braintwistedness and NCTMs

You know, I DID use my college degree for about five years before having kiddoes. But now that I'm a stay at home monster, I've had to do the ol' career switch, falling back on something I thought I'd neeever, eeever use.

Referring, of course, to the fact that I teach piano lessons from my home twice a week. My dear friend Di commented to me once, "How do you expect your students to practice when you never practiced yourself?"


An astute question, that.

REGARDLESS of the answer to that, which I am still pondering in various shapes and forms, as evidenced by my weekly parade of non-practicing students.... the fact remains that there are some serious gaps in my musical education, inasmuch as I chose to major in English/science and take a break from music when I was in college.

So--skip forward a decade, and into my life enters Mimi, and lessons with her. First class lesson, she started talking about scale modes like lydian, dorian, aeolian, etc., and I'm saying...."uh...WHAT?!" Clearly, I have some gaps to fill. She just spews knowledge out left and right, and occasionally some of it sinks into my thick head.

So several of the music teachers and I are taking classes with Mimi, specifically for the purpose of becoming Nationally Certified Teachers of Music (NCTM), which is offered through the Music Teachers' National Association. As for me, I don't really care about being "Anne Cognito, NCTM" --it's really more about HOW to teach piano, pianistically. Applied technique. Music history. All those things rolled up together.

Which brings me to last night's choir practice. We were singing Mendelssohn's "Behold a Star" - and at one point, he throws in this funky chord. Some kind of augmented sixth thing, functioning as a V7. So the director and I were bantering back and forth about whether it was a German, Italian, or French 6th. Now that I look at it again, it's a diminished chord; so does that still make it an augmented sixth? This makes my brain hurt.

I can't keep them all straight in my head. I have to see it on a sheet of paper and plunk it on the keyboard. The German sixth SOUNDS just like a V7 chord, but it's spelled as a sixth on the staff, and it resolves up and OUTward, instead of down. The Italian is like the German, except no 3rd degree... I think? And the French is something entirely different altogether, which I'm sure would please the French. I think it involves a tritone. I've been looking at a Wiki article to try to nail it down in my head, but so far, no dice.

ARGH. So all this braintwistedness in my head had better be straightened out if I'm ever going to have those four letters after my name.

Enjoying the journey...