The Rant Thread/My Life Sucks Topic [Don't be pricks]

[Nebbles]

I've been sick all weekend... hell I don't even know if it's an actual cold, my nose is just stuffy beyond belief and it's awful.

[Olimar12345]

 The genius new music director at the University of Houston  in all of his wisdom decided to add a stinger to the end of Sousa march that doesn't end with one.  I've never wanted to kill myself more in my life than in this moment.

[MaestroUGC]

He did what? Why? Why would you do that?

[Altissimo]

Ow ow ow ow ow no things are written as they are for a reason. Interpretation is one thing but Notes are another

[Olimar12345]

Sousa knew how to write marches, he wrote about 150 of the damn things. The "March King,"  as he's called, was fully fucking capable of writing a stinger at the end of his march. I'm pretty fucking sure he knew what he wanted when he didn't put one at the end of this one. I've been getting more and more fed up with the pure stupidity that is the music staff at this facility.

[blueflower999]

Wow, musicians are passionate about their work.

[Altissimo]

No shit!

[SlowPokemon]

Wow, musicians are passionate about their work.

You don't have much business being in music if you don't have the capability to get this worked up about it honestly

[Altissimo]

You don't have much business being in music if you don't have the capability to get this worked up about it honestly

but really

also that quote reminded me: i've been tutoring this freshman girl in theory (and piano apparently, not sure why i agreed to that one) and she is just in the wrong damn profession entirely. She's a singer and one who "just sings", y'know no note-reading or any of that jazz. That's cool, I mean, some musicians come to this program with less experience than others? Except she's also horrendously bad at music so far, like she doesn't understand any of the spatial or mathematical relationships that music really requires. What's the difference between a half and a whole note? Who really fuckin knows? That's two eighth notes so it's beats 1 and 2, right? I mean why would they be subdivided? What the hell does the dot mean? No it's 1.5 but what does it mean? "What, I have to keep playing [the piano with my left hand while my right hand moves]? That's like both sides of your brain at once, that's really hard!" (actual quote I am not fucking exaggerating. this school requires four semesters of piano)

You know I like tutoring, and I plan to be a music theory professor one day. But this kind of tutoring, where I feel like I have to explain the basic concepts of music to someone who is basically incapable of understanding the underlying math, is painful. Painful. And I can't even say anything because I'm just a fellow student! Instead I end up going to the music therapy supervisor (who's my bud from my days as a music therapy student) and melting into a puddle of word-vomit "OH GOD THIS IS TERRIBLE WHAT DO I DO". And then she basically implicitly agrees with me that this is a doomed track for this girl and I feel bad and I feel bad for complaining but really seeing someone struggle with theory basically sets off alarm bells that scream "TELL SOMEONE GODDAMIT ALTI DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS" which make me feel bad for not acting on them so it's a catch-22, either I feel bad or I ... feel bad, and no matter what the answer is I still have to keep tutoring, which I can do because I'm really damn patient when it comes to this kind of teaching, but I cannot impart understanding when I have no devices with which to do so. Augmented sixth chords? Hit me up. Modes? I've got three different ways of thinking about them. Voice leading rules? Easy enough to adapt to the learning style! Note durations? ... that's where I hit a wall. Maybe I'll need to work on that in grad school. But I'm pretty good with math and the durations make total sense to me - as they do most of my peers. Then sometimes I just get that one student who you can tell probably struggled immensely with math in school (and hell, in third grade I struggled with fractions which is the ENTIRE CONCEIT of note durations, which I'm fine at now, so it's not just that being lacking) and you have no way to make them understand because notes is math. Notes is always math. Chords is math and intervals is math and everything comes down to numbers and if you don't understand the numerical relations (even my mom who plays piano as a hobby but hasn't touched it in months, when I went to her and said - "But you understand math - if you move from a line to a line you're going up -" "Two notes." "EXACTLY!") then I am sorry but you are in the wrong damn major (I likened it to a friend as "a translator who can only translate present tense") and I have no way to tell you that because I'm just the theory tutor student.

You may be able to infer it from this, but - this has happened before. Two years ago I had a student that I taught at least twice a week for both semesters (until she left the school; the reason why is irrelevant) who didn't understand these basic relationships either (and, by no coincidence, was also a singer). That was painful. I'm not really looking forward to repeating that part of my duties as tutor.

[Bespinben]

*rant about musically incompetent singers*

Fun fact: My own musical genesis lays in the domain of choirs.
(I think Maestro as well...)

We CAN repent of our ill ways!

[Altissimo]

Absolutely you can! My program is 90% vocal majors and they're all doing fine. But sometimes there are just people who are just incapable on a basic level of understanding musical theory, and that's a whole other ball game entirely. That's the one I'm complaining about.

[MaestroUGC]

As a former chorister, I can confirm that trying to collaborate with a singer for anything is like trying to get a gopher to do the Macarena. You can try all you want, but they're still going to do their own thing regardless of what you say or do.

[Ruto]

I'm sure that girl thinks she's Billie Holiday or something, but I think the pop music genre (in general) makes people think they can be successful without actually knowing music theory since they can hire songwriters and sing by ear or autotune -.-

It's not just music. Today someone asked me for help in math! She was a math education major and got some basic arithmetic wrong. Then didn't know what math class she was taking and had told the person at the desk she was taking calculus. And I was going over the super basic 6th GRADE geometry she should have know before taking this class because I knew she was never going to get trigonometry without knowing basic properties first, (such as area and circumference) so I spent the whole hour telling her those instead. I wonder how she's going to survive being an almost math major...

Also this other guy that asked me for help in chemistry and clearly did not read his book before asking me questions because the answer and explanation was right there. He expected me to recap the lecture for him. He wanted help on every single one of his homework problems. I feel like I'm doing his homework but at least I get to say "this is similar to the last problem and since we already went over that, you should do this yourself." Then I gave him a reading list from his own book rather than give him the answer or tell him how to do the problems >_>

The music students at least show they're trying to understand notation and theory.

[mikey]

I hit stuff.  That's the extent of my music.

[SlowPokemon]

I have a crush on a straight boy (not recommended) who plays trombone (definitely not recommended) and it sucks but we played music together tonight and it was just about the greatest thing ever it made me feel so good

Also the way we met was he heard me playing Layton's Theme and came into my practice room asking to record me because he loves Professor Layton

Goddam why is he straight