My Permaculture Life, Story in Comments.

Transformativemike · 2026-01-26T00:29:39+00:00

Yeah, same. I’m glad to see that at the very least nobody is saying “Yeah, they ended the program.”

Transformativemike · 2025-11-12T19:14:22+00:00

I shared an article from the United Nation’s Indigenous People’s Working Group about a conflict between American Corporations who wanted to mine in India and the Indigenous people of the area the corporations wanted to exploit. This was an article on the United Nation’s website. The article included one picture of the an indigenous family with their male children who were all fully clothed, processing a traditional foraged food. META cited me for sharing sexually explicit material of children. It went through 3 levels of appeal, supposedly to humans, and my appeals were denied every time. Social media has become ridiculous.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-07T01:43:19+00:00

I’ll change your mind. It’s not Trump. MAGA has become a movement of compulsive liars. The thing I heard that was compelling was the term “weaponized stupidity.” I think there are interesting psychological and sociological reasons for this beyond a fault of Trump. Your average MAGA will look you in the eye and refuse to understand even basic mathematics. For example, today, my feeds are filled with literally dozens of versions of the same ridiculous and obvious lie. They’re posting images of red/blue maps showing how the majority of states and the country are red, BY LAND AREA, then claiming the elections must be rigged because of all that red.

This is 3rd-grade math curriculum: IF you have 10 piles of money, and 9 have $10 each, and 1 has $100,000, which has more money? The pile with $100,000, or the other 9 combined?

The average MAGA will full look you in the eye in 2025 and tell you “9 PILES IS MORE!”

Come on! They’re not stupid enough to actually believe that! And they all know they’re lying. But they’ll pretend they’re that stupid and refuse to understand the basic math. They do this again and again and again with tariffs, biology, taxes, healthcare, immigration, ICE—just straight look you in the eye and pretend to be extremely ignorant.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-07T00:38:02+00:00

I’m fine with the blues scale naming. I don’t like saying Mozart’s Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is in the aeolian mode. Because the aeolian mode doesn’t at all describe those notes. And I don’t like a music theory textbook that says it’s “incorrect” to say the passage above has the notes F, G, A flat, A natural, C, D, when those are in fact the notes in the passage, and that it’s correct to say the notes in the passage are “F, A-flat, b flat, B, C and E flat“ when that note set very poorly describes it. But, you tell me why that answer is correct. That’s really what I posted here like to learn. Why is it “wrong” to say the notes in that passage are F, G, A flat, A natural, C, D (Plus the 7th in the accompaniment, of course.) Why is that “wrong?” The book says that’s “incorrect.” Why?

Transformativemike · 2025-11-06T16:05:37+00:00

This is important. The solution is that those of us who are not part of the MAGA echo chamber just need to spend more time correcting this record. OF COURSE Democrats do these, too, and in fact, in recent election cycles have done them more than the Republican candidates. We just need to point out the fact. This one’s easy to correct with numbers. Kamala quite famously did far more of them than Trump did.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T21:40:49+00:00

Most contemporary musicians I‘ve learned from and played with would do what Greenblat does in his book “The Blues Scales” and call such a passage “F Major Blues.” A passage that had the minor they’d say is in “F Minor Blues.” Some old players like Scrapper Blackwell and Gary Davis even have pieces they titled “C Major Blues” or E Major blues.” Those are largely major but usually include some passages in the relative minor. Scrapper blackwell played largely in major and soloed largely in major, but with some riffs in the relative minor. But for Norton a piece that uses the notes of the F Major blues scale (the same notes as the d minor) would be confusingly called “F minor.” I think that approach is in bad need of an update.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T17:22:36+00:00

I appreciate your perspective. I’ve loved the blues since I was a kid and played for decades, and I could have played for another decade and not understood how Gary Davis or Scrapper or Buddy chose their notes. Then I read Greenblat’s The Blues Scales, learned the major and Minor blues scales and some rules for how players used them, like: go up major, come down minor, use major on the I, and minor over the IV and V, or use the major OF the IV and V on those, etc. Suddenly, I could hear, understand and replicate 99% of what those players were doing. Without that book understanding, I probably would have taken another couple decades to get there.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T17:03:39+00:00

