Raging Dooner (Beware)
Okay, so here is my rage post. Be afraid.
I am sick of all the shit. I'm sick of getting fucked over because someone stole my idea. I'm sick of having a class about American Roots Music that that only focuses on one very small part of Americas musical roots. And as you can probably guess, this entire post is going to be mostly about those two things (and also to distract from the paper that I need to finish writing).
So stealing my ideas and fucking me over. Yeah, how about that. I announce in class that I was going to do my project on the music theory behind blues music. And it was going to be great and would have been super easy to do because you can find all kinds of information about it everywhere. And it would have been almost a guaranteed good grade. But no, I got my idea fucking ninjad out from under me just a week before I was suppose to present. And for that, I am extremely bitter. I was forced to come up with something new and I had to do it quick. Well, I didn't come up with any good ideas. I couldn't teach people how to play stuff because I didn't have the equipment. And that was the best thing I could come up with. So I was forced to settle with some bull shit lame assed idea about marching bands and needed some lame connection to make it somewhat relevant to the class. That was obviously really, really hard to do, seeing as if you google it, you will find NOTHING. And I was forced to present this nothing. I only hoped that the relevance to the class wouldn't be brought up. Sadly for me, it was. And again, I was fucked. This project thing has done nothing for me other than to teach me that people are general ass holes that will fuck you over at any chance they can. And being myself, I'm usually too nice to say anything about it, but I guess not this time (though I didn't say anything in person). I got fucked over on this project and god damn am I bitter about it.
Second, I'm sick of this "American Roots Music" class not being about all of the American musical roots. Why do we only focus on Blues and Country music out of one small area of the country? There is more to the nation that just Louisiana. What about all the music that came from other areas of the country, like Chicago, New York and the southeast? Or does this music just not relevant to the American musical style? Should we not care about musicals, jazz, classical, and marches? These are all prominent in America as well. It's not just blues and country.
God this week blew ass. I can't wait for it to be over.
posted by Brandon/Dooner (Dune-er) @ 12:32 AM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
Wow - I totally missed this when you posted it - sorry.
First, I'm really sorry that you chose to drop your original idea just because someone else did something similar, and that you didn't come by so we could talk about it in advance. My sense is that you could have definitely still done something on music theory - the other presentation certainly didn't cover all the ground and I think we could have worked something out. (It would have been even better if the two of you could have worked together on a joint presentation, but since you got blind-sided you couldn't have done anything about that.)
Second, I can understand your frustration about the limited scope of the course listenings - I share it. I really wish we had time to work with conjunto, polka, etc., but it's frankly difficult to cover a very broad range in a two credit course with obligations like Jamboree and the library sessions. It's not perfect, but it's what I can make work in the time that we have.
That said, there are several bits of "musicals, jazz, classical, and marches" that I'd be unlikely to cover even if this was a 4 credit course. Students often want to cover jazz, which is clearly a vital American music; I'm unlikely to cover that simply because there are already good courses at UMM that specifically cover jazz (and none that say anything substantive about what we do cover). Musicals, classical, and marches probably don't really fall into the category of roots music as they were mostly made by professional musicians and composers, and performed in large groups; they're not typically "folk" music, which is what we're focussing on. The possible exception would be marches; if you thought of this in terms of jazz second lines then it would fit wonderfully, but if you're thinking Sousa then it's not really folk music.
Which is not to say that these musics are not important, or even related to the course. The Gershwins, for example, have a complex and interesting relationship to jazz and the blues that would definitely be a wonderful thing to explore. Time, again, is the enemy; I have to make choices and these are the choices that I've made.
I'm really sad that we never had a conversation about this and that you bottled it up and got so incredibly frustrated and angry. In the future I would seriously encourage you to meet with your profs early about things like this. We are here to help, and while a prof isn't guaranteed to change the content of the course, it has been known to happen, and even if it doesn't one could hope that a conversation would help both you and them better understand where each of you is coming from.
I have no idea where you are on all this now, but feel free to come by my office if you'd like to talk about it.
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