From the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, December 15, 1997
Music Department course surveys Urban Blues and the Golden Age of Rock
Wanna whole lotta love
By Caroline Moseley
Jimmy Page's guitar screams and howls as Led Zeppelin rocks the room:Wanna whole lotta love,Wanna whole lotta love ...Can this be the Woolworth Center for Musical Studies?
Indeed it is, and the recorded blasts of Led Zep are
part of Music 210, Urban Blues and the Golden Age of Rock, taught by
Professor of Music Steven Mackey.
The course covers post-World War II blues and its influence on rock of the late '60s and early '70s. Urban blues, says Mackey, emerged with "guys who made it out of the Mississippi Delta up the Mississippi River to Chicago and plugged their guitars into amps." Then, "British white kids from northern industrial towns appropriated that music as their own. Half of Led Zeppelin's 1967 album is covers of blues by Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James and Sonny Boy Williamson."
Among the other musicians and groups covered in the course are the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Yes, the Doors, the Allman Brothers and the Rolling Stones. Mackey also discusses Joni Mitchell ("on the folk periphery") and Bob Dylan ("because of his influence on so many people, both in music and lyrics").
"I'm not pretending this is a survey. It's music I'm really interested in," says Mackey. He is an unabashed partisan and experienced performer of "the rock music of my teenage years."
What's a bar in a 12-bar blues?
The course starts "with a basic technical vocabulary," Mackey says. "What is a `bar' in a 12-bar blues? We talk about rhythm, which can be very complex in rock music. We look at how the sonic and rhythmic qualities of rock lyrics make the words effective in musical context.
"We focus on the contribution of individual instruments to the musical fabric," he continues. "What is the bass player doing here? What is the drummer doing? What's the guitarist doing?" This way, he says, "the students gain an appreciation of why certain guitar players--Duane Allman, Eric Clapton, Hendrix--are revered."
Mackey has found that, in general, "People who are familiar only with rock music don't previously have the technical terminology, and those who do are interested to see how nomenclature designed for classical music can be applied to popular music."
Aggressive, invasive, ominous
In the Woolworth lecture hall, the blackboard declares the room the domain of classical music. It is covered with the titles of Verdi operas: Simon Boccanegra, 1857; Un Ballo in Maschera, 1859; Don Carlos, 1867. Against this backdrop, Mackey paces about, playing riffs on an electric guitar, deftly hopping over the yards of cord that attach his 1968 Les Paul Deluxe to the amplifier.
Mackey's lectures combine exposition of technical material with extensive discussion of matters musical, social and cultural.
He begins a recent lecture by describing a blues scale in terms of the intervals between notes: "A basic blues scale uses scale degrees 1, flat 3, 4, 5, 6, flat 7." Then he plays the scale notes, pointing out that "Our Western music uses discrete pitches, but in most world music you have a continuum of micro-tonal inflections." He plays the notes as they might be heard in a blues accompaniment, involving pitches not heard in the basic scale, suggesting that "a blues scale is as much a system of musical gestures as it is a system of discrete pitches. The idea that blues is a feeling supersedes the routine execution of the `correct' notes."
He plays the tape of "Whole Lotta Love" loud enough to shake Simon Boccanegra off the blackboard. The students listen pensively, chins in hand. Only an occasional foot taps. Despite the intoxicating sounds, they are in classroom mode.
Then Mackey asks students to articulate their response to the music. They analyze the structure of the piece. Says one, "The guitar solo grounds the piece, it gave me a sense of a center." They talk about the relative value of music and words, the song's relation to the ("much more misogynist") Muddy Waters original. They characterize the piece as "aggressive," "invasive," "furious," "distorted," "ominous." Mackey suggests it is "testosterone-driven rock, associated with the darker side of the male psyche." Not everyone agrees. Says one woman student, "If this were sung by Janis Joplin, it would have the same aggressive feeling. It's about catharsis, not male domination."
Not a lot of spin
Mackey credits his department with being very open to "the music the students dig" and to "America's own vernacular music." For himself, "I have complete confidence in this music. I don't have to put a lot of fancy spin on it."
Students appreciate the opportunity to "apply traditional liberal arts approaches to popular music, which may well have more applicability to the lives and interests of students than any esoteric classical text," observes Jeff Leven '00. "This course recognizes the music that is so important in our daily lives and urges us to do some thinking about its meaning."
According to Ani Mason '00, while the students are learning about the music in technical terms, there has been time to discuss many issues surrounding blues and rock, "from the conditions of life for an African American in 1890, to how to reconcile WASP roots with a desire to listen to/play/make blues music."
"A lot of listeners and performers come to classical music through pop music," Mackey points out. "Me, for instance."
A putative physics major at the University of California, Davis, Mackey "heard my first Beethoven symphony" in a required music survey course. Transformed, he ended up majoring in music, while continuing to perform as a rock musician. He subsequently went on to earn an MA at the State University of New York, Stony Brook and a PhD in composition at Brandeis University.
A member of the faculty since 1985, Mackey teaches Beginning Workshop in Musical Composition, and Twentieth Century Music through Composition and Performance. He recently toured as soloist with the Kronos String Quartet, "doing music I wrote for electric guitar and string quartet." He is now working on "a music theater piece for electro-acoustic violin, sax, synthesizers, one singer-actor and"-- naturally --"electric guitar.
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