This post offers a broad view of humanity's musical customs. It explores the evidence for prehistoric music making, and it explains how music got passed down through the ages. The world's musical traditions are also explored, as are the earliest efforts to notate music.
This blog post explores three swing-era musicians who were known for their brilliant soloing styles: Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, and Ella Fitzgerald.
This post explores the swing style of jazz. It summarizes swing's defining characteristics, and it covers two influential swing musicians: Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington.
In this blog post Jump explores the hostility many musicians feel towards reading music. He describes how music students shirk the responsibility of reading, and he dispels the myth that learning how to read is antithetical to the spirit of music. Jump’s main point here is that becoming a literate musician is wise.
In this blog post, Brian Jump explores the common failures of audience/performer interactions. He covers courtesies musicians owe audiences and ones that audiences owe musicians. To assuage this occasionally dysfunctional relationship, Jump offers a list of eight commandments to be observed while giving, watching, or paying for musical performances.
This post covers the definition and process of audio recording. It introduces the concepts, explains the formats, and inspects the techniques used by sound engineers to capture and produce professional audio.
In this post, Brian Jump speculates about the direction and future of music. He explores the impact that artificial intelligence might have on composition and consumption, and he considers the possibility that the music of the future might be fundamentally different from the music of the present.
This blog post is about bebop, which is a form of jazz that evolved during the 1940s and 1950s. It covers how bebop changed the jazz genre, and it examines how Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell contributed to this change.
If you are interested in music technology as a career, then this blog post will be useful to you. It covers activities, like audio recording, devices like synthesizers, and concepts like AI-enabled composition. It is introductory in nature and designed to help you decide which area of this field you like best.
This blog post analyzes the motet, which was a style of polyphonic vocal music that evolved during the European Middle Ages. The motet featured simultaneous, overlapping vocal lines of varying text. They were compositionally dense and musically sophisticated. Progenitors of the motet like Philippe de Vitry, Franco of Cologne, and Guillaume de Mauchaut, are covered.
Picture credit: Desmond, Karen. "Ars Musicae." Ars Musicae.and
Chasing the Chords 