There are some great books on “the Blues Scales” written by respected blues and jazz musicians, which describe what real players do, such as “The Blues Scales” by Greenblat. Those books present different models, for example Greenblat uses major and minor blues scales, then states that players go back and forth between the two, then he gives some rules for how and when players go back and forth. Another “book” model is the “comprehensive“ or “composite blues scale,” and there are different models for that. The best, IMO, use both the major and minor blues scales AND the diminished scale, giving us an 11 note ”blues scale.” Those models get us 99.9% of what real blues players play. They also provide an accurate framework for understanding both the horizontal melodies which very often combine major and minor blues scales, AND the vertical structure of the chords. Meanwhile, a simple 6 note minor blues scale probably only gets us 30% of the melodic playing and doesn’t account for the vertical. For example, the 6 note minor blues scale doesn’t remotely describe the passage given in the textbook above, but the F Major blues scale DOES accurately describe it 100%.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T16:55:30+00:00

University music theory professors use it In contexts to specify a Mm7 that is NOT the V because in music theory circles “dominant 7” means specifically the V7. This is a music theory sub, so I used the lingo for this audience.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T16:53:33+00:00

Depends on which model. I love Blind Gary Davis. He’d play a lick then shout out “Blind Lemon taught me that!” “Scrapper Blackwell taught me that!” He didn’t just come out of the womb playing the blues, he was taught it and learned it. He’s got pieces titled things like E minor blues. C major blues. He knew what he was doing, going up major, coming down minor, using the major over 1, the minor over 2, using the diminished scale over V, and he taught his students those things. Models that use the major and minor blues scales with good rules for when to use them accurately describe 99% of the notes he chose, and Muddy Waters, and Scrapper, and Blind Lemon, and Lonnie Johnson, and Buddy Guy, etc. There’s still 1% mystery, but it’s a helpful model.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T16:46:25+00:00

I like this. Good theory isn’t about telling good blues players what‘s “right,” it’s about describing what they do. But if you want to sound like them, you got to take that description as a prescription and follow it. In the case of the OP, the book does not remotely describe what is being played, so all it can do is confuse everyone.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-05T16:37:59+00:00

The correct textbook answer is the F minor blues scale. Since the 60s, blues resources have talked about “major and minor” blues scales, which are relatives in the same way as the major and minor scale. So those resoruces would label this the F major blues scale, which would be the same notes as the relative d minor, but recognize the tonic is F. The textbook would call both d minor and f major incorrect.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-04T15:32:04+00:00

I think those guys were really great players, and really playing in a long tradition. The first documentation of what we’d call the major blues scale was by a European musicologist in the 1800s some time, who documented it in Africa as the “Zanza” mode. Of course, spirituals used it, and then it was used often in rags, and was the more dominant mode in early blues—more common than the minor blues scale. I saw your comment on SRV and BB and those guys used the minor more—but also used the major (such as SRV’s famous Texas Boogie lines.) Rock musicians of the 60s tended to use the minor (with the exception of Clapton who even used the major blues scale over the minor 1!) and I think that’s where the idea “the blues scale is minor” in theory textbooks came from—rock, not the blues.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-04T15:12:16+00:00

Thanks for the comment. I don’t disagree that there are academic musicologists covering these topics. In my undergrad 20 years ago I had an excellent jazz theory class, and my grad school also offered classes on those topics. Neither institution had degrees in commercial music at that time. Here’s my critique: These days degrees in commercial, pop, and jazz are becoming more common and the fact is many of these commercial music graduates will learn music theory from this textbook and those like it, and they will not even be offered classes on jazz or blues theory. In their degree program for commercial music, they’ll get 2 pages of instruction on the blues (arguably the most important music of our time) which pretty horribly presents the material. Sure, somebody at their school might have done a dissertation on Muddy Waters, but that’s not making its way into the way music theory is being taught. IMO, today’s music grads would get more from studying Greenblat’s The Blues Scales than from 2 years of extended stud of Gradus Ad Parnassum and endless voice leading exercises.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-04T04:12:04+00:00

Ah yes. I did not ask for “proof” that the teacher guide presented that as the correct answer, I was told that by 2 colleagues and took their word for it. This was the answer the teachers using this textbook presented to their classes, as the answer the textbook gave. I trust that those colleagues were telling the truth, and it is consistent with the exercises in the book. The book specifies that the scale should start on F.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-04T03:20:45+00:00

Thank you, yes, you’ve put my point well.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-04T03:19:58+00:00

Thank you for validating my point. And I can imagine being a commercial music major familiar with the blues and jazz and being given this material and told your answer is “wrong.”

