As a classically-trained performing musician, I've always felt very comfortable teaching classical music theory. I believe that by continuing to perform--which I love to do; it's why I got into this business in the first place--I can continue to provide my students with real-world examples of music theory in action. I played Rigoletto a month or so ago, and faced a few passages in D-flat minor! I brought the parts in and we looked at them, tried to figure out what the key was, which notes were non-diatonic, etc. We talked about why D-flat minor and not the more manageable (!) C# minor. I talked about my experience playing the Buddy Holly show, and so on.
I've always felt a pang of guilt teaching my hip hop class, which I've done pretty regularly for about five years now, because I don't make hip hop. I read Mark Katz's fine book, Groove music, and thought if he (a classically trained violinist) can get a set of turntables and learn how to scratch, well then I can too. So I bought some turntables and a mixer and a half a dozen records--some classic hip hop breaks along with the "do-it-yourself" version of Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks" and got to work.
I've always felt a pang of guilt teaching my hip hop class, which I've done pretty regularly for about five years now, because I don't make hip hop. I read Mark Katz's fine book, Groove music, and thought if he (a classically trained violinist) can get a set of turntables and learn how to scratch, well then I can too. So I bought some turntables and a mixer and a half a dozen records--some classic hip hop breaks along with the "do-it-yourself" version of Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks" and got to work.
I found a great series of YouTube videos on the basics of turntable technique that were made by DJ Angelo. In one of the videos, he talks about finding a sound on the record that you want to scratch and offers some guidelines for what that should be--"a single word or a single drum hit." I sat down and I listened to my records in a very new way, listening for that one single drum hit or horn section hit. It was a very micro-kind of listening, one that I'm not accustomed to.
Around the same time that I was doing this, Jon Caramanica published this piece in art forum (which, sadly, isn't free anymore) on the best sounds of 2015. He isolated sounds from about a dozen records--things like Lana Del Rey sighing "soft ice cream" or Waxahatchee's "Maybe."
I think we're so fixated (at least in classical music) on large-scale architecture and goals and phrases that we might miss the little things. I suspect that the classical world's preoccupation with "the notes on the page" also cloud our vision (as it were): these "small things" are features of performances, not scores. Having said that, I do have some favorite moments among my classical recordings that I think fit in here:
Beethoven, symphony no. 7, II (Bruno Walter and the Columbia Symphony). There's a glorious portamento in the violins at 3:08, and it happens again around 3:26)
Sibelius, violin concerto, I (Ginette Neveu). The huge leap at the beginning of this cadenza to me always sounded like a tear in the sky--so bold.
The other bit I was unable to find on YouTube, but there's a recording of the Philadelphia Orchestra with Ormandy playing Strauss's Also Sprach: at the climax of "Von dem Hinterwelten," the violins have a heavenly portamento--"sol---mi!"
(I'm sure there's something to be said about bias and I'm a string player and these are both string moments, etc. etc. I don't care. I like them.)
What are your favorite small things? (Blink-182 doesn't count...)