YouTube’s best ‘how music works’ channel taught me so much about media I love

YouTube is packed with “How do I…” and “How did they…” channels. SEO masterminds chase Google glory on basic questions like “How to change a tire.” Lifestyle gurus explain how to change your life. Documentarians lay out series on how specific products are made. Comedians mix straight-faced how-tos with pointed irony. Entire channels are dedicated to how to pronounce things (or how not to pronounce them). If you want to learn more about practically any form of creative work, someone on YouTube has your back.

But the only channel I return to consistently for my “How’d they do that?” fix is @HowardHoMusic, the channel where composer/playwright/journalist Howard Ho unpacks songs from stage and movie musicals in micro detail, but in terms that music amateurs like me can actually understand.

I first ran across Ho’s channel after Disney’s animated movie Encanto put the frustratingly catchy number “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” on nonstop rotation in the constantly running jukebox of my brain. I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get it out of my head, so when YouTube suggested a video explaining the phenomenon, I bit.

Ho’s video not only got me to hear the song differently, it let me see some of the movie differently. He doesn’t just explain home keys and relative majors, and how the song’s keys and chords fit together: He picks apart elements of Encanto’s visual and storytelling symbolism to explain why certain colors and visuals are relevant to the characters involved. The insight about the notes used in Bruno’s name and the concept of “blocking the way home” in this song blew my mind, but the breakdown of Mirabel’s skirt embroidery was even more exciting. It’s like an “Easter eggs you missed” video without the condescension.

Still, that video doesn’t hold a (magical, symbolic, straight-out-of-Encanto) candle to the breakdown of “Surface Pressure” from the same musical, which just about made my brain explode. This look at how a song about emotional stress uses syllabic stress to make and break rhythms and convey different emotions is fascinating — one part structural analysis, two parts composition education. 

Ho has a degree in musicology and a clear fandom for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s work: His series breaking down theory, process, rhymes, and symbols in Hamilton has a longer run time than Hamilton itself. He clearly follows his own fascinations as he’s programming the channel — he isn’t just opportunistically diving into whatever’s popular at the moment, he’s exploring things he himself finds interesting, whether he’s picking apart a particularly involved and clever bit of lyrical play in Into the Woods or spending nearly an hour on how the 2022 Broadway show & Juliet fixes the fundamental problems with jukebox musicals.

Ho’s videos are brisk but not frantic — they don’t have that “rushing to keep the attention of an impatient crowd” sense of overcutting that bugs me in other analysis channels, but they don’t drag or belabor any given point, either. For me, his shifting focus between lyrical, musical, symbolic, narrative, and rhythmic analysis also means a steady shift between analytical languages I already understand and can take in easily, and ideas that push the limits of my comprehension in exciting ways. If you’re anything like me, his videos exploring media that most fans will already feel they know a lot about are informative and insightful enough to pull you toward watching videos about lesser-known projects — and maybe, hopefully, to actually check out those projects in turn. (Schmigadoon! is terrific, y’all.)

But my favorite thing about Howard Ho’s channel is that he answers questions I wouldn’t even have thought to ask about media I’ve already watched. Why does a B-flat note kick Sinister Strange’s ass in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness? How does it connect to Danny Elfman and Beethoven? Why does Solo play the Empire’s theme from Star Wars in a major key, and how does that theme relate to “the happiest type of melody you can write”? Next time you’re looking for a diversion on YouTube, you know where to answer those questions.