#52 Which instrument are you?

Now, I know that not all of the vast hordes of people who read this blog are musical. Well, don't feel bad, it's not your fault that your sister hogged all the talent. Supposing you were a musical genius...what instrument would you play? Don't tell me. Let me tell you, with this handy quiz... 1. What nickname would your friends most likely give you? A. Handsome B. Awesome (you actually gave this nickname to yourself) C. Psycho D. Hyper 2. It's the first day of band. What are you thinking?A. Yay! I love band. B. Man...still no talent in here. Except for me. C. What the...? How did that get on the ceiling? D. I need Mountain Dew. 3. There's a new kid in band. How do you respond? A. Introduce yourself and be nice. B. Hope they don't sit next to you. C. Make faces at them. D. Wonder if they have any Mountain Dew on them. 4. The band teacher says something that you know isn't correct. What do you do? A. Politely correct him. B. Roll your eyes whisper his mistake to the person sitting next to you. C. Don't care. D. You don't even notice. 5. Time to vote on new music! What do you vote for? A. Something quiet and easy. B. Something really hard, so you can show everyone up. C. Something that was written by someone on drugs. D. Something really loud and fast. 6. You're going to the State Fair. What do you do there? A. March and play your instrument, silly. B. Sit on a bench wearing sunglasses all day. C. Talk to hippies. D. Drink lots of Mountain Dew, then ride the fastest, wildest rides until you throw up the Mountain Dew, and then you take pictures of the green throw up. 7. What kind of beard do you prefer? A. None, I'm clean-shaven. B. What does this question have to do with anything? C. An evil, villainous, curly beard. D. Any kind of beard, so long as it's a beard. 8. You get a new band teacher. What do you do? A. Welcome him nicely. B. Hope he's better than the last band teacher, but don't get your hopes up. You'd be way more qualified to run this band yourself. C. Throw fruit at him. D. Wonder if he has any Mountain Dew. 9. You get a 1 at contest. What's do you say? A. "Yay! I love getting 1's." B. "Well, duh." C. "I wonder if there are any bananas around here?" D. You don't know if a 1 is good or bad, so you don't say anything. 10. You're sitting in the band room, waiting for a concert to start. How do you mentally prepare yourself? A. Breathe deeply. B. You don't need to mentally prepare. C. Throw fruit at people. D. You forget why you're there because you're so hungry. 11. Time for new band shirts. What design do you vote on? A. Something decent and not too conspicuous. B. Something that screams, "I AM AWESOME AND YOU KNOW IT!!!" C. A shirt that is tie-dye, glows in the dark, and has one of those 3-D images hidden in it. D. A shirt that you can eat if you get lost in the jungle. 12. Who's your favorite musician? A. The Beatles. B. Yourself. C. David Crowder Band. D. You don't listen to music. 13. What do you like to read? A. Newspapers. B. Something high-brow, like Dickens. C. Edgar Allen Poe. D. You don't know how to read. 14. What do you like to eat? A. Normal food. B. Expensive stuff imported from Italy. C. Sushi and alligator. D. Mountain Dew. 15. What do you do in your free time? A. Practice my instrument, read, listen to music, hang out with people. B. Sit on a bench wearing sunglasses. C. Make your own clothes out of hemp and throw fruit at people. D. Drink Mountain Dew. Well there you have it. How did you score? Mostly A's: Clarinet You're probably as normal as a decent musician can be, and you don't like getting in trouble. Mostly B's: Trumpet You think you're the awesomest person alive, and you probably are. You rock at your instrument and love sitting behind people so you can play in their ear. Mostly C's: Saxaphone No offense to you or all the saxaphone players out there...but you're weird. Sometimes this is a really good weird, and sometimes, it's just a really, really bad weird. I am not kidding you. All you other people, approach the saxaphones at your own risk. Mostly D's: Drums You, my friend, are in a group all your own. You probably don't read music, and you're unique in that while other band members are called "a trumpet" or "an oboe" or "a glass armonica," you are called "a drummer," not "a drum." You're usually off in your own little world, and if somebody asked you why you were in band, you probably would have no idea how to answer them.

#51 Those people who chew gum.

Chewing gum is against the rules in band. Why is it against the rules? Have you ever tried to extract a piece of gum from the depths of a bass flute? (I haven't. But I'm going to bet it's not enjoyable.)
And yet people do it.
And then when they get caught, they do one of two things: pretend to spit it out, or SWALLOW it. And that's not good for your digestion.
Here's my question: Why would anybody WANT to chew gum in band?
Why chew gum at all? I've chewed gum, and it's really not worth breaking the rules to do it.
Does your instrument taste that bad?

