So ,I’m a music teacher and every year we have what are called “walk through observations”. Basically, this means that 4 times a year the principal or vice principal comes into my class to assess my teaching. Fine. Sure. No problem.
Well, today I was doing an activity with my 1st graders called “Musical Groceries”. Basically, they make up a fake shopping list and then together we figure out what the rhythm of the words on the list is. To do that, a small group of students plays the beat on the conga drum while the rest of the students move around the room while chanting the word. It sounds weird but it’s a great way for the kids to figure out the relationship between syllables and rhythm.
They quickly get bored of walking the rhythm so I let them come up with their own ways of moving around the room.( skipping, hopping, etc) One student suggested they hop around the room like frogs, way down low to the ground. Okay fine.
Or it was fine until my vice principal walked in to do my observation only to find 20 seven year olds hopping around the room like a hoard of little hob-goblins, rhythmically chanting “BREAD! BREAD! BREAD!” while five other kids played ominous beats in a drum circle.
I have never seen anyone look so confused in my life and I really don’t want to know the rating I got on my observation.
I love this….those kids are geniuses…and do they actually know how to play/tongue/bow the instrument they were playing in that video? Not doubting them or anything it just looked like they swapped instruments….
Ok, as the person in the blue shirt on the left, I can explain what is going on here.
On the far left, you see a clarinetist playing a broken cello. She does not know how to play the cello. (Nor does that cello have any intention of being played.)
My friend and I are collectively playing a frankenstein of an instrument that I like to call the “Eb bassooninet.” It’s an Eb clarinet with a bassoon bocal attached. It sounds like a dying duck.
The bassoonist in the middle is the only one playing a normal instrument normally.
Second from the right, you see a clarinetist playing half a clarinet.
Finally, on the far right you see a clarinetist playing a Bb clarinet that is pulled out so far at every joint that it approximates an A clarinet.
The best part about this video is that everyone is actually a really accomplished musician, not that you’d guess it xD
au contraire, this is the kind of thing ONLY accomplished musicians are fucking weird enough to come up with
Musical prodigy Alma Deutscher aged 11 (seen here with younger sister Helen), is staging her first full-length opera, Cinderella.
Composer, pianist, violinist… Alma learned to read music before she could read words. She began playing the piano aged two and at four years old she was composing her own music.
Fun Story: My director kept telling me and my tenor sax buddy to play softer. No matter what we did, it wasn’t soft enough for him. So getting frustrated, I told my buddy “Dont play this time. Just fake it”
Our Band Director then informed us we sounded perfect.
To my readers: “p” means quiet, “pp” means really quiet. I’ve never seen “pppp” before haha.
On the contrast, “f” means loud, and “ffff” probably means so loud you go unconscious.
I had ffff in a piece once and my conductor told me to play as loudly as physically possible without falling off my chair…
Me and my trombone buddies had “ffff” and he sat next to me and played so hard that he fell out of his chair.
The lengths we go for music.
Okay yeah so I play the bass clarinet and the amount of air you have to move and the stiffness of the reed means it only has two settings and that is loud and louder, with an optional LOUDEST that includes a 50% probability of HORRIBLE CROAKING NOISE which is the bass equivalent of the ubiquitous clarinet shriek.
One day, when I was in concert band in high school, we got a new piece handed out for the first time, and there was a strange little commotion back in the tuba section — whispering, and pointing at something in the music, and swatting at each other’s hands all shhh don’t call attention to it. And although they did attract the attention of basically everyone else in the band, they managed to avoid being noticed by the band director, who gave us a few minutes to look over our parts and then said, “All right, let’s run through it up to section A.”
And here we are, cheerfully playing along, sounding reasonably competent — but everyone, when they have the attention to spare, is keeping an eye on the tuba players. They don’t come in for the first eight measures or so, and then when they do come in, what we see is:
[stifled giggling]
[reeeeeeally deep breath]
[COLOSSAL FOGHORN NOISE]
The entire band stops dead, in the cacophonous kind of way that a band stops when it hasn’t actually been cued to stop. The band director doesn’t even say anything, just looks straight back at the tubas and makes a helpless sort of why gesture.
In unison, the tuba players defend themselves: “THERE WERE FOUR F’S.”
FFFF is not really a rational dynamic marking for any instrument, but for the love of all that is holy why would you put it in a tuba part.
This is the best band post
Everyone else go home
Oh man, so I play trombone, and we got this piece called Florentiner Marsch by Julius Fucik, and we saw this
which is 8 fortes. We were shocked until,
that is 24 fortes who the fuck does that
Who does that?
This guy. Take a good look – that is the moustache of a man with nothing to lose.
Julius IdontgivaFucik
More like Julius Fuckit
Pyrozod’s tags for this were too hilarious not to share
I haven’t been in band for years but this made me laugh so hard
I haven’t seen this post in ages and I’m dying of laughter
I didn’t think it could get better after The Foghorn Tuba Story, but it did. It got better. Bless you, MusicTumblr.
as far as I can translate it, the German notes at the octuple forte mean something roughly like “You want the instrument to cough… this is not for wimps”
this man was a menace
Yeah I need to join another brass band
Getting Tuba feels.
When I was in high school I played the flute and piccolo. One day the director hands out a new song to us, and I was the ONLY piccolo player. For those not familiar with this particular instrument: google it. It sounds like a banshee but worse. I wore EARPLUGS because of this.
The sheet I was given at 10 Fs. TEN!!! I must have had a strange look on my face because a flute player asked if I’m okay. So I pointed at the section with the Fs. She proceeded to tear a tissue apart and stuff the pieces in her ears, all the while with this shit eating grin on her face.
When we get to this particular part of the song I decide to just go with it. The composer must have been evil or deaf, maybe both, but the sound that came out of my piccolo isn’t something meant for humans to hear. It made EVERYONE in the room stop playing, a few dropping of them looking like they’re in pain (which they likely were). The director asks me “what the hell was that?” So I handed him the sheet and pointed out there are several sections with this absurd requirement.
The flute player who had stuffed the tissues in her ears was laughing really hard.
wupacing 