The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: BG
Date: 2002-11-13 14:08
I received the following in an e-mail from a friend and thought it might be worth sharing!
You Know You Are A Musical Geek If......
your favourite pickup line is, "What's your favourite augmented sixth chord?"
you can look at a piece by J.S. Bach and say, "You know, I think he could have gotten a much better effect this way... "
you like to march around your room to the rhythms of Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps."
you love to quote Walter Piston.
you long for the good old days of movable G-clefs.
you like polytonal music because, hey, the more keys the merrier.
you dream in four parts.
you feel the need to end Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony with a Picardy third.
you can improvise 16th century counterpoint with no trouble, but you frequently forget how to tie your shoes.
you lament the decline of serialism.
you enjoy the tang of a tritone whenever you can.
you like to deceive your friends and loved ones with deceptive cadences.
you only drink fifths, and then you laugh at the pun.
instead of counting sheep, you count sequences.
you only sing tunes that make good fugal subjects.
you find free counterpoint too liberal.
Mussorgsky's "Hopak" gives you nightmares.
you wonder what a "Danish Sixth" would sound like.
the "Corelli Clash" gives you goosebumps.
you can hear an enharmonic modulation coming a mile away.
you have ever done a Schenkerian analysis on "Three Blind Mice."
you have ever tried to do a Schenkerian analysis on John Cage's 4'33".
you have hosted a "Gurrelieder" party.
you have ever pondered what an augmented seventh chord would sound like.
bass motion by ascending thirds or a sequential pattern with roots in ascending fifths immediately strikes you as "belaboured."
you know what the ninth overtone of the harmonic series is off the top of your head.
you can name ten of Palestrina's contemporaries.
you can answer your phone with a tonal or a real answer.
you have ever heard a wrong note in a performance of a piece by Berio, Boulez, or Stockhausen.
you suspiciously check all the music you hear for dangling sevenths.
when you're feeling particularly prankish, you transpose Mozart arias to locrian mode.
you keep a notebook of useful diminutions.
those "parasitic" dissonances make you queasy, especially when left unresolved.
you have composed variations on a theme by Anton Webern.
you know the difference between a Courante and a Corrente.
you have trained your dog to jump through a flaming circle of fifths.
you have ever used the word "fortspinnung" in polite conversation.
you feel cheated by evaded cadences.
you have a poster of Allen Forte in your room.
you know who Allen Forte is.
every now and then you like to kick back and play something in hypophrygian mode.
you wonder why there aren't more types of seventh chords.
you wish you had twelve fingers.
you abbreviate your shopping list using figured bass.
you always make sure to invert your counterpoint, just in case.
you have ever told a joke that had this punchline: "...because it was POLYPHONIC!"
you know dirty acronyms for the order of sharps.
you consider all music written between 1750 and 1920 to be "rather elementary."
you memorise dates and times by what they would sound like in set theory.
you not only can identify any one of Bach's 371 Harmonised Chorales by ear, but you also know on what page it appears in the Riemenschneider edition and how many suspensions it has in the first seven bars.
you got more than half of the jokes in this list. !
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Author: William
Date: 2002-11-13 14:37
I always thought that simply owning an alto clarinet was the only qualification............(???)
Great list (LOL)
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Author: Ralph G
Date: 2002-11-13 15:44
I'm humbled. I don't get most of them. And I made the dean's list during both semesters I majored in music...
All I wanna do is play purty songs on my clarinet!
I'm goin' back to my aviation forums. At least I get the "you know you're a geek" lists there.
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Author: Anthony N
Date: 2002-11-13 20:09
Very funny, i understood roughly 3/4 of those jokes. I don't really like clarinet that much, but i play oboe (better than clarinet...)I'm digging myself into a deep hole here aren't I..
