Ending my Musical Ignorance

In an effort to no longer be useless at my coaching job, I am attempting to learn music. I know, "music" is a very broad term. And the more "music" I learn, the more I realize how much I am still completely ignorant about.

My freshman year at Snow, I had a roommate who was a music major, and another roommate who was a math major, but whose family is extremely talented musically. We would all sit in the living room and do homework together, and the two of them would often work on music theory homework. I vividly remember looking at one of their worksheets and asking, "what's that symbol that looks like a table on wheels?" I was referring to an eighth note. They dissolved into laughter, attempted to help me, and then gave up when I showed no modicum of understanding. I wrote it off, telling myself that I was good at English and that knowledge would be more helpful in the long run, anyway.

But it drove me crazy that I didn't understand what was on that page.  I forgot about my stupidity for a while, but my curiosity was piqued again at band camp.

It started this week when I looked at a score of our band's show. I was writing down the letters of the different musical sections so that when our director tells everyone to "start at letter ___," I could tell my colorguard girls where we were starting in the routine. As I looked through the score, I became more and more curious about what the heck all of these foreign symbols meant.

I asked Brooklyn, my co-coach, to explain, and she very patiently taught me the names of most of the symbols and their meanings. Then Ben, another staff member and an extremely talented musician, entered the room and took over when Brooklyn (very understandably) became bored. We studied the score for about an hour; I learned about crescendoes, rests, measures, the lengths of notes, and the difference between flat, sharp, and natural notes. I left that night feeling both extremely bewildered and satisfied.

The next day Brooklyn taught me how to distinguish between notes and where middle c is located on a piano. I played numerous warm up exercises that are so basic the book they came in was decorated with kitten stickers. And I played them poorly.

Learning music is much harder than I anticipated.

Part of me wonders if this is kind of a lost cause; the people I work with have been studying and playing music for 20-30 years; many of the students in the band have been playing for over a decade. And I'm starting out at square one. But, I'm sick of my eyes glazing over when the rest of the staff talks about music dynamics and attacks, so I will press on in my quest to learn about music.