Dilla, Detroit, and Machine Music

Catalog description

This 14-week course explores how machines changed the way we make music — and how machine music created new paths in rhythm, harmony, sound, and composition — through the lens of Detroit and the Detroit-born electronic producer-composer James Dewitt Yancey. Known variously as “Jay Dee,” “J Dilla” or simply “Dilla,” Yancey’s professional career was short, spanning a dozen years before his death from a rare blood disease in 2006. But his influence in that period shifted the sound of popular music; and his ideas have compelled a new generation of musicians — both electronic and traditional — who have drawn inspiration from Yancey’s music and seized upon his innovations, chief among them a unique conception of musical time. In this course, which spans genres from jazz to Motown R&B to funk to techno to hip-hop, we use Detroit as a grounding context for understanding how music evolves, and how we evolve with it.