Roberta Hemmings staged the enlightenment of the treble clef. Davey Glad was good for breaking down guitar solo mechanics, but if I wanted to write a scale in G Mixolydian, Roberta was my woman.
A complete, thorough source for musical theory was she, this fiercely menopausal woman at fifty years of age. The best of days her already wary countenance turned a dark corner at the mildest of impositions. Students took to suiting up in helmets and elbow pads at the door before entering her layer, priming themselves for the hormonal shrapnel she would so unpredictably fling.
No one was safe from it. You accepted having a unique entry point by which to get under her skin. That is, if you wanted to stay alive all year. Some were more direct in their approach, while I made the freshman mistake of trying to hide behind the firing line. It seemed the more I tried to stay out of range, the more there was at risk of fucking up on a grander scale point.
One afternoon Roberta asked us for a write-up on what we enjoyed most about music. It was without common sense or critical thinking that this teen would compose an ode to improvisation. Not only this, but of its musical importance, far superior to that of premeditated notes. This was a mistake. Having spent two of my lifetimes preaching inversely, Roberta grew depressed on sight.
"Not only can I not agree, that paper hurt my feelings."
In Roberta's defense, she did her best to see that our class was given enough time to absorb each lesson, however tedious, before advancing to the next musical concept. Even when she was contending with the arrhythmia of a self-destructing biological clock.
There were definitely a few people undeserving of her liberality. You could've been Louis, the piano prodigy who passed her class without trying. (Why he would enroll in a beginner's music theory class, I'll never know.)
Or you were Mia, this incorrigible Hollister-wearing busybody who tirelessly competed with Roberta for attention. Such competition would convene in an argument everyday for the last half hour of class. They snapped back at each other like this all year long. For any kind of reason. If the sky had been gray, one would've produced evidence to convince the other it was scarlet.
Such was Roberta's classroom--the going rate for learning. I don't know what possessed me to not just take Appreciation. You came in with your favorite CD and forced your classmates to participate in your music. Everyone had a turn in it. How painful could've that been? I wonder if I secretly wanted to be punished. Roberta's Music Theory 1 was clearly an outlet for anyone with a proclivity for toxic sadism.
My second year of music theory was with another tiresome individual named Mr. Costa. Tim Costa, a smug Napeolonic man who delighted in my musical ineptness--the limited sight reading speed, the untrained musical ear. Whatever it took to degrade this seventeen-year-old student for having a few spare inches on him.
Tim might have been conductor for the band--certainly too, held his own in the flirtation department when engaging manic drama club females--but he was also a taunter, as talented a button-pusher as he was a trumpet player.
But who was I to copy-paste myself into their disciplined world founded on precision and timing? I was the alien back in Clint's gym class, possibly upgraded to humanoid, with respect to two years of progressive instruction from Mr. Glad. My intentions were tried and true several times over--I wanted to learn more about music. They could have obliged and laid it all out for me, but Tim and Roberta were unhappy creatures.
These decorated members of the department exhausted all pleasure since first climbing aboard the nine-month merry-go-round. Propelled to tenure, Tim and Roberta conceded to a drudgery they let bend to bitter gratification--at the expense of the student body.