How To Write About Music: A Definitive Method

This is a technique I learned in music school, from one or maybe two teachers who taught a class on musical analysis. It can work on any body of music in any style: I’ve used it to talk about “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra, the sociological importance of A Tribe Called Quest (using the album People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm as an example), and a Ghanian folk song I had absolutely no background on, including a lyrical translation. The Music Map lets you dissect and diagram every part of a song and assign meaning to it. Then, when you’ve fully formed your understanding of the core essence you want to talk about, it gives you a chart of exactly how to write about it.

The Basics of Modernism

The following is a transcript (written by me) of a presentation of modernism (focusing on modernist texts and further research) to students at Northeastern University in Massachusetts. The included section is an introduction that, read alone, can provide a good preliminary overview of the wide-reaching, unifying theories of modernism as it applies to art, literature,…