Big Kids Say the Darnedest Things

In one of my college jazz combo rehearsals yesterday, we were tuning the horns, and one of them, a retiree in his 70s, was just a little sharp, so I told him to pull out his mouthpiece just a "micro-hair." He reached back to his nearly bald head and plucked something out, saying "Here you go--a micro-hair!"

Blogiversary

Just a quick note to mark my ninth anniversary of blogging. While I certainly haven't gotten things completely figured out with regard to proper maintenance of this blog in the era of Facebook and Twitter, it's still in my long-term plans to keep this thing alive and viable. If nothing else, it will continue to be a collection of "Facebook's Greatest Hits" (the Kids Say the Darnedest Things and Playing This Week in the Kevmobile series), as well as longer-form things that don't fit as well on the social networks, such as essays, CD and concert reviews, and so on.

For those of you who visit here regularly (or even irregularly), thanks for stopping by; I'll try to always make it worth your while.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things About Bad Penmanship (Mine in Particular)

As I entered a student's check in the ledger and endorsed it, he took note of my, umm, "unique" signature...

KID: (laughs)
ME: Like my signature, do you?
KID: It's like a jazz signature.
ME: Oh yeah?
KID: Yeah. If jazz had a signature, it would be that.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things When They Mis-hear Instructions

A band director related this tale from yesterday:

DIRECTOR: If you're working the fundraiser this weekend, you'll need to wear a white, collared shirt.
KID: Huh? A white-colored shirt?

Kids Spell Things in the Darnedest Ways

Some middle schoolers were asked to mark their music with the names of the instruments that were playing the same parts that they were. On one kid's page, he was playing alongside the "cleranets'" for a while; he was later joined by the "fluts" and the "obous."

Kids Say the Darnedest Things About Less Familiar Musical Terms

Today, a student and I were playing a duet with appoggiaturas in it...

ME: Oops--what happened there; did you just lose count for a second?
KID: Nah, I was just confused by the Impostor Zero.
ME: You mean appoggiatura? Impostor Zero sounds like an anti-hero in a comic book.
KID: You know what I meant. This is going on Facebook, isn't it?
ME: You know it.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things About Food, Part 2

Somehow, the subject of restaurants came up this morning...

KID: I want to go try that new place that's coming to Rockwall--Four Man, I think it's called?
ME: You mean Five Guys?
KID: Yeah, I knew it was some sort of male thing.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things About the Obvious, Part 2

Kids say the darnedest things about the obvious, even if it isn't actually obvious to them.
KID (headed toward our lesson): Hang on a minute; I have to go get my neckstrap.
ME: Umm, dude...you're already wearing it.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things, and Sometimes They End Up Being True

ME: Now, this piece is marked Andante. Do you know what that means?
KID: Yeah, it's someone's name.
ME: Someone's name? As in, "Hey, how are you? I'm Andante Jones."?
KID: There's a kid in my class named Andante.
ME: Really now...
KID: He's from Romania.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things About All KInds of Stuff

My future stand-up comedian was in rare form yesterday...

ME (looking over comment sheet from solo and ensemble): Ahh, I see a few things we've talked about in lessons before.
KID: Don't judge me!
ME: Nah, that's Mr. (name of judge)'s job.
KID: You may have won the war, but you lost the battle!
ME: Wait...that works out in my favor.
KID: Oh yeah? Just wait--I'm gonna send you to Cuba while Castro is still alive, and it's a dictatorship, and we'll see how you survive without any peanut butter!

Kids Say the Darnedest Things About Distractions

This one tried to put a repeat sign at the end of the first line of a two-line exercise...

ME: Wait--why did you try to repeat that part?
KID: I dunno. I guess I was distracted.
ME: What was distracting you?
KID: The pencil.
ME (looking at my pencil on the stand): The pencil? So if I move this pencil, all your problems will be solved?
KID: Maybe.

Coaches Say the Darnedest Things

Texas Tech football coach Tommy Tuberville, in this morning's paper: "We are going to have the opportunity to host probably three top-10 teams at Jones AT&T Stadium, and I don't think any other school in the country can say that."

Well, yeah, Coach...no other school will likely be hosting any games at your stadium...

A Simple Solution to Copyright Issues in Music Education

Today was Solo and Ensemble Contest for my high school students, and, as I noted on Facebook, I had to "rescue" quite a number of people who forgot the original copy of their solos or the score to their ensembles. (A bit of background to anyone who was never a school musician: The performer has to furnish a clean, original copy of the solo or the score to the ensemble, with no markings other than the measures numbered [or as many kids accidentally say, "the numbers measured"], and disqualification will result from not doing so. I tend to carry my entire selection of originals in my trunk on contest day in order to solve last-minute crises as described above.)

