Re: Music and performance (WAS: Why does mainstream seem more like,downstream these days?)

[Rainer Straschill <moinsound@googlemail.com>]

Louie Angulo schrieb:
> interesting thread people,
> So with all the tools to document music how important do you consider
> being able to read and write it the traditional way nowdays?
>   
Which ways are there to document music? You can remember it, you can 
write it down, or you can record it. I don't see how anything has 
changed, at least not in the last 60 years or so.
However, there's a big difference between recording and writing it down, 
and that is that writing music down is specifying it on a much higher 
abstraction level. Let's take jazz as an example: you usually have a 
lead sheet, and then you give that to your band and play. And the end 
result may be vastly different. Now remembering music is different 
insofar, as by doing so you can take different approaches. For example, 
if you listen to a performance of a specific piece, you can try to 
remember it on the "overall sound" level, or you can try to remember 
what every musician plays, thus making the abstraction to notes and 
dynamic notation etc., or you can even figure out what it looks like as 
a leadsheet and remember that.

> But what i found amazing is that they only offered me to teach only as
> an independent teacher and refuse to give me a contract on grounds
> that im not qualified because of the types of music i teach and lack
> of pedagogic diploma.
>   
Reminds me of that old story about that teacher at the grammar school I 
used to attend: he was employed as a teacher for religion, but was 
active as a composer and had also established a workshop for 
avantgarde/contemporary classical music at the school. Now this guy had 
applied for being employed as a music teacher as well, and after some to 
and fro, got the final decision by the ministry for education and 
culture that this can't be done because he lacked a proper 
qualification. Fortunately for that guy (one Dieter Schnebel), he could 
answer that letter with his resignation from his job because he had just 
been offered a chair for music composition at Hochschule der Künste in 
Berlin. ;)
> Even more amazing is the fact that the teacher who quit before me had
> a diploma and all of his students did not know the differrence between
> major and minor chords and could not even play them after 3 years o
Perhaps that teacher was following some kind of 
left-wing-paedagogics-school diploma where it was strictly forbidden to 
teach anything formal?

          Rainer

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