The rubber met the road this week, it has been very trying. Tons of homework, I mean, I knew there would be a lot of homework with this being not only a Masters program, but also an accelerated one to boot, but holy shit!
The biggest usurper of time and energy is Film Music History. I love the class and the teacher is an old-school Hollywood film-type lady with tons of industry anecdotes. I'm being introduced to movies I never gave a second thought to. My previously 'narrow' view was that movies made before 1975 were just not as good as modern movies. Like it took Hollywood 80 years to figure out how to make something good.
That was the biggest eye-opener for me. In the last three weeks I've seen the original King Kong (Music by Max Steiner), The Adventures of Robin Hood (Music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold) and Sunset Boulevard (Music by Franz Waxman).
I was seriously surprised at how good these films actually are. And the music! These scores are every bit as good as anything John Williams has ever produced! If you haven't seen these films, I can honesty recommend them now. :-)
But the homework! Oi! Each week I have to do the following:
- Read 6-8 articles of 7-20 pages regarding the film and contain 1-5 film clips each
- Watch the film
- Answer 2-3 questions by posting on a chat board, then reply to at least 1 other post (Well thought out answers, not just "Yeah! I agree!")
- Then take a quiz
- Then watch a 'secondary' film without all the other stuff, just watch. It's like a vacation.
It has been an emotional roller coaster to say the least. I go from "Wow! This is the greatest thing I've ever done!" to "There is no way I can do this." to "What ever made me think I was capable of such a thing." to "Meh, this isn't so bad." in the space of a few hours.
I had to reach out for music theory help for the first time in my life this week. I had a tutoring session with my teacher (tutoring is included in the cost of tuition so I can ask for as much as I want) and even to other music friends. I am learning stuff I never did as an undergrad, nor in the graduate-level theory / analysis classes I audited.
This shit is hard, not un-understandable (is that a word?) but after 4 hours of theory on Fridays my head is full, I can't even make basic decisions like what to have for dinner or what time I should go to bed (which is constantly since I am wiped most of the time.)
The theory is getting serious, today in 2 hours we covered Delayed Dominant Tonic Resolution using 3 separate methods: The use of an Interpolated II-7, 2 different Dominant chords that both resolve to the same target chord, and, multiple II-Vs that lead to the same target chord.
The second 1/2 of class was, chord progressions using mechanical voicing in close position, drop 2 voicing, drop 3 voicing, and drop 2+4 voicing. I don't expect any of that to make sense to you, but the comparison is that as an undergrad, those topics (taught at a basic level) took an entire semester. We 'reviewed' them in 4 hours.
So after 3 weeks of a 40 week program, I am all out of theory stuff I know.
I still love it, and learning is not bad, just exhausting. The week before Thanksgiving I will conduct and record my first score with an 20 piece string orchestra. I'm really looking forward to that.
There wasn't a lot of "this happened in class" stuff in this post, but I needed to word salad all this shit out.
Thanks for following along with this madness!
Dave
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