musicology – Joe Bennett

A Night At The Opera: The Music of Queen #berklee

Posted by JoeBon December 17, 2019December 17, 2019in berklee, Education, musicology, Popular Music, SongwritingLeave a comment

On December 5th 2019, Berklee staged its annual Singers’ Showcase, and the theme this year was A Night at the Opera—The Music of Queen. As a lifelong fan, I was honored to be asked to write the program notes for the evening’s performance.

Each song entry features a reference to the original Queen recording, and the official video embedded, plus a description of the approach the students took for the Berklee version. Selected excerpts from the show itself will appear online sometime in the future, but for now you can get a great behind-the-scenes flavour of the quality of the performance by watching Marshall Lilly’s terrific drumcam footage.

Concert producer: Maureen McMullan
Words: Joe Bennett
Photography: Kelly Davidson Studio
Drumcam video: Marshall Lilly

The Berklee student performers, with special guest drummer, Berklee President Roger H Brown.
Photograph: Kelly Davidson Studio

Drumcam video: Marshall Tilly

Introduction: “I see a miniature libretto from a fan”

Anatomy of the Hit: Bruno Mars and Cardi B ‘Please Me’

Posted by JoeBon August 20, 2019August 20, 2019in musicology, Popular Music, Songwriting, tidal1 Comment

[JB note: This article was originally commissioned by TIDAL, and is part of a series – see links below. Parental advisory: adult themes in the lyrics.]

Songwriters: Cardi B / Bruno Mars / James Edward II Fauntleroy / The Stereotypes (Ray Charles II Mccullough, Ray Romulus, Jeremy Reeves, Jonathan Yip)
Tempo: 67BPM
Run time: 3:21
Chord loop: |Bm7 C#7^(#5b9) | E/F# F#7^(b9) |
TIDAL audio: Please Me

Today, we will be talking more about the music than we will be talking about the sex – I mean, the lyrics. Usually with a song analysis, I try to figure out how the words and music work together, and highlight particular phrases that stand out in the musical arrangement. But given that Please Me is a ‘slow jam’, we don’t want all this musicology to kill the mood, so we will mostly let Cardi’s x-rated rapping (and Bruno’s vocal paroxysms) speak for themselves. TIDAL is all about the fidelity, so along with master-quality audio we’ve included the full, un-bleeped lyric. Insert your own asterisks according to taste.

Anatomy of the hit: Ariana Grande’s ‘7 rings’

Posted by JoeBon April 19, 2019April 19, 2019in Articles, music production, musicology, Popular Music, Songwriting, tidalLeave a comment

As a music theory geek, I love to get inside songs and figure out why we like them. There’s something beautiful about the ability of a mainstream hit to bring people together. And when the songwriter and singer is as extraordinary a talent as Ariana Grande, we can be sure we’re putting the very finest pop product in our ears.

So let’s dive in, intro first, middle bit in the middle, and outro at the end, as has been the way since the dawn of time.

TIDAL video

Intro – 8 bars [0:00]

We hear a single reverbed synth sound playing half notes, with occasional 8^th note passing notes, and no indication of what’s to come. That’s sparse, even for a trap-pop intro. At this point, we don’t even know if we’re hearing 140BPM (fast pop) or 70BPM (slow ballad).

The Art of Listening To Songs #apme2018

Posted by JoeBon June 25, 2018June 29, 2018in Association of Popular Music Education, Education, music education, musicology, Popular Music, SongwritingLeave a comment

Randy Klein, songwriter and SongU coach.

Randy introduces himself and talks briefly about his work in music education, including his publications, talks, and his experience of listening to other songwriters’ work over many years. Today he’s sharing with us the structure of his 16-week songwriting course, and he begins with the philosophy of definition i.e. the question ‘what is a song?’. He suggests that most technical descriptions of a song fall short of the mark of describing its subjective effects on listeners, noting how difficult this intangible would be to achieve. He provides a traditional melody-lyric-harmony definition of a song (i.e. omitting the Sound Recording or arrangement), and then asks the potential student question “If [a song is too intangible to hold], then how can I learn about it?”.

