i think none of my kids inherited the musical side of me. i've always wanted to have a piano in my own home (organ != piano), to be able get my kids to learn how to play (and discover the beauty of music), but you know how it is - time went by, excuses of nanti lah and later lah came next, then covid happened and by then a piano wasn't a priority anymore.
don't get me wrong, i stopped classes when i was in Grade 6, but i wasn't a Beethoven prodigy either. i hated practicing my piano pieces, i got frustrated when the music piece had too many sharps and flats involved, i hated creating my own melodies (it was a theory requirement); most of the time i'd randomly doodle notes onto the score sheet without even bothering to find out if the notes made sense bahahahhahaha. so long as the number of notes per bar corresponded with the meter, aite?
aunty Musalma would be smacking her forehead right about now should she read what i just wrote. oops.
but i still enjoyed playing, assuming the music notes were in front of me (i wish i had Gesty's talent!). and that's why i joined gamelan during my uni years - they didn't have the orchestra back then, so gamelan was the next best thing. my friends used to be amazed at how i was able to play the music without the notes. every note on the instruments were numbered; you just needed to remember which ones to hit. lol
5 - 5 - 2 - 3 - 2 - 3 - 5 (inside joke bersama mama Ju)
anywayyy, my daughter came home with very atrocious marks for her Music paper recently. i was totally horrified when she texted her marks to me. and when i got to hold the paper in my hands, my eyes almost popped out of their sockets; i actually wanted to laugh just looking at the subjective part of her paper - she totally bombed on the scales and triads. since when was music complicated like History?! however, i didn't learn music in malay, mind you (i was on the ABRSM curriculum), so her paper was practically foreign language to me. the whole paper was in Malay! and it seemed that my daughter does not have the gift of 'ting tiong tiang', haha (i used to know people who hentam the answers to their objective papers yet still managed to get a decent score). i can go on and on on how appalled/mystified/baffled/confounded i am at the results of her music paper... but oh well, pasrah je lah.
that's it. i'm going to enroll one of my kids in music class after thisssss.
for reference (because my brain has gone all rustic on music theory), here are some of the notes i have managed to scrape together with regards to the questions in her exam paper.
Piano Scales that need to be remembered:
- C Major
- F Major: B♭
- D Minor: B♭
- G Major: F#
- A Minor: G#
- E Minor: F#
- D Major: F#, C#
Relative Minor: take the 6th note from the scale, e.g
- relative minor for C Major: A Minor
- relative minor for G Major: E Minor
Relative Major: take the 3rd note from the scale, e.g
- relative major for A Minor: C Major
- relative major for E Minor: G Major
Scale Degree Notes (To See More Sheep Don't Say Lunch)
- 1 - tonic
- 2 - supertonic
- 3 - mediant
- 4 - subdominant
- 5 - dominant
- 6 - submediant
- 7 - leading note
Formula of the Major scale: T T S T T T S
- T - tone
- S - semitone
i could go on about the harmonic and melodic minor scale (which i'm still confused about), but then i'd be crying blood tears at how much i just realized i've forgotten the theory of music. it's been a while since i've rambled on random subjects, and this is one of those posts. so if you managed to read my post until this line, i apologize because think i kinda wasted your time reading all this crap i wrote, haha.
did you know i wanted to learn the violin? i did. i almost purchased a violin back when i was in uni, but i didn't; i don't really remember why. i'm now worried my kids will end up tone deaf like the husband, haha.
