As a marching band groupie, I sit in on plenty of conversations involving music major terms and inside jokes. As someone who’s never seriously studied music beyond the sixth grade, I usually don’t get any of them. Nevertheless, I continue to listen to these conversations, nodding now and again and giving my band friends the Jim-from-The-Office smile and shrugging my shoulders. I’ve long ago given up trying to understand what most of my musical friends talk about.
However, for those of us who are completely lost in terms of music (much like me), the New York Times has, once again, come to our rescue.
Anthony Tommisini, top music critic at The Times, demonstrated the intricacies and methodology of counterpoint on the piano in a nytimes.com video blog. Counterpoint, he says, is basically playing two notes at the same time. Counterpoint happens when two lines of notes are played simultaneously (Ever seen those musical geniuses play something on the piano and both hands are moving faster than Kevin Harvick at a Nascar race? Apparently, that’s what it’s supposed to look like).
As he fits years worth of music education into two minutes of video, I start to feel smarter. Is this what my music major friends feel like all the time?
Do they walk around with this feeling of smugness that they know what counterpoint is and everyone else doesn’t? If so, then I know now what it feels like to be a music major.
And then I kept watching. He started talking about how fun it is when it gets ambiguous, how atonal counterpoint is underrated, how some composers are into great contrapuntal intricacy and complexity. Three-part counterpoint? Is two-part counterpoint not enough? Most people only have two hands!
Despite the simplicity Tommisini was trying to convey throughout the first four minutes of the video, I just thought, “Are the black keys and the white keys supposed to look segregated?” I’m pretty sure if my music buddies had been there, the shame of having me, a tone-deaf news junkie, as their friend, they would have hung their heads in embarrassment.
“Counterpoint is a little intellectual,” Tommisini said. “It’s a little demanding.”
As he started to get into the subtlety of atonal counterpoint (the kind of unmelodic song you would expect to hear during a particularly scary part of an M. Night Shyamalan movie), I gave up my last vestige of motivation of trying to understand the most complicated musical concept that, apparently, my entire Thursday night crowd understands.
So much for being as smart as the music majors. There was almost hope.
As I shook off the disappointment of not fully understanding the six minutes of video that managed to cram in a decade’s worth of musical training, I decided to go back to my usual Jim-shrug-smile and go back into my new junkie ignorance. Maybe ignorance is bliss after all.