Music: Damn Kids And Their Music

Get home from work Thursday and check the mail, and to my surprise... my music appreciation book and cd's FINALLY came in the mail! Still unsure if my class is cancelled, though. Jump on my school email, and sure enough, it's on. Hooray!

Head up to campus #3 and walk into class, got there RIGHT at 6pm, and was a little surprised to only see three other students in my classroom. The three idiots behind me didn't show up, only their buddy on the back row. I'm going to sound like a total old man here, but how do you expect to pass your class if you don't show up? Seriously.

So, class starts. We start talking about music, which, I suppose is to be expected in this class. He explains things like tempo, rhythm, tone, etc. He goes on to talk about how scales work and things like that. I knew these things having been in band and playing music for years as a kid. He started to talk about syncopation (which, if you don't know, is what happens when you don't play a note on a downbeat, so if it's not on 1,2,3 or 4 but in between, it's syncopated. Got it? Good.) and he asks if anyone can think of an instance in a song of syncopation. He looks at me and says, "What about you, you play drums, can you think of anything, maybe from your personal library of music?"

"Well, pretty much anything by Rush would have something. You could play anything that Neil Peart does with the Buddy Rich Orchestra as well." I had him look up one of the Buddy Rich tribute concerts with Neil and he showed a clip from you tube of them playing "Cotton Tail" (Check it out, it's great.)

So he points out a few things and we listen for a minute or two. He then asks the class if anyone knows who Neil Peart is. Silence.

He asks if any of them know who Rush is. Once again, silence. This is one of those instances where I'm not really surprised, but I'm disappointed. Mr. Music, being the guy that he is, felt it necessary to educate the class on who Rush is, and I'm glad he did. He pulled up the video for "Tom Sawyer" and let it play through. Nobody knew who they were.

I'll bet if he played a Travis Barker video they would know who he was. Damn kids and their music...

We started to get into the music that we are going to be listening to in class and he played a Gregorian chant that just made me feel like I was at church. He explained some of the history behind it and we took some more notes. Not too much else to class that night. We have a little bit of homework on what we went over in class, but it's nothing I can't knock out pretty easily. Pretty good end to another week of school. Looking forward to the rest of this class.