Teacher, Composer, Performer

Dr. Kit Music

Blog Archive

  • Let This Radicalize You

    I’m planning to release a new cellopunk album in two weeks! I’m working on audio editing, and I’m releasing videos of the songs every other day or so for the next little bit. The title of the album is Let This Radicalize You and it will have 13 tracks, including 3 solo cello elegies, 8…

  • Blue-Bird, Valerie Capers 2001

    I’ve been working thru Portraits in Jazz by Valerie Capers at work, and decided that Blue-Bird, which I played recently, had a chord progression that would be fun to describe with Functional Analysis. Here’s a Recording The notes from the composer describe this piece as a chromatic blues in bebop style, and Theme and Variations…

  • In the Springtime, Betty Jackson King 1976

    Today’s analysis is a song by Betty Jackson King, “In the Springtime.” Here’s a recording. I have performed this piece as the pianist a couple months ago, and I am also working on the vocal part. This song definitely evokes an older style than 1976 for me; I think that the Shakespearean text with generic…

  • Night, Florence Price 1946

    Continuing in music I’ve been practicing (both voice and piano in this case). Below is a youtube video of a performance, and the score is available for purchase here. (I will be showing chunks of the score that I engraved so that I could change the key, so the music font will be different than…

  • Killing in the Name Analysis

    CW for the lyrics; swears, allusions to police violence The next video in the chronological random grab bag of songs I want to analyze is Killing in the Name, by Rage Against The Machine.* This song is originally from the early 1990s (I saw 1991), but the message is unfortunately still relevant. In hopes of…

  • Satin Doll Analysis

    *Disclaimer: Schenker was a terrible human. For people who might not know, I was influenced by Schenkerian Analysis in that I like see how chord structures might be more or less surface level or used prolongationally, but I don’t have any kind of insistence on a certain background structure, I don’t really look at melodic…