This e-book's 'nutshell.' This e-book is written in a 'mentor to pupil' dialogue, reminiscent of the now ancient music theory text titled Gradus ad Parnassum, which dates from Euro 1725. I borrowed deeply its format of 'call and response' or 'questions and answers' dialogue, to create an evolutionary sort of ongoing dialogue of academic vocabulary words; simply by evolving the same terms from pitch and triads origins right through to polytonality, and spanning the Amer ~ Euro music theories of Bach to Coltrane, and maybe even a bit beyond.

These hyper-linked vocabulary terms then create knowledge building pathways sparked by each individual artist's own interests with music. Energized by one's own curiosity and passion to learn, to create and express, now shared by an e-book's magic abilities to reach out into resources of a global arts community (we get by with a little help from our friends). Once chosen, hyperlink words then turn purple after a visit remind us and light up our pathways :)

The 'AmerAfroEuroLatin' merge. By merging Americana's blues roots of melody and phrasing with the 18th century diatonic harmony developed in Europe of J.S. Bach, we foundation Americana's own gospel melody / harmony evolutions on through successive generations and styles, up to and including the work of American Jazz saxophonist John Coltrane in 1960, when the improvisational nature of American musical arts found a new dimension to explore.

What is BA music theory ? This music e-book primer defines music theory as a set of 'silent architectures' that we knit and puzzle together to create our songs to tell our stories. These builders combine to create and structure our songs, but choose to remain silent letting their strength be felt, not heard. Our academic goals include to recognize and source these architectures back to their component parts to learn their role in creating & composing music.

There's an architecture for the 12 pitches for making melodies, one for centering the pitches in a key center, one for rhythm and time, one for form to shape our story into phrases and one for stacking pitches into chords. Each of the main components of a song; its key center and melody, rhythms, form and chords each have an 'architecture.' These we weave together under the umbrella of study we term 'music theory' that would be included in a BA degree at formal music school.

Solo or collaborative learning. Written to fully function off-line independent, as well as 'on-line' and fully web energized, those web connected learners have the option of collaborative learning, working through this e-book on a tablet or laptop computer in real time while on-line and collaborating with their musical friends. And though we all get by with a little help from our friends, way deep down we each know that ...

Highschoolers thinking of college have a mentoring option by reaching out over the web to their own State Universities and Music Schools to locate mentors. Many such schools have 'music ed' curriculums for the developing, certifying and placing of college students and degree graduates as professional musicians; as performers, teachers, writers, composers, arts administrators and technical personnel. Believe that there's fun in being serious about music, to want to go rub elbows with career musicians so as to become a better musical artist yourself.

Recruit, mentors, formal music school. The magics of this e-book and its wide ranging curriculum, can link together everyone wanting to better understand the music they love to listen to, dance, perform, study and enjoy in their own communities. E-books are local, regional, statewide and global, merging the folks in music communities wherever they may be through a shared common interest; to understand the musical components we share together in making musical art.

All teachers / formal music school. As it is web based, there's many possible connect points for connecting, mentoring and recruiting interested students in formal music programs. Easy to begin by simply using your e-mail address to begin a dialogue of correspondence. Once established, we can e-mail selected links from within the text to individualize instruction for each learner as their own curriculum begins to blossom. Add in natural curiosity and voila, a lifelong / career spanning learning pathway can begin to manifest. Touch screen tablets, laptops with keys, mouse clicks even phone all function fine through any web browser with this e-book.

To illustrate a few of these connective properties, here's a flow chart of ideas for a regional / statewide music education / teacher training program centered around a formal University Music School.

University of _______ School of Music

College of Music ________

________ School of Music

________ State School of Music

School recruitment of new students. As an addition to existing recruitment portals to higher education statewide, by energizing this educational e-book, a statewide public school recruitment program can be achieved by using your program's own web site and e-mail address.

When book marked or loaded onto a school's website, this e-book now becomes a way for every high school music program in the state to be directly linked to the state university music programs.