Among the comments to that post were several from my former boss from my days of moonlighting in the retail print music industry, and, as one might expect, he advocates for following the law to the letter--i.e. that the student should be using an original edition of the solo from Day One (what usually happens in practice is that the student practices off a photocopy until the order for the original comes in, and plays off that copy if he/she does not perform the solo from memory). He also correctly states that the one student who simply never ordered an original needs to do so before proceeding to the next level of competition, which is not until Memorial Day weekend. And then he asked me why a photocopy should ever be used in the first place. A band parent also commented on the thread, noting that the issue should first be taken up with the band directors.

This spawned a fairly long discussion from me, which is reproduced in its entirety here:

1) First of all, while I agree that it would be ideal if everyone had the original of the solo right away, I'm not sure that this is a realistic situation in light of the way that the contests are scheduled. In my region, All-Region is always the first weekend in December, and Solo & Ensemble is always the first weekend in February. Many of my students are so busy with All-Region that they don't even pick their solos until the week afterwards, and the possible lag time on an order (as well as Christmas break closings by most publishers) might leave the student with only a month to practice the solo if they had to wait until it was ordered.

2) Beyond that, I'm not sure that the "only using the original, never a photocopy" scenario is realistic unless every student performs the solo from memory, which simply is not the case with many younger, less-advanced students. Besides that, the original has to stay "clean" for the judge with no markings other than having the measures numbered. To perfectly realize [my former boss's] scenario would require buying TWO originals, and that's simply not something that parents are going to get on board with anytime soon. (To cite an extreme example on my instrument, the alto sax solo Tableaux de Provence comes in at an eye-popping $44 this year.)

Again, others are welcome to disagree, but to me, owning the original and making a "practice copy" is no different than owning a CD and ripping it on your computer to put on your iPod. Even the RIAA, for all its greediness, doesn't expect someone to buy a distinct mp3 copy of a CD he/she already owns just to listen to it on another device.

[The band parent who commented] is of course correct that the band directors likely bend farther from the letter of the law than we private teachers do, but I see both sides of this issue. One can't realistically expect directors to pass out originals to 16-year-olds until said 16-year-olds suddenly become 100% responsible caretakers of same. (I'll pause a moment while every parent reading this thread collapses in a fit of laughter.) The odds of a student leaving music at home or at school on the morning of UIL [the big concert and sight-reading contest here in Texas] are too great, and that would punish an entire ensemble, not just the irresponsible student.

But check this out: I'm not just writing about problems without offering a solution--one that would make both the students/parents/directors AND the music publishers/retail outlets happy if done properly.

The big problem at hand is that the publishing industry--like most content providers--is operating under an outdated and severely flawed business model, mostly by limiting itself to preexisting physical copies of the published material. With virtually everything able to be saved as a PDF, the entire process could be streamlined in this manner:

1) Retail music stores could serve as the gatekeepers for the publishers' "print on demand" capabilities. (We would assume that not all publishers would be interested in dealing with retail customers on a regular basis, so the music stores would not lose this element of their business.) This means that the 16-year-old COULD lose a part on the morning of UIL without tanking the entire band's performance, because the director would have a license to purchase a replacement part right then and there, printable on his/her own computer.

2) Make everything available as an individual part--in other words, if the publishers don't want students making practice copies of their solos (even though I still think this is OK under the "put a copy on your iPod" scenario I described earlier), then include two copies of the solo in the set to begin with. The price might be a tad higher in this case, but not nearly as much as it would be if the student had to buy two distinct originals of the solo (which also means buying two piano parts, which is completely unnecessary).

3) The ability of publishers to archive their entire catalogs on PDFs would also mean that there would be no reason for a piece of music to ever go "permanently out of print." {Former boss], you may correct me if I'm wrong, but the whole reason that happens in the first place is that a piece doesn't sell enough to justify keeping physical copies in the inventory, but if it's reduced to a small file on a hard drive, this scenario is rendered moot; those items that don't sell well can be printed on demand only, which will increase the sales of that item in the long run (even if it's only 5 or 10 a year, that's 5 or 10 more than the zero copies that would be sold if the item went POP).

(This last one is a soapbox issue for me right now, as one of my students didn't get to play his solo this year because it went POP sometime between last summer, when the PML [the prescribed music list for competitions in Texas] was revised, and now.)

And as if on cue, someone else on Facebook who wasn't involved in the discussion posted this article, which, although it deals with the movie industry, also touches on the flawed distribution model of only providing physical copies of media on the content providers' terms, the consumers' needs notwithstanding.

I'd love to hear other opinions on this outside the scope of my Facebook friends, so feel free to chime in with your comments.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things About Celebrities

I use the first two notes of the National Anthem as an example of the dotted eighth/sixteenth note rhythm, and we got on a tangent about how some amateur renditions of the Anthem are less than successful...

ME: Yeah, some of them are kinda bad.
KID: Well, not everyone can be the next Julia Roberts.
ME: Can she even sing?
KID: Wait--that's a real person? I thought I just made that up!

(I quickly went to Wikipedia to produce a picture of Ms. Roberts, and the kid said she looked somewhat familiar.)

The same kid had one more take on national anthems. I mentioned that ours was particularly difficult to sing, compared to, say, Canada's...