#50 Contest, part two.

Remember that post about the judges at music contests? Remember that? Wasn't that great? Wasn't that the funniest thing you ever read?
(If you're feeling left out right now, that was the last post. Scroll down a bit, you'll see it.)
Anyway, this post is about the musicians at music contests, because without them, there would be no music contests. Judging contests, perhaps, but not music.
Anyway, there are four main types you should watch for...

1. The guy who's really expressive with his body.
Have we covered this before? There will always be somebody who does this. They aren't necessarily good musicians, either. They could be thinking one of several things. "I hope all this breakdancing will distract the judge from my horrible playing," "I wonder if they'll count me down for bad posture?" and (from the pianists), "I don't care how this looks, my rear end is asleep and I have to move around a bit," are just a few.

2. The person who's really awesome and makes the rest of us feel inferior.
This is one good reason not to listen to anybody else's performance. If you do, you'll end up picking the one guy who's been playing the glass armonica and the marimba at the SAME TIME since he was two days old, while you don't even know what a glass armonica is (that deserves its own post) and you thought that "marimba" was an African language. You'll probably end up depressed and quit your instrument. Poor you.

3. The person who freaks out.
Everybody should feel sorry for this person. It's not her fault that she can't handle the pressure of these things. She's probably been shaking and sweating and regretting for a whole week, and hasn't slept the whole time, and when she gets up in front of people she just loses it. Here's what this person is thinking the whole time: "Ok, it's ok, I'm ok, I'm prepared, I've practiced a hundred million times, I've got this, what am I holding? An OBOE?! I don't play the OBOE! Do I? Well, I don't now, anyway. OH MY GOODNESS they just called my name! Was that my name? I can't remember my name! Why do we even HAVE names? What am I holding? Nothing? Where did my instrument go? Why does my cousin have it? Give me that! What song am I playing? I hope my family doesn't mind if I freak out and run away, which would mean driving fourteen hours here was for nothing..."
And then she passes out.
What? Why is the failure a girl, you ask? Nothing against them, it's just that...girls are more prone to faint.

4. The guy who just sits there and plays his music, like normal.
Lame, I know, but these people are ALL OVER THE PLACE. There's even one who lives in my house. These people don't do anything particularly bad, but the judges have to criticize SOMETHING, so they put on the score sheet, "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, YOU CRAZY UNMUSICAL FREAK?! YOU JUST SAT THERE, AND PLAYED YOUR MUSIC, LIKE NORMAL!"
At least, they should.

#49 Contest.

Have I talked about contest before? I can't remember. Well, if I did, you probably forgot, too, so here we go.
I'm going to piano contest tomorrow. Am I practicing on the night before? Apparently, no, I am writing a blog post. I've literally played the piece hundreds of times before. If it's not ready now, it never will be.
Anyway, whether you're going to piano, solo, ensemble, or large group contest, you always have to face...
THE JUDGES.
...and, beside the normal, you-did-this-good-this-needs-work type judges, there are basically four kinds you need to look for...

1. The judge who hates your guts.
Good luck getting anything better than a 3 from this guy. This judge hates you, and everything about you. He is, as my dad says, a musical snob, and you picked the ugliest, most unmusical song out there, and he hates it. He also hates your interpretation of it; his is much better. Why is he playing a song he hates? Who knows? He also hates your posture, your clothes, your hairdo, how tall you are, and the fact that you can say the alphabet backwards with your tongue rolled, and he can't do either. How does he know that, anyway?

2. The judge who is just kind of...dumb.
This guy is more of a rarity, but he's out there. It's one of the mysteries of life, how smart, hard-working people can fail at many things, but some really stupid people somehow get through the education system and become police officers, nurses, and, occassionally, musicians. You never know what kind of a score he'll give you, but even if you do a really horrible job, there's a chance that he'll give you a really high score.

3. The judge who can't read music.
How did this guy get here? You probably ran over the real judge's dog one time, and when he heard you were performing, he got depressed and hired his identical twin brother to take his place. This guy will ask for the score an inordinate amount of times, and pretend to be studying the section that looks the most difficult to him. He then tries to figure out what the terms on the score sheet mean, and not to give the same number on all of them. This guy is really easy to spot. He'll most likely give you a high score, since everybody who performs will impress him, and he won't leave any comments at all on the score sheet.

