Professors can be a little scary. Music professors can be downright frightening. Not to say that Dr. Groesbeck wasn't frightening, but he made up for it by giving us a treasure trove of quotes to remember and blackmail him with. Some of these should be funny to almost anybody, some will only be funny to those who know a lot about music, and some will only be funny to those who were in this particular class with me. Whichever category you fall into, enjoy!
"Look at it through 20th century ears..."
"There's all these quotes littered about in the textbook."
"It's not just an elfking... it's a ghoul or a goblin or something... something out of Friday XIII..."
"Even if you're drunk and falling down at a frat party, you can recognize strophic form... 99 Bottles of Beer is strophic form!"
"She gets kind of pissed at the end... because he kills her" (of the main character in Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique)
"There's no musical theme for opium per se..."
"He writes this symphony about her being a witch and then he proposes to her... courtship must've been different in the 19th century."
"I hope you're just dying back there of... passion or something." (directed toward me and a friend during Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet suite)
"There are many important Italian dishes named after him [Rossini] because he ate so much. He might not have composed after 18[??] because he was so fat."
"[These operas contain] people doing things that are morally wrong but you can't blame them."
"They [operas like Aida] were popular because they were so realistic..."
"She's not quite a corpse yet, so she sings an aria for a minute or so."
"It's kind of like recitative... but it isn't..."
"It's the kind of thing that reduces old ladies to tears..." {O terra addio from Aida)
"Bugs comes out of his hole and he's chewing on a rabbit... no, wait a minute..."
"You almost don't need singers." (of Wagnerian opera)
"They led very boring lives... they'd go home and do whatever they did before there was television..."
"And Isolde dies of ecstasy above him, and it's a happy ending...????"
"Combining music with the tradition of getting plastered... which was so popular in Vienna at the time..."
"It would be as if the concertmaster played a solo cadenza and then picked up an electric guitar and and became Courtney Love for 20 seconds..."
"MY GOD, IT'S ONLY 5 MINUTES LONG!!!" (of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, III)
"Why don't you take a plane... or why don't you leave at halftime? We'll be losing 50-0 anyway..." (to marching band members about the Florida game)
"It's a moot point?? I'll spend the next couple of days wondering what it was...'
"The Cowboys win, the Indians lose, and everybody goes home happy." (about predictable themes in classical music)
"Now if this were normal music..." (referring to Rite of Spring)
"It just sounds like rape..." (referring again to Rite of Spring)
"It's the sort of music that makes people tear their hair out." (about loud, dissonant modern music)
"The cowbell is one of the dominant instrument in the ensemble... the only time when people had used cowbells before was tying them around the necks of cows... so Weburn must have gone up a hill and stolen them and brought them back down to the orchestra..."
"I don't know if you're afraid of people breaking into your house... no, you're in a dorm room... anyone could break into your dorm room... and now you'll have a sense of dread all week long."
"I'm sure dogs heard it that way too." (chords and dissonance)
"Somebody in this class could be the next Beethoven... Trey, are you the next Beethoven?" (I'm flattered, of course... :c) )
"Anybody who was anybody died around that time period." (around 1945)
"It's incredibly rational, but it sounds like crap." (about serial music)
"I didn't think that Schumann was a pitch-oriented atonal composer..."
"What we're going to do now is go back to the beginning of time and work up to 1600."
"Plato was trying to get away from... the Dionysian orgies..."
"The Locrian [mode] is something invented by... weirdos, I think..."
"I guess if you guys feel strongly about it, I can bring in some cookies next week..."
"It wasn't like there was this sign outside the monastery saying 'Monks singing at 3pm, tickets $25, $12 under 12, students with valid ID free..."
"If there's a God, you'll be getting your papers back on Monday."
(and on Monday...) "There isn't a God."
"For a party, they'd break out the fixed organum."
"Organa are like having a 10 layer cake, instead of just a pound cake or something..."
"That's a good guess... actually, it's wrong, but..."
"[Another part of the mass] was the Ite, missa est, which means 'Go, get out of here...'"
"'Oh the Virgin Mary is a great person, I enjoy worshipping her' and so forth..." (about special masses for texts about Mary)
"'Oh I worship Mary who lives in the next village, but I have never been able to... do whatever with...'" (about the secular texts often set to sacred music)
"Imagine if you had been listening to monophonic music for about 800 years and then someone came up with polyphony and just blew you away..."
"There's something particularly in the area of rhythm that will just knock your socks off!"
"I don't think people listened to this and thought, 'this will cause people to lose their virginity'..." (about organa with syncopated rhythms)
"Some of you might have felt your butts were kicked by the test because your butts were ripe for kicking anyway..."
"To give those of you who can honestly state from the bottom of your bosom... your spleen, yeah... that you knew the Bartok..."
"Reading these theory treatises is like reading a Monty Pytyhon skit!"
"You can't just be some idiot monk off the street!!"
"There's a poem in the 14th century that portrayed the Pope as... a jackass or something..."
"Sean, I don't always get your sense of humor. It's so deadpan... sometimes I have to wait for two or three hours to get it..."
"I'll give you a hint... the name is also someone on The Simpsons..." (Flanders)
"All these things were learned orally and manuscripts were like... cheat sheets." (Renaissance music)
"I do'n't think anyone in the 15th century said to themselves... 'I'm going to use the rhythm John Coltrane will be using in the 20th century'..."
"'You take away the sins of the world'... God already knows that, so it's in homophony.
"I'll explain this [some soprano part he tried to sing] after a few beers at the end of the day."
"There's another one of those questions I could take three hours answering..."
"They would farm all day and then instead of having bingo games all night, they would play in a gamelan ensemble."
"It's hard to hear because it's played abut 500 times that fast."
"Genre... genregenregenregenre!!"
"I always try to maintain my cultural relativism when lecturing on Kenny G, but it's... very... difficult..." (while motioning as if strangling someone)"
There aren't any jazz accordionists, actually..."
"Jazz was assosciated with whorehouses!"
"This was kind of the 1890's equivalent of 'Smashing Pumpkins'..." (Tin Pan Alley)
"I don't think I'll ask specifically about marijuana on the final..."
"You like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Raincoat????"
"People would often listen to this after they'd had 11 or 12 beers..."
"Did I really say all of this??" (on seeing this list for the first time)