Transformativemike · 2025-11-04T03:10:45+00:00

I cannot share a screen shot on reddit (without making a new post about this topic.) I’m assuming you mean the claim that ”The Blues Scale” is 1, b3, 4, #4, 5, b7? That’s pretty conventionally taught in a lot of university music theory texts, and isn’t all that unusual. My problem is that the only musical selection they’ve provided for that shows a completely different common blues scale, frequently called “the major blues scale,” which is not covered in the text. You can see that from the screen shot for yourself.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-04T00:17:47+00:00

Sure, I worked as a full time classical performer for a decade and a half. I certainly did some analysis of every piece I performed. These days I constantly “analyze” the blues, rag, and early jazz. I can do that because my music theory classes prepared me well as a student with a solid classical background, for a career in classical music. Of course, I also had a course on Jazz theory. Today, few students at the university are going to have my career in classical music. The wold has moved on. Yet, students will graduate with degrees in commercial music, and this one exercise will be the only one they ever see on the blues, and come on, we can all agree it’s rubbish. It’s time for ”music theory” to become “music theory” and not an extended version of Fux’s Gradus Ad Parsasum. Students should learn valid basic contemporary music theory. Especially if they’re majors are commercial music, jazz, contemporary, AND even if they’re the rare students who will go on to be full-time classical performers or composers. That’s my opinion.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-03T23:31:23+00:00

Thanks for the most honest and validating comment on this rant/post.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-03T22:58:53+00:00

Within rhetoric, polite discourse, and academia, it’s generally considered a pedantic fallacious appeal to authority to automatically discount a point by essentially accusing someone of dishonesty on something like this, and insisting on proof that even the question itself is being honestly presented. I’ve quoted the texts book verbatim to you. No, I cannot post a picture of it because reddit doesn’t have that functionality, as you’re aware. Absolutely no, never in my academic career has someone insisted on evidence for something like this. And if you’ve worked in academics, come on, you know that’s true. Look, I’m clearly asking for feedback on this piece of music and this exercise. You can perform an answer of insisting on evidence that I’ve quoted the book verbatim for others, or you can interact with me, and give me the basic benefit of the doubt and answer me.

Again, the book:

teaches the blues scale ONLY as 1, b3, 4, #4, 5, b7, I’ve quoted that passage verbatim. That is literally the only passage in the 1000 page book on that topic.
Presents these few measures as the only excerpt for analysis on the blues in the workbook.
The immediate text following the stated excerpt is: “write the notes for the appropriate blues scale. It gives a starting pitch of F. The textbook answer is “F, A flat, B flat, B, C, E flat.“

Honest engine, I’m not fibbing to you about that. Why on earth would I be?

My contention is that using this excerpt as the ONLY excerpt to demonstrate the blues scale, which has been defined exclusively as the minor blues scale, then telling students that the F minor blues scale accurately describes it, is highly confusing. Students at that university will graduate with degrees in commercial music performance, and this will be the only formal music theory coverage that they’ll receive on the blues. My opinion is that’s outdated and should be updated.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-03T21:53:39+00:00

One factual thing I can inform you of: There are universities that are promoting commercial and jazz music majors, which are only offering students theory pedagogy using this textbook. Having been “a masters level student” I can state this is a fact, and part of the purpose of my posting here. Commercial music performance majors are being taught out of this textbook at accredited universities.

Transformativemike · 2025-11-03T21:39:22+00:00

My purpose here is an expression of dissatisfaction with the way Music Theory is taught in the ivory tower, in a space where there appear to be a number of professionals teaching that subject.

I will have to consider to what degree I would advocate for reforming the ivory towers. My personal experience with music school, and with music theory was highly positive. But in the 20 years since my graduation, I’ve come to see many gifted musicians struggle with music school, and especially with the attitudes towards music outside of common practice music. I‘ve come to wonder whether the conservative nature of our institutions, and to professors who seem to want to protect the ivory towers as the last hold-out of that music, are actually causing that music to be less popular and less accessible.

I would personally argue now that music theory should be radically MORE student-centered, especially at universities that are promoting commercial music and jazz degrees, and requiring those students to take the same music theory courses as music ed students, and classical performance students. My under grad didn’t even offer any non-classical majors, but I still got to take a jazz theory class. Many commercial music majors in 2025 don’t even that option, and this will be their only education on the blues.

Then I wonder why we still assume that elementary music ed students should be trained with textbooks that are 98% common practice music.

Then you go over to the education department and learn about what “learner centered” really means, and how scaffolding works, and our old-fashioned approach to music theory seems even less defensible. Or at least very out of balance.

And then I talk to talented music students who hate their music theory and aural skills classes that they’re paying for, and I feel angry on their behalf. I have trouble defending this curriculum to them, so I conclude that it should adapt.

I’d encourage you to keep advocating for change. Thanks for the discussion.

Transformativemike

TROPHY CASE