The Chat Room

[takigan]

  borchnork said:

Why am I no longer a music major?

 

Two words:

 

Aural Skills.

 

Let's just say, we have grad students who come in from other music programs across the nation that struggle through this class. And I'm just a freshman! hahaha. It's sooooooooo hard, and I don't have the time to deal with it.

 

God.....Aural <_ .>

 

That's the class where the teacher plays a stream of eight to ten 4-part block chords on a piano at quarter note = 45 and after finishing gets up from the piano and says, "Ok class, now write down every single note I just played...-1 for every wrong note".....well, it only got that extreme for me a couple of times, but most of the time they'd still make you write down the bass note and the top note of each chord.

Edited November 10, 2008 by takigan

[borchnork]

yah, when we do harmonic dictation, we just hafta get the bass and treble note, but we hafta write down the chord and it's inversion.

 

After that though, we usually hafta part write the alto/tenor line for homework.

[Nancy08]

You have to do the alto and tenor lines for hw? haha not us. I'm not that great at harmonic dictation but i <3 melodic dictation.

[rpd]

uhh, ear stuff is going to kill me in college. I have a damaged ear from ear infections as a child, far from tone deaf, but I notice it is weaker now that im trying to train it. I do amazing in the written part of music theory, but when it comes to dictation, I'm not great at all.

[borchnork]

that's what the classes are for though... to BUILD your ear. Trust me, I'm much better now than I have been in quite a long time. The techniques like "Speed Writing" and "Tonal Indexing" as well as harmonic and melodic dictation get easier the more you do it, but it just wasn't for me.

[Gracelyd33]

you are at UNT though sweetheart. Music was bound to be tough. (:

[chickora]

He is aware of the difficulty. Even the marching band was too much for a nonmajor like me. I just had too many hours, so I dropped out. But I do say, Band would be funner if UNT actually won some games. =sighs=

[M1KH4J157]

LSU VS UNT

27 - 3

 

OHHHHHHHHHH YEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH.

 

>_>

[treblemaker]

  M1KH4J157 said:

LSU VS UNT

27 - 3

 

OHHHHHHHHHH YEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH.

 

>_>

 

You only scored 27 points on UNT and you are bragging?

[whitewing09]

I really wish I could have taken a music composition class in high school :-\

[takigan]

Taking composition classes really doesn't teach you how to compose. And you can't really take a "composition class" without at least some basic knowledge of music theory. You learn how to compose by composing, and learning from your mistakes as you go. You can take Music Theory classes or read books on music theory, which will give you a better understanding as to how music functions which can help you be a better composer, but a lot of the great music out there (Classical or not) was composed by people with little or no formal training at all.

 

That being said, many community colleges with viable music programs offer courses in Music Theory at low costs (a few hundred dollars a semester). Anything is possible if you're committed enough.

[TRtrumpet]

I wanna transfer to UNT after two years at TAMUK in Kingsville.