4. The old guy who falls asleep during every performance.
This is just one more reason to play a loud, flashy piece rather than a quiet one. This judge is probably about 114 years old, is a professor emeritus at the college, and has been to contest, as a contestant or a judge, since he before he was born, and it's kind of boring now. He's also kind of deaf, and doesn't feel like straining to hear your music. He, like the last guy, has to fake the score sheet, but he's better at doing it. After all, he has been at it for the past seven decades.

#48 Cover tunes.

I hate cover tunes.
That's one of the great things about classical music. You can't say that this guy did a recording, and this guy did another recording, and this guy did an acoustic version, and that band played it with kazoos, and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra actually did a version that people liked, and we can't remember who wrote it, but we hate him because his song plays on every radio station because people from every genre have COPIED HIM!
No.
In classical music, ONE person writes something, and then EVERBYBODY plays it, and EVERYBODY knows who it was that wrote it.
Wait a minute, you say. What about Flight of the Bumblebee? What about Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini? What about the La ci darem la mano variations?
Yes, those are songs composers have written off of other composers.
But they are not cover tunes.
A cover tune would be when you take a composition for orchestra, say, and transcribe it for...band.
That's wrong.
We're currently playing two songs by Bach in band right now. One is a very famous organ work known as "Jesu, joy of man's desiring." (Really? Why does everybody love that song?) Also, another known as "If Thou be near."
Over 1,100 works Bach wrote, and those are the two we got.
I know for a fact that we have at least one Prelude and Fugue of his in our vault.
But we play this.
Cover tunes are evil.

#47 I would mess with the students' minds. A lot.

Yesterday, my brother and I had to shovel the driveway.
So, we took the snow and buried the lamp post.
Actually, we didn't get all the way to the top. But we were mightily proud of our accomplishment.
Later in the day, I was talking to someone online and sent her the picture of our glorious mountain. She liked it.
Her sister did not.
She thought it was "horribly uncreative."
Well I don't know this person, but I wasn't going to let that pass. A conversation between we two ensued with the person I was actually talking to as the mediator. In that conversation, I got her to ramble confusedly, threaten me, use the word "whatever," and call me a creep and then leave.
It was nice talking to her. (And probably safer than doing it face to face.)
I do this to a lot of people on purpose, and I do it to a lot of people accidentally. There's going to be a lot of confusion in my classroom.
It's because I'm an eccentric.
My dad maintains that an eccentric can't know that they're an eccentric, and if they did know they wouldn't be an eccentric.
I beg to differ. I have a sneaking suspicion that I am eccentric and everybody is too afraid to tell me. I just can't differentiate between the normal things I do and the eccentric, which no longer sounds like a word.
Maybe that's why everything I say to a certain person I don't know very well confuses her. I just don't speak English well, which is a poor thing for a blogger.
Or maybe she just doesn't like me.

#46 The one guy who's really expressive with his body language.

Want to see something scary? Go to YouTube and type in "Lang Lang."
That guy has way too much energy to be a pianist. He should be a comedian/trapeze artist.
While it's ok for a soloist to be that way, or the lead violinist in a concerto, but people sitting in the orchestra should not be allowed to do that. (I'm the one that dances around. Not you.)
Why do people do this? At least three reasons...

1. It's the only way to draw attention to themselves.
It's an orchestra. It isn't about you third chair contrabassoons any more than it's about the first chair timpani. Maybe that's where we get the 'and' part of band; it's this guy AND that guy AND those people who don't really play their instruments AND the man with the funny facial hair. Therefore, nobody gets any attention individually.
In other words, NOBODY CAN HEAR YOU.
But they can see you.
Especially when you're pretending to have a seizure. (That really messes up your phrasing.)

2. They drink way too much coffee and are really hyper.
Drinking caffeine before a piano performance aids the performance. Maybe. It's a theory, anyway. I haven't tried very hard to prove it.
Before a band performance, not so much.
It doesn't take nearly as much energy to play the triangle as it does to play the piano. Since it's annoying to bounce your knee through the whole performance, they have to do SOMETHING to get rid of all that energy.

3. They're just getting into the music.
This is like the classical version of metal guitarists jumping the stage and headbanging, which, incidentally, can cause brain injury. If you went to that extreme during a symphony, you would not be highly respected in the classical music community. Nor would you be able to do it sitting down. However, doing weird circular movements with the upper half of your body which may resemble the mating dance of some birds is acceptable. Everything was way calmer when the music was written.

Those are my guesses on why people think it's necessary to break dance while sitting down. Why do you think they do it?