eine kleine musik, nacht
Sep. 21st, 2015 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishI could write about work (garden-variety corporate stupidity coupled with software-industry-specific stupidity) but that would just make me irritated, so I won't.
Besides, I've been meaning to write about some music stuff for a couple of weeks now. That was the first time I've ever done any sort of formal play-by-ear. That is, my teacher picks a key and plays a few notes, and I play them back to her, and repeat.
The first time or two it was fun but exhausting. It works my brain in a way I'm not at all used to. A couple of times I could stop trying to think note-names and just *play* and it worked, which was amazing and inexplicable. And then today... today it was just fun.
And I am apparently pretty good at it, which is a great shock to me as I've always thought my ear wasn't all that hot. I can mostly tell if a note's out of tune, but not always whether it's high or low.
Then it occurred to me that this isn't the first time I've done this. In high school, on cello, I picked out the melody to "Chariots of Fire" and the bass line to "Stand By Me." So, I dunno.
Side note: I seem to have a much harder time hearing notes in voices. I don't know why that would be but it might explain some of my inability to carry a tune in a bucket.
On being a beginning music student. I was mostly Leigh, with a lot of Quentin mixed in.
I started playing cello in third grade. I stuck with it because, I don't know. Because it was Something I Did and I didn't know how to stop doing things, and because I had some friends who I only knew/saw because of cello. I don't think I really aspired to anything musically.
Except that my uncle Jimmy Dale (not to be confused with my uncle Jim) knew that I played cello, and one Christmas he gave me a cassette of Skylife, by the Turtle Island String Quartet. I was... as blown away as it was possible for me to be at the time, which was "kind of." I had no idea you could do that with a string quartet. I wanted to be able to do that. To play like that, popping and sliding and all.
I never said anything about it. Certainly not to my parents, but not to my teacher either. I'd moved on from the early-music violist who taught me at first, to Liz West, a bassist who ... was probably only a year or two older than my current viola teacher, now that I think of it. I suspect Ms West would have been thrilled if I'd ever said that I wanted to play like Turtle Island. But I didn't, because I was in eighth grade and miserable, and I'd been stuck in Fayettehell for five years, and I still stung from the lack of support I'd gotten when I'd said I wanted to be a writer. I'd learned better than to want anything.
And then we moved, and I went from being the second-best cellist in the district to second-worst in the school, and eventually something had to give and it was music.
When I started taking viola lessons last year I thought I was David. To some extent I still am. (With that same mix of Quentin to go with it, of course.) But I put on Skylife for my commute in to work one day last week... and I'm starting to suspect I might be an Emily as well.
Besides, I've been meaning to write about some music stuff for a couple of weeks now. That was the first time I've ever done any sort of formal play-by-ear. That is, my teacher picks a key and plays a few notes, and I play them back to her, and repeat.
The first time or two it was fun but exhausting. It works my brain in a way I'm not at all used to. A couple of times I could stop trying to think note-names and just *play* and it worked, which was amazing and inexplicable. And then today... today it was just fun.
And I am apparently pretty good at it, which is a great shock to me as I've always thought my ear wasn't all that hot. I can mostly tell if a note's out of tune, but not always whether it's high or low.
Then it occurred to me that this isn't the first time I've done this. In high school, on cello, I picked out the melody to "Chariots of Fire" and the bass line to "Stand By Me." So, I dunno.
Side note: I seem to have a much harder time hearing notes in voices. I don't know why that would be but it might explain some of my inability to carry a tune in a bucket.
On being a beginning music student. I was mostly Leigh, with a lot of Quentin mixed in.
I started playing cello in third grade. I stuck with it because, I don't know. Because it was Something I Did and I didn't know how to stop doing things, and because I had some friends who I only knew/saw because of cello. I don't think I really aspired to anything musically.
Except that my uncle Jimmy Dale (not to be confused with my uncle Jim) knew that I played cello, and one Christmas he gave me a cassette of Skylife, by the Turtle Island String Quartet. I was... as blown away as it was possible for me to be at the time, which was "kind of." I had no idea you could do that with a string quartet. I wanted to be able to do that. To play like that, popping and sliding and all.
I never said anything about it. Certainly not to my parents, but not to my teacher either. I'd moved on from the early-music violist who taught me at first, to Liz West, a bassist who ... was probably only a year or two older than my current viola teacher, now that I think of it. I suspect Ms West would have been thrilled if I'd ever said that I wanted to play like Turtle Island. But I didn't, because I was in eighth grade and miserable, and I'd been stuck in Fayettehell for five years, and I still stung from the lack of support I'd gotten when I'd said I wanted to be a writer. I'd learned better than to want anything.
And then we moved, and I went from being the second-best cellist in the district to second-worst in the school, and eventually something had to give and it was music.
When I started taking viola lessons last year I thought I was David. To some extent I still am. (With that same mix of Quentin to go with it, of course.) But I put on Skylife for my commute in to work one day last week... and I'm starting to suspect I might be an Emily as well.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-23 05:37 am (UTC)And it is, of course, More Complicated Than That. But learning how to want things for myself feels like a big project, right now.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-23 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-24 01:59 pm (UTC)That's mostly accurate. It turns out to be less stable than it looks, for two reasons: 1) a bunch of coping mechanisms that are appropriate to Bad Times are actively detrimental to happiness in Good Times, so I tend to backslide; 2) this nagging sense that something is Not Right but no language to express what that might be, so I tend to wobble.
... yeah, this wants its own post. :)