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Harmony Postlude: Mary Had a Little Lamb in Minor

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As a precursor to an upcoming discussion on harmonies (or a "postlude," if you will pardon the musical pun), I wanted to rewrite "Mary Had a Little Lamb" again with the same melody but different harmonies, placed in such a way to put it in a minor instead of a major key.  This wasn't too hard, as there are only three notes (4 notes in some versions) in the whole song.  Here's the minor version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb:" While this is the same exact melody, a change in the harmonies can give the song a different feel, in this case quite sinister and very dark.  Since the melody used only DO, RE, and MI in the original key, I turned these into ME, FA, and SOL for the minor version. I've utilized a similar technique for my Piano Sonata to help change the feel of different movements but to connect them together.  The first movement is in A minor and starts out in the melody with a B-flat grace note going to the tonic, A.  The second move...
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Playing with Legos: My approach to teaching the major scale pattern

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I've recently been using a technique for teaching whole steps and half-steps with my students that I feel has been pretty effective, and I wanted to share what I do.  I mention this to my violin students after they have been playing for a little while.  I have students start with a simple tetrachord pattern (what I call the mini scale) on just one string, and from there we progress to a D major scale on the D and A strings.  When they are starting to play on more than their D and A string, I introduce them to the fact that they can do a bigger scale on their whole instrument.  At this point, I mention half steps and whole steps. I start by having students listen to the difference between half-steps and whole steps.  I currently have a piano in my teaching studio, and so I'll play them the a half-step lower down on the piano, and tell them how it is like the "Jaws" theme. I then show them the contrasting sound of a whole step and mention how in music we ha...
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First Composition: Concerto No. 1

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Here's the first thing that I ever wrote:  Concerto No. 1.  This was a class project for my 7th grade orchestra class.  My teacher asked us to write an 8 bar melody on your instrument to be played in front of the class.  I had recently seen the movie Amadeus, and it fascinated me that someone could do what they were doing in that movie:  writing music.  I decided instead of 8 bars, I would write a full length piece for the class.  What it ended up becoming is this work: Concerto No. 1 1st Movement 2nd Movement 3rd Movement In seventh grade, we had played an arrangement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5.  The influence from this piece can be very clearly seen in the 1st movement, as well as somewhat in the the third.  I wasn't sure what a concerto was at this time, and so it ended up being more like the original Baroque concertos.  In fact, the original meaning of concerto comes from the latin conserere , meaning to join ...
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