social.noyu.me

reflecting on how i'm blessed to already have some (limited) familiarity with music notation, because it was compulsory to learn a bit of it in school. that little bit of literacy helps a lot now that i'm trying to properly get into music like a decade and a half later.

it's a lot easier to go from some literacy to a deeper literacy than it is to go from none to some. this applies to many subjects i think

@hikari this is probably expected of us at this point, but... disagree

our experience with compulsory music in school was introductory guitar, because it seemed like the easiest choice for "someone who had already experienced the 'good azn' extracurricular classical piano training (where we _actually_ learned notation) to just satisfy University of California admissions performing arts requirements with minimal effort"

@hikari it turned out that around half of the students had exactly the same idea, and the remainder of the class was filled with disruptive idiots who wanted to be rock stars. there was only a single music teacher in the whole school, and so he dealt with the lesson just enough that he could get back to teaching the marching band that he actually wanted to be doing.

@hikari actual content was completely unremarkable, although it took us until very recently (i.e. well after we accidentally became a raver) to realize, "oh, the whole reason why the disruptive rock stars kept trying to learn chord progressions is because they're crucial to the type of pop music that they were listening to but that we ourselves had basically never heard"

@hikari i.e. a complete failure to present the larger cultural context in which music exists in (although this might be yet another instance of us being wildly ND?)

@hikari ime this failure is *massive*. we basically found all of (western) music theory to be a jumble of strange rules that didn't make sense _until_ we stumbled into stuff explaining alternative tuning systems, just intonation, and the history and development of equal temperament

@hikari it also took exposure to a lot of raving (*wink*) and later experimenting with music for us to finally realize "oh, we fundamentally don't seem to hear harmony the way other people seem to"