Credit Grok
April 23, 2025–Was telling some youngsters about how my Music Theory final was to score out the melody to Jingle Bells without using an instrument.
I don’t think I did very well. We used our knowledge of intervals to sing it in our heads. I could do it now with my eyes closed, but just didn’t have the theory down at age 19.
Got me thinking about how I ended up in Music Theory class, as I was not a music major. I just wanted to learn it. I had not grown up with classical music in my family or in my culture, but I yearned to know and understand it.
It was not easy in the 1970s. We did not have the easy access to music that we take for granted today–no internet, Apple, iTunes, CDs, not even LimeWire, that invasive app that infected our computers with viruses. Radio stations we could tune in on the farms did not play classical music. None of our rural high schools had orchestras. Our concert bands didn’t even have xylophones.
Back in college, our Music Appreciation final was to write a critique of a piece of classical music. I was petrified. I had not a clue what to write about, lacking any familiarity with the great compositions of the world. I scanned a list of available albums (albums were flat black disks that revolved on a turntable, that you set a metal needle arm onto in order to send vibrations to speakers).
As I often did when stressed, I chose to be funny rather than smart. I decided to write about Prokofiev’s “The Love of 3 Oranges” because the title conjured up an R. Crumb image. Remember, this was the 70s.
First, I had to hear the music. I did not OWN the record. We had to walk to the Music Building library, and check out the vinyl disk, take it to a kiosk and play it on a turntable through headphones. I remember listening to it over and over in the library, because we couldn’t check it out either. We had to write out our thoughts longhand in a notebook, as there was no way to record it or type it out in place.
Then we took home our notes, edited them, and typed them out, on paper, on a portable typewriter. Any changes or edits were done by using a teeny brush to smear tacky white paste from a bottle over the offending words, blowing on it for a minute, then lining it up on the platen (look it up) and typing over with the new word. If this sounds awkward and ineffective, it was. That’s how I learned to write it right the first time.
As a sidebar, believe it or not, before inserting each sheet of paper into the typewriter, we drew a light pencil mark one inch from the bottom of the page. When that mark appeared in our typing line, we knew we had come to the end of the page.
Thank goodness for the Pass/Fail option, because I know I did a terrible job on that paper as well, as I had no experience reading or writing about classical music. I had no backlog of classical tunes to compare it to. And I knew none of the terminology or catch phrases, which reside in every field. For example, when judging cattle, you quickly learn to throw in phrases like “more length from the hooks to the pins” and “would like to clean him up in the brisket” and so on in order to impress the head judge.
Looking back, that ignominious beginning set my foot in the door to learn more about classical music, eventually actually picking up a violin and sawing my way through a musical library I am now slightly more familiar with. I am glad I had the courage to take classes about stuff I didn’t know about.
Which, I guess, is how one learns anything about anything.