There's 50 states for sure and upward of 50,000 + public high schools nationwide. So creating a statewide music centered dialogue around a common e-curriculum with up and coming musicians, some of which may be hoping to take their learning and skills to the next level or towards a pro career in music as our next generation of artists and music educators all melds together.

Mentors and formal music teacher training. Current attendees to each of the state programs that include special training towards credentialed / licensing for public school teaching, perhaps with work / study funding, can become the paid mentors to their state’s high school students, to facilitate learning and development while beginning the recruitment dialogue for interested artists to learn more about each formal music school resources and faculties, statewide and even beyond.

Mentors that go on to become licensed professional educators could then also have an existing tie to musical folks in communities statewide, advancing employment opportunity and pro career start points for new graduates.

Pathways of study. Thanks to the e-nature of the now modern e-book, writers can create topical discussions that include music and art vocabulary terms as active hyperlinks, to take the reader to all points within this primer. Hyperlinked words of power, one to another to another and forward, enable a gradually maturing complexity of ideas and content development, of the varied topics within our Americana music theory curriculum.

Self accelerate. A second aspect of this hyperlinked vocabulary is to encourage each and every reader to 'self- accelerate' their own learning. That if a reader already knows about the topic under discussion, and especially the music words used to describe its aspects, these vocabulary words also become linked ways to evolve the current topic into a new dimension, becoming puzzle pieces in another and very often more involved (complex) musical structure, etc. Just look to the right of any paragraph and there' usually links forward, and back too sometime :)

Thus, these active musical terms can create pathways forward skipping through already known facts and information till we bump into a topic we just might want to understand more fully, then we can stop to examine at our leisure. New musical artist / theorists have multiple 'start' pages of various essential music components and structures to spark off learning.

While advancing readers can skip along right through all the seven main chapters, even to the very end of the book, whose last discussion about 'time', included here from Forward Motion, can become a lifetime's worth of exploration, study and artistic development, a space portal into the potentially endless 'time universe' of improvising music together with other artists.

The goal in UYM / EMG is to get a sense of the 'whole tamale' of these same musical elements as quickly as possible when beginning one's studies; of the relationship that theoretically exists between musical style and the number of elements ( pitches and chords ) generally employed in their creation; # of unique pitches in a melody, # of chords in its progression, # of bars in its form. Just those three are often enough :)

An while an artist might not ever need a chord such as a super jazzed up 'G7 / #5#9#11' chord, knowing there is such a critter, and how to build one and maybe where to find it in the Americana songbook, that is the goal of this e-book; simply an awareness of the full spectrum of the musical elements we can conjure with just the 12 equal pitches. End author's note.

Author's note. And while slow and steady wins the race, just saying here, but whenever a 'lighting learnin' moment has come along over the decades; as a kid feeling balance, and understanding and mastering the 'balance' on a bicycle, 'crowning rafters' by sight, and understanding natural grains and shapes for strength to build a hip jack roof as a teen, on to spelling any chord through all 12 keys in the blink of an eye at 20.

We all have these learning moments in life which we'll always remember. In this e-book I tried to 'build in' such magics, ways to accelerate insights to a bigger picture, with the key music terms. Personal curiosity counts for a lot in accelerating the joys of learning new ideas, encouraging us to solve life's puzzles, which accelerated by necessity or pure curiosity, organically renews again and again all through a topic and beyond into its next.

So a superhoot special thanks to the new tech of this here generation, in evolving a book into an e-book, with nuts and bolts text words that link to other discussions, some becoming insights to a gradually increasing complexity of music's organization. When we pair this 'accelerate the learning' with understanding of a numerical 'spectrum of styles' one's perspective of their theory / art relationship can quickly come into focus in creating and understating their art, leaving questions about the far horizons till further on up the road.

E-book stats and fun facts. With 30 years of research after completing my BA ~ Arts, today this e-book took three years to technically develop and seven years to bring to finish. And it was quite a task to bring it to close. Just turns out that near everything in music and art is somehow, someway connected to something else, so 'linking to a full acceptable theory closure' was quite a challenge.