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Author: Heidi
Date: 2002-11-13 22:34
This is a great list!!!! I got a bunch of them! I'm sure my music history professor would enjoy this list even more!!:)
Great great, funniness!:)
Heidi
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Author: Ralph G
Date: 2002-11-14 01:04
After reading it four times, I think I get a good majority of them. But I'll bet hardly any of you can tell what kind of airliner it is just by the sound of the engines!
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Author: diz
Date: 2002-11-14 02:46
Hey David Pegel - how's it going in your neck of the woods anyways??
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Author: David Pegel
Date: 2002-11-14 22:06
It's going pretty well, considering Tennessee has been invested by tornadoes recently. My studies are still going strong!
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Author: Micaela
Date: 2002-11-15 01:49
I'm only a year older than David and I get most of them too. Not only have I made up dirty acronyms for the order of sharps (with the rest of the music theory class) and have read Piston, when I read the one about the Pathetique, I picked up my score (sitting next to the computer) and looked at the last chord. It's a b minor in root position, by the way. But I already knew I'm a geek.
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Author: sfalexi
Date: 2004-04-23 16:32
Had a 'musical geek' story to tell on account of something that happened last night!
I work for UPS so I see a fair amount of packages and boxes come through to my trucks.
So I'm working last night and see a piece of exercise equipment go through. The "Ab Bench. Ab Excerciser" For your abdominal muscles.
Except I didn't realize it was an "Ab" machine. It took me about fifteen minutes of thinking and peering at it to stop wondering how a bench can help you get a better "A-flat" and wondering what instrument this person played that they needed a bench to excercise certain notes!
Talk about a 'musical geek' moment!
Alexi
[EDIT] Yes I know it's old, but I've seen others get chastised for starting new threads on older already talked about topics so I figured I'd try to avoid it!
US Army Japan Band
Post Edited (2004-04-23 16:34)
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Author: Joel Clifton
Date: 2004-04-23 17:45
I had a music geek moment once. Last semester, my clarinet teacher Michele Gingras said that she would hold a mock clarinet audition next semester, and the winner would win loot. I pondered this for a good 30 seconds, and asked, "loot?" in a confused manner. Ms. Gingras confirmed this. Then one of my fellow students realized what I was thinking and said, "She doesn't mean the renaissance instrument!"
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"You have to play just right to make dissonant music sound wrong in the right way"
Post Edited (2004-04-23 17:46)
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Author: Micaela
Date: 2004-04-23 22:26
"Mussorgsky's "Hopak" [sic] gives you nightmares."
My, my, my! All those parallel fifths! Run for cover!
[sic] because I believe it's Gopak, unless this is a different piece.
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Author: GBK
Date: 2004-04-23 22:49
> you have a poster of Allen Forte in your room.
> you know who Allen Forte is.
Worse - You happen to know that Allen Forte's wife is Madeleine Forte (and you have some of her recordings) ...GBK
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Author: hans
Date: 2004-04-23 23:08
Alexi,
Thanks for my laugh du jour! (I'm working on my taxes and I needed it.)
Hans
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Author: claclaws
Date: 2004-04-24 01:17
Alexi,
I didn't understand half of what the original list says, but I laughed to tears at yours. Thanks a lot. And I'm quoting you in my webpage.
Lucy Lee Jang
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Author: Mark Pinner
Date: 2004-04-24 06:47
A musical geek is somebody who owns their own alto clarinet. I know I guy who owns an alto, a contra bass and a contra bassoon. Scary!
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Author: Michael G
Date: 2004-04-24 13:04
I have actually had a Gurrerlieder party at my place.
I'm so ashamed......
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Author: claaaaaarinet!!!!
Date: 2004-04-26 04:06
> you have a poster of Allen Forte in your room.
> you know who Allen Forte is.
I took two courses from Allen Forte while an undergraduate at Yale. You know you are among musical geeks when......
In Forte's lecture we routinely used twelve-tone matrices to analyze Schoenberg's serial music. One time, I got a long and hearty laugh from the other students and a blank stare from Professor Forte when I suggested that he try to popularize his next book on serial composition by entitling it "The Matrix."
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