Dr. Kit Music

Teacher, Composer, Performer

Blog Archive

  • 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…

  • Heu me domine, Lusitano

    This motet was published in an appendix to a Music Theory treatise in 1553.* It is for 4 singers. The text is included at the end of the post. You can read a bit about the composer, and listen to it here. Like I said last week in my post, I did this analysis predominantly…

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