The #'s atop each page. Each of the 137 pages comprising this e-book have two linked #'s at its top. The first, large and in the upper right hand corner, is a link back to the index of topics in this e-book listed alphabetically. The second, smaller number at the top of a page, tells the reader how many 'links out' are on each page.

These links travel us off to further related vocabulary and discussions of the topic under consideration, there to find further links that can eventually loop us back to where we started. We construct these theory loops with seven main 'silent' architectures, which when combined all together, illuminate a view of the whole Americana BA theory tamale curriculum.

Our Americana musical and art discussions take us through 137 bottomless e-pages, tucked into 53 topical folders. The 340 art concept topics generate 3,719 links out into the discussions. There's 2,450 audio .mp3 audio files for learning by ear, of which 2,128 are nested with their representation in standard music notation. The glossary, 'a to z' has 963 vocabulary words which generate 4,489 links out into the e-book. And there's at last count 34,605 internal hyperlinks and an an estimated 250 'wiki' styled links, to wiki pages that are titled to that exact topic. Cool ?

# of art page hyperlinks out / 3,719

# of images ~ written music / 2,128
# of .mp3 audio files / 2,450

internal hyperlinks / 34,626 :)

hyperlinks out of glossary / 4,489
file size / 759 megabytes

Internet safety. And for internet safety and respectful accordance with Wiki policy, these 250 or so 'wiki links' are not 'active' links. The reader must choose to leave the 'shell' of this e-book to wiki explore. So for those readers working on line and thanks to an e-book's web browser online magics, 'wiki' links simply need a 'mouse rollover' to highlight text, a search click then a 'go fetch' click, to activate the link and take the reader through the web to that topic's wiki page. And along these expansionary lines when working this e-book on an online computer, these same search mouse clicks will work for any text words ... to generate a www. search for additional topical information. And just how cool is that huh ... ?

'Music and the fine art of ... everything.' As far back as I can remember music was my art. At early school in art class, all the arts where included and this spirit of 'inclusive of all the fine arts' is written into and woven all through the curriculums of this e-book. We each have our own memories and instincts towards making the kinds of art we love. And this e-book's curriculum components have ways to include all the arts in collaborative projects and solo ventures.

Music. As far back as I can remember now, music energized my life. Singing along with records, rote learning the words and melodies, sometimes playing the same song over and over, for the pure fun of it. And oftentimes, both the 'A' and B' sides of a single had hit songs we had to know. A first 'air' guitar riff for us all :)

Learn 'by ear.' This e-book initially comes from two hardcopy printed primers I wrote. When the e-book technology ( a desktop computer ) came along to me around the turn of the last century, and I realized that my previous paper texts could now become three dimensional, with full-on audio playback of all the theory necessary, and imaginable, in recorded and notated music ... I thought wow, it'll straighten out me karma in all this, I just have to write this e-book. So I did, for all musical friends that love to create their art 'by ear', and aspire to 'hear the theory' of a song too.

We learn the basics of ...

To aspire to understand ...

With lots in between ...

For all instruments, especially guitar and bass ...

Dance / choreography. Truth be told from earliest memories, I headed for the bandstand so as to be able to keep myself off the dancefloor. That said, and as the song goes; "I Got Rhythm" and can bring the deep swing too, dance ? Nope, I've steps for rain and for snow, and slow steps for dancing slow. So ...

There's too many positives about dance to begin to list here, suffice to say that when I'm on the bandstand and laying down the audio for dancers, not sure I've ever seen so much joy and giant smiles on participants collaboratively created.

There's solo and couples dance routines to be worked out for; the "SuperHoot" musical show, in learning the 12 bar blues form and choreographing exact steps to create a repeatable routine to a 'set in stone' song form and dance routines for both a lead singer and backup vocalists for a pop band "FoneZombies", which could also be included in the "SuperHoot" show.