To the great amusement of the audience, Randy now talks us (literally, talks us) through the whole of the lyric to James Brown’s ‘I Got You’, demonstrating that it’s clearly a love song. He now separates the [love] song from the arrangement, describing the horn lick and Brown’s vocal as ‘ear candy’, building on the core lyric’s emotional intent.

Eurovision 2018 preview – top 10

Posted by JoeBon May 11, 2018in Eurovision, musicology, Popular Music, SongwritingLeave a comment

It’s Eurovision eve!

[For any Americans who are unfamiliar with the ESC, here’s the background]

Back in 2010 I live-tweeted some song commentary as the show was going out. Since 2011 I’ve been live-blogging the show, with real-time music analysis and commentary, and attempting to predict the winners before the voting begins.

Since 2015 I’ve been in the USA, and for the last two years have had to pre-blog due to work commitments and the time difference, but this year I’m pleased to say true live-blogging is back and I’ll be sitting down at 3pm ET/8pm UK time to be live-blogging. So please go to http://www.joebennett.net at those times and refresh your browser after each song. I’ll be chord-analysing, BPM detecting and quality-scoring each song as we go.

Here’s a preview of the top 10 watched YouTube Eurovision song videos in April. I note that an early favourite was Belgium, who didn’t make it through the semi-finals.

Did Lana Del Rey copy Radiohead?

Posted by JoeBon January 9, 2018January 9, 2018in Copyright, musicology, Plagiarism, Popular Music, SongwritingLeave a comment

This week, Lana Del Rey stated that she is being sued for copying Radiohead’s 1992 song Creep in her 2017 release, Get Free.

It’s true about the lawsuit. Although I know my song wasn’t inspired by Creep, Radiohead feel it was and want 100% of the publishing – I offered up to 40 over the last few months but they will only accept 100. Their lawyers have been relentless, so we will deal with it in court.

— Lana Del Rey (@LanaDelRey) January 7, 2018

First, some facts…

Both songs use the same chord sequence: | I | I | | III | III | | IV | IV | iv | iv |
- Creep is in G major, so | G | G | B | B | C | C | Cm | Cm |
- Get Free is in Bb major, so | Bb | Bb | D | D | Eb | Eb | Ebm | Ebm |
They are both mid-tempo (Creep is around 92 BPM; Get Free is around 102BPM).
They both have a similar rhythmic feel – straight 8s 4/4 time, in 8-bar sections (this is a similarity but an unremarkable one, given that it applies to a huge number of songs).

…and some history…

Creep is part-borrowed from Albert Hammond’s The Air That I Breathe (1972) – later a hit for The Hollies. According to The Guardian, Radiohead gave Hammond and his co-writer Mike Hazlewood a credit in the Pablo Honey album liner notes.

Here are the three songs in reverse order of release:

Musical and Lyric Traits in the UK’s favourite Christmas songs

Posted by JoeBon December 5, 2017December 8, 2017in musicology, Popular Music, Research, SongwritingLeave a comment

There’s a news story right now about the ‘Happiest Christmas song’, a commerical research project I was asked to undertake recently to provide statistics about the characteristics of the UK’s favourite Christmas songs (Spotify streams, Christmas 2016). It resulted in the following song, penned by the remarkable Harriet Green and Steve Anderson, two super-talented and mega-credited UK songwriters. The song is below – I think it came out great, but judge for yourself.

Academics who are interested – here’s the analysis paper – a simple list of musical and lyric traits by popularity, with some speculative commentary about cultural trends (complete with extra-Christmassy red and green data charts). There’s also a ‘making of’ video at the bottom of this post.

Bennett, Joe (2017). Musical and Lyric Traits in the UK’s favourite Christmas songs. Boston/online. joebennett.net.

Here’s the behind the scenes video of the recording session, with commentary from songwriter Harriet Green.