Employment in America

What's the scrow, bro?  Nada.  Word up, Homey.  Hammond smorgan.  I have been working on my organ, so to speak.  Recently I asked a thirteen year old girl if she would like to try her hand at our organ, a Hammond A-100.  Not really, but I try to be careful about the innuendo.  "Would you like to try your hand on our organ?"  Currently I am not teaching.  I have not taught since I was enrolled in the doctoral program at Ohio State.  I taught a few private jazz piano lessons.  One was to a MOP, a miscellaneous oriental penis, I mean pianist.  They were plentiful in the OSU School of Music.  Because they can read fly shit on a newspaper, I wasn't very effective for her.  She just wanted to read jazz transcriptions, or else I should have told her to buy an Oscar Peterson book and read away.  Jazz piano is a much more involved process.  I stopped thinking about jazz music when I was in the program.  To complete the D.M.A. in composition I had to adhere to their curriculum guidelines.  That meant focusing on contemporary classical music, concert, or symphonic music from the 20th century.  All of these titles are misleading.  WCPE calls themself "The Classical Station," but they are not really that.  While they do play music from the Medieval, Baroque, Renaissance, Classic, and Romantic periods, none of that except Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart correctly are thought of as classical.  The Classical Period, or more specifically the "High Classic Period" is thought of as 1780-1790.  This is what I learned from Lois Rosow in my History of Classical music at OSU.  The first time I took this course at UNC-Chapel Hill, I made a D.  This was the only D ever I made in my entire tenure at Chapel Hill.  Dr. Harold Andrews was the professor, and his class was dry.  Not only that he was not an effective lecturer.  The exam I took in his class was the only exam I ever took which had nothing to do with what he said in class.  Nothing.  Nothing he said to us during his lectures was on his written exam.  All of the material was foreign to me when I read his test questions.  I suppose it came from his assigned reading, but why did I even spend time in his class?  Instinctively I knew this, and hence I hated sitting there.  Not only was it boring, it was a waste of my time.  One evening when I was walking through the foyer in Hill Hall, I spied the light on in this very classroom.  Then I heard the faint whisper of opera music coming from behind that closed door.  I had forgotten we had an extra listening session for his class that night.  I pondered walking in late, and then I decided to blow it off.  It was horrible, that opera stuff.  Today I have learned that opera is a visual affair.  The music truly is high art, perhaps the highest form of music because it is coupled with drama and the human singing voice.  Writing for chorus, soloists, and orchestra indeed is a lofty accomplishment.  It is worthy of study, but fully to understand the intent of opera one must SEE it.  What is happening on stage, the sets, the lighting, and seeing people sing is important in the opera genre.  Simply to hear the music is not enough.  It is and should be an encompassing experience, one which draws you in with human emotion and anoints you with passion.  This was not happening in that classroom.  What was happening was students were sitting stationary in hard wooden seats watching a bumbling man blather on about something which was nondescript.  Never in his class was the intent of classical music expressed.  It was the pedagogy of the Ivory Tower, an "I know more than you about something that is very important" kind of deal.  This precept in the music department at Chapel Hill was not helpful.  Students are no less than professors.  They just know less.  The reason why they are enrolled, paying tuition, and supporting the personal habits of tenured professors is to learn more, so that one day they may be able to do the same thing, teach music.  Possibly at the undergraduate level this philosophy is not evident.  Students are just trying to make it through.  If a professor did instill the worth of the music, its meaning and expression, perhaps the students would become more interested.  That was not the case in Dr. Andrew's class.  Instead, like Judge Rick Pfieffer in environmental court, he dissuaded me from being interested.  Pfieffer changed me from being penitent to being angry, because he enacted a sentence that was not related to my crime.  It was hypothetical and motivated only by his desire to try to seem like a powerful judge and to collect revenue for the city.  There was no correlation between what I had done and his fine.  It was arbitrary.  Already I had remedied my mistake, and I brought him evidence of my contrition.  He was not interested.  I was ahead of his game.  I was on top of the bell curve.  I already had put myself through the criminal justice system.  I realized my wrong-doing, amended my foible, and asked for forgiveness. None was given.  Instead he enacted retribution that far missed the mark.  He conspired with the prosecutor before I appeared with no knowledge of my situation.  I was not given a fair trial.  I assume this is commonplace.  Especially it is in the American South, in a good old boy network of selfish ladder-climbing.  They are not interested in you in the least.  You are inconsequential.  You are nonexistent except that you broke their law and were responsible for your own lynching.  This kind of premeditated stereotyping is rampant in America.  It hangs on from our times of slavery, racism, and white supremacy.  These roots are hard to swallow, because America has come a long way.  We had a Civil Rights Movement, but one would not know it.  America has regressed to violence, ignorance, and greed.  Dr. Andrews repelled me from classical music with an unskilled, dispassionate, condescending approach only that made me angry.  I took the History of Classical Music again while working on my masters degree at the University of South Carolina.  I made a A.  I took it again at OSU, and also made an A.  This is a lesson in politics of America.  One region will put you in the grave, and another region will lift you up.