Theatre / workshop a play. "Scene Billy" is a theatrical production in two acts. It is a work of fiction in a romance comedy rhythm, whose plot arc muses about the writing of 'Billy's ( William Shakespeare ) own plays and how these stories and their morals are viewed and included through his fictional participation as lead editor of the crew writing by commission the King James Bible, which according to wiki history was commissioned 1604, published 1611.

That the Globe Theatre was rocking London during these same years sets our story in motion. Scenes are formed up into a repeating cycle 'triptych', three ongoing dialogues bouncing between the King, Billy and the Bible writing crew. Each successive year brings us a new Shakespeare play and the King's own political dramas, both reflected in the discussions of the writing crew. Our story's closure is created by the demise of the Globe in 1613 and the Bible's arrival in the Americas on the Mayflower in 1619.

Workshop this theme. This plot line can 'workshop a play' of your own, becoming a writing project for students to express themselves on 'Billy's themes and topics', creating a story that reflects their own passions and perspectives of life and society's ever enduring truisms, through a lens of their modern life today.

To write. Consider to generate dialogue and eventual script by having actors improvisationally bounce topical ideas off one another in live acting classes, record these workshop classes and record these sessions with an i-phone. Then by transcription and then editing, these actors can create their own script. Which if retitled appropriately to reflect their own take on this plot arc and its history, can then be copyrighted as their own original work.

Administrative artists. At a recent get together for artists here in Alaska, we realized that among our group were artists whose creative powers were directed towards the infrastructure and logistics of what needs to be done to present art to the public.

In getting started in admin, if appropriate, just go to a show and ask the folks working the gig if they need any help, and jump in with whatever is needed at that moment, with an eye towards learning how it all the parts fit and get sequenced together to create a show from end to end, good 'admin' folks have probably done every job on a set at some point along the way too in addition to handling the loot $, promotion and production. Back in the day this was termed to 'get a foot in the door ... :) Read on !

 

The 'tech' side. When starting out, kinda the same as above; that if appropriate, just go to a show and ask the folks working if they need any help now or down the road. Most beginning jobs are physical labor, so always work safely for you and all around you, learn how to move things around, roll up cables and stay far away from the big electrical panels, make the ...

'if u can't work safe then u can't work here'...

'be a mantra, the bosses will love it. Know that there's all sorts of tech skills needed to create art that become careers; build, paint, lights, sound, fix anything, move things around, props, costumes, fetch stuff, sweep and take out the trash, can hang talent / stars of the show, plays well with others. For more art activity ideas and jobs in the bizz, watch the credits of any movie and read along with the scroll, looking for something that sounds interesting to you, something you think you might be good at doing. With an interest u'll find a way in, one gig leads to the next and as the saying goes ... 'the show must go on.' :)

~ 'SuperHoot' projects / bands ~

"SuperHoot", the musical. The idea for this show comes from watching another production that caused me to feel quite sorry for the actors. Borrowing from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", our two main 'SuperHoot' characters are singers. One, Ms. Veronica, is quite famous but has achieved fame through the impersonation other big stars.

Our Romeo, Joey, is a real deal blues guy himself but can't get any traction in the bizz. Joey falls bigtime for Veronica, and she too but hesitates in returning Joey's intentions, as Joey, while is true blue to himself and his art, shows little to zero prospects for success, until that fateful day when over the radio airwaves ... :)

In production, the Ms Veronica(s) decide on popular songs of their choosing then 'dress up' to impersonate each star and sing their hit song. There's back up singers and four groups of two paired dancers for each of Veronica's numbers, oh and there needs to be a 'duet' song for her and Joey to sing together somewhere along midway through the show. That sparks off her love for Joey and here quest to capture true love.

