Bio byte

[scarfman]

My normal language usage is so formal and so informal at once that, years ago when I wrote a paper on Rhapsody in Blue for a music appreciation class, the contrast drove the professor to wonder to me whether I was using quotes without quotation marks or attribution. I described that rest in the middle of the second piano solo in the Bernstein recording as lasting exactly "a bar and a deep breath". Well, it does.

Comments

[larksilver.livejournal.com]

I think I know how you feel, a bit.

When I was in High School, I spoke very correctly, working always to eliminate slang and colloquiallisms from my language (okay, so I was a bit of a weird chick, what can I say?). It drove my professors nuts. "You can't possibly have written this," they would say. "No high school student would use this phrase, or this one!" Then, of course, I would speak, and they would recall that I did, in fact, use those more mature phrases in my daily speech.

Obviously, I soon realized that such speech mannerisms were off-putting to new people, and learned that a bit of informality went a long way (Granted, this can seem very odd, as I'm sometimes heard to use "fortuitous" in the same sentence as "y'all," but that's beside the point, right?). It's all been downhill from there, sadly. ha!

You're right about Rhapsody in Blue, by the way. That's the perfect description. It has always seemed to me that those who analyze music too much lose the ability to find the poetry in it - a condition which runs rampant through the University system. Such a shame.