KID (sings): O Canada...I hate your bacon!
ME: (laughs) You don't like Canadian bacon?
KID: It's...just...ham. Why do they call it bacon when it's just ham?

If this kid goes into stand-up comedy later in life, this blog might get a lot more readers...

Fans of the Esbjörn Svensson Trio, Rejoice!

It turns out that, before Svensson's untimely passing in '08, the group had one more album's worth of music in the can...and it's about to be released:

Nearly four years after their demise following the tragic death of pianist and composer Esbjörn Svensson in a diving accident in June 2008 a new EST studio album, 301, is set for release on 30 March on the ACT label.

[...][T]heir appetite to continually evolve and experiment saw the trio’s final album, Leucocyte, recorded in 301 Studios, Sydney Australia just prior to Svensson’s death, become their most radical departure yet. In addition to the released album nine hours of music were tracked at the Leucocyte sessions and it was Esbjörn’s initial plan to edit it down to a double album, or release two consecutive albums. In the circumstances following his death it was decided to release it just the single album.

In November 2011 after both recording solo albums and touring, bassist Dan Berglund and drummer Magnus Östrom decided to revisit the sessions and together with their sound and recording engineer Åke Linton, whose electronics played a key part in these recordings, decided to edit the remaining material.

This is great news. I can't wait!

Kids Say the Darnedest Things About Dead Composers

This one was playing a Bach minuet and adding some, umm, artistic license...

ME: You keep trying to put an F# in there.
KID: I know. I like that F#!
ME: Yeah, but Bach didn't, or he would've put one there. And he may be dead, but you don't want a German ghost haunting you.
KID: Good thing I'm German...
ME: But you still wouldn't want a ghost with a powdered wig coming in your room...
KID: Yeah, I know, 'cause I just washed my bed!

Kids Say the Darnedest Things About Footwear

Today, I was wearing my TOMS shoes to school, and a kid noticed:

KID: I've always wanted a pair of those. How do they feel?
ME: They're amazing.
KID: Like a potato?

Wait..Haven't We Heard This Story Before?

A story of note from the business world last week involved a global beverage company buying out a smaller competitor in order to avoid name brand confusion, even though many people believed the smaller company's product to be superior to that of the giant one. And while you may say, "Wait--we've talked about this already," hang on; I'm not talking about Dr Pepper at the moment, but Budweiser:

Anheuser-Bush InBev NV (ABI.BT), the world's biggest brewer, has acquired the rights to some Budweiser brand trademarks in Europe by striking a deal with a small Czech brewer, marking a small step forward in a long-running legal battle for global use of the Budweiser brand.

While I never sampled the smaller Budweiser that was bought out last week, my parents brought me some Budvar Budweiser--the last remaining barrier to Anheuser-Busch's exclusive ownership of the name--from a trip to the Czech Republic, and it's a far better beer than the one from St. Louis could ever dream of being.

I sure would like to see David beat Goliath in the corporate world again sometime...

The End of a Legend...and for No Good Reason

I can't tell you how upset I was to read this a few moments ago. From the Facebook group called "Support Dublin Dr Pepper" comes this horrible news:

As some of you may have noticed I had pulled this page for the past few weeks. I was asked to do so by the people at The Dublin Dr Pepper bottling company, as they were in negotiations with Dr Pepper/Snapple Corp/Cadbury. In lieu of the outcome of the court case I feel that it is time to open the page back up.

It is with a very heavy heart that I must tell you the results of the case. A true Texas tradition has died. As of five o'clock central time The Dublin Dr Pepper Bottling Co and Dublin Dr Pepper are no more. Dr Pepper/Snapple/Cadbury Companies won their case against our small bottler and have closed the plant in Dublin. They have graciously allowed the new museum and soda shop to remain open, but they will only be able to serve regular Dr Pepper sweetened with sugar; not the original recipe we all love.

I know that all of you will be affected by this outcome, but I can't even imagine the devastating affect it will have on my small town. I vow to NEVER buy a product made by any of these companies and pray that you will let them know exactly how you feel. As always, there is contact information on the Info page. Please pray for all of the newly unemployed Dublin bottler employees, and for Dublin, Texas.

Thank you for all of your support!

Corporate greed at its finest, ladies and gentlemen. I'll savor my last few sixers of Dublins that I bought the last time I was in Stephenville last month, but after that, I guess my weekly DP at Chick-fil-A will change over to something else; I'm not supporting this corporation in any way, shape or form.

UPDATE: More information can be found here; this article makes it appear that they settled, and Dublin probably caved a bit to avoid having the full corporate legal hammer fall on them. It still sucks, no matter how you slice it.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things About Holidays (the sequel)

Back in October, a Monday kid was lamenting the fact that the next Monday holiday wasn't until MLK Day next week. This week, he was confronted with the fact that the holiday is almost upon us...

ME: I'll see you in two weeks. That holiday you've been longing for is next week.
KID: Next week is spring break???