Interspersed with these performances are performances by Joey, who plays either songs written by Jacmuse or bluesmen Jake Matson and Joey Fender. Or use write your own songs. Joey's hit song is also included if needed, one I wrote titled "When You Coming Back", which of course he sings to Ms. Veronica to close the show and seal the deal :)

"FoneZombees" / pop vocal band. After playing a blues show at an AK roadhouse, I had a conversation with a few dancers about life in this small town. Well, turns out that one of the high steppers had a day gig where they supervised a 'call in' help desk for people with cell phone problems. Quickly dubbed in this particular case as ...

The 'FoneZombee Queen' ...

Our new band now had a leader and name !

"The FoneZombees"

Although the queen's hip hop raps were sort of AI sounding, all the usual of 'hi and thanks for calling intro ... then as u might imagine into some rather hilarious rejoiners based on personal experience. Its was fun. And a band named as such, its way easy to jazz up into whomever, whatever, wherever this band hails from. Here in Alaska ...

"FoneZombees of Alaska"

"The AK FoneZombees"

"FoneZombees of the North"

They're all good :) So there can be your own bands and 'chapters' of 'fone-zombees' all over this globe, writing songs and telling stories, maybe with common hooks and parodies etc., and using our cell phones to first get us there, imagine that :) There's any number of singers, each write their own lyrics to the song's theme and front the band, then sing backup as other 'leads' sing their ideas. Historically its been groups of four voices covering the four part harmony, but every combination of will work, just gotta wanna be a bee ... :)

All the hooks in the songs are parodies of an oldtime kid' riff while spoken word poetry tells the stories between the restatement of the hook. Simple, fun and wide open for writer of verse to have their say on topics that are meaningful in their lives.

"Ring Ring Ring"

"Paaah-leeezzz ..."

"Tell me what you're thinking"

"When you gonna ring me"

"Why you telling me that"

"Really now"

"Don't touch"

"Half my diet is yogurt"

"Please don't push that button"

"What's with all the sparkle"

Blues band.

Jamm band.

Euro classical to Americana.

Writers.

... just write :)

References. References for this page come from the included bibliography from school and the bandstand, made way easier by the folks along the way. In addition, books of classical literature; from Homer, Stendahl and Laudurie to Rand, Walker and Morrison and of today, provided additional life puzzle pieces to the musical ones, to shape the 'art' page and discussions of this book. Special thanks to PSUC professor Dr. Y. Guibbory, who 40 years ago now provided the spark to ignite a love within me of the weaving of the history of the arts into the evolutions of Americana musical art.

"Life is about creating yourself."
wiki ~ Bob Dylan

Find an e-book mentor. Always good to have a mentor when learning about things new to us. And with music and its magics, nice to have a friend or two ask questions and collaborate with. Seek and ye shall find. Local high schools, libraries, friends and family, musicians in your home town ... just ask around, someone will know someone who knows someone about music who can help you with your studies of the musical arts with this e-book.

Intensive tutoring. Luckily for musical artists like us, the learning dip of the 'covid years' can vanish quickly with intensive tutoring. For all disciplines; including all the sciences and the 'hands on' trade schools, that with tutoring, learning blossoms to 'catch us up.' In music ? The 'theory' of making musical art is built with just the 12 unique pitches, so easy to master with mentorship. And in 'practice ?' Luckily old school, the foundation that 'all responsibility for self betterment is ours alone.' Which in music, and same for all the arts, means to do what we really love to do ... to make music :)

 

"These books, and your capacity to understand them, are just the same in all places. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing."

wiki ~ Abraham Lincoln

Academia references of Alaska. And when you need university level answers to your questions and musings, and especially if you are considering a career in music and looking to continue your formal studies, begin to e-reach out to the Alaska University Music Campus communities and begin a dialogue with some of Alaska's finest resident maestros !

University of Alaska

University of Alaska Anchorage Music

University of Alaska Fairbanks Music Education

Formal academia references near your home. Let your fingers do the clicking to search and find the formal music academies in your own locale.

"Who is responsible for your education ... ?

U

'We energize our learning in life through natural curiosity and exploration, and in doing so, create our own pathways of discovery.'

Comments or questions ?

jacmuse@ak.net