Hey everybody!!
         I hope you all are doing ok, and are at peace tonight.  Last night, I had way too much noise going on in my head.  The result?  Three hours of sleep. Yay. Insomnia and I have been hanging out  for many years.  But, it is certainly not my friend.

Hopefully, I’ll fair better tonight.  Salute to all my insomniac friends! (yawn)

So, back in the day, when I was a junior at Sumter High School, I took an AP Music Theory class from our assistant band director, Joe Allison.  He’s a cool guy.  He composes, conducts, judges drum and bugle corps…the whole nine yards.  Anyway, our class was a combination of aural skills (ear training) and music theory  (the logic behind the sheet music).  Now, he would give us aural tests to see if we could hear the distance between two different sounds.  If it’s a perfect 4th, it sounds like Here Comes the Bride.  A minor 2nd is the theme from Jaws. A perfect 5th is the first two notes to Star Wars….you get the picture.

So now that you’re thinking about using the force and walking down the aisle during shark week…imagine your teacher hitting a note on a marimba, followed by tapping a music stand.  Or a chime then a timpani drum?  I learned a lot in that class.  More than I ever imagined.

So, one day, Mr. Allison brings in an article about Billy Joel, out of Keyboard magazine.  I’m thinking, “Oh yeah!  I love Keyboard magazine!  I love Billy Joel!  This is great!”  Until…he starts asking for the meaning of words in this article, that frankly, sounded like someone opened up a Britannica Encyclopedia that erupted like a volcano, somewhere between Thoreau and a NASA space mission.  Great.  My 5 second attention span is gonna LOVE this…sigh.  

I learned two new terms during that report: juxtaposition and tintinnabulation.  From that day on, I at least considered my vocabulary and if I chose to speak poor English, it would be by choice, lol!!

This is the song Billy Joel released that year, and one of the few songs I learned by sheet music, rather than by ear.  It has a great piano accompaniment,  and cool lyrics too!

So, everytime I play this song or hear it on the radio, I think of Mr. Allison and juxtaposition and tintinnabulation.  And so it goes, and so it goes, and so I go to beddie bye.  Night night.  Love to all!