Didactic Dissonance
Strange notations from my youth.
Do you remember elementary school music class?
Do you remember, once or twice a week, schlepping up to a nearly windowless room to sit in rows of stackable chairs? There, the music teacher—a fortyish man of obviously Scandinavian descent with the ability to hit an extraordinarily low G, wearing his Century-21 sports jacket and correspondingly low-key trousers—would mete out tambourines, deeply profiled drumsticks, and a single instance of that latin shicka-shicka-rubbing-ball-bearing maracca thing.
Do you remember having your own recorder, in a green felt sleeve? (Why did that last finger stop have two unequal holes? Who would give children such a horrible device?)
Forgetting for the moment the scandalous singing of the Famer in the Dale, wherein some poor gradeschool boy was singled out and forced to choose a wife from his breathless, seething, coed cohort, concentrate on the actual musical curriculum.
Remember the songs?
Rather, do you remember the songs with the lyrics and notes stripped out with Norse precision, replaced with symbology to represent meter, on meter?
What might have been:
Alas, my love, you do me wrong,
To cast me off discourteously.
became:
TI TA, TI TA, TI TA TA TA
TI TA TI TA TI TA TA TA
Remember that? Remember TI TI TA TI TI TA TA TA?
So do I.
Now. What the hell was that?
ev · PDDCCCLXXXIII
October 27th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
I took private music lessons when I was a kid. By grade 7 I discovered the following: Music in school and music out of school were as similar as Calculus and Girls. Both a bit mysterious, but only one was fun.