what musical education/ backgrounds do you possess??

i studied psychology, but with so many electives took a ton of music history and art classes.

i ask this because as a semi-unemployed freelance web designer, i'm always looking to get out of this industry. i just started thinking about going back to school with a future goal of possibly teaching??

ideas? advice?

Um, degree in popular culture and philosophy, and I now work in the a/v department of a university library, ie; looking after 10,000 jazz and blues records and as many films. My older brothers were always in bands when I was a kid, but I've never been inspired to learn to play anything. I just like listening to and thinking/writing about music. Except, obviously, for my future dub pop collective called Asskickers Of The Fantastic. I have a rhythm section. They've never met.

Have far more musical education than I will admit to, and have spent most of my life trying to escape it.

Studied piano and voice with teachers who were intent on drilling a history of "classical" (sorry that term makes me wince, but it's shorthand) music into your head along with breath control and finger technique. You can pick up an amazing breadth of knowledge in a well-run choir - I chose not to, but it seeped into my brain anyway. In most of the schools I attended, music classes were as much a part of the curriculum as history or mathematics, but fortunately this stopped when I got to high school, so I feel like I escaped becoming a full-on muso.

At college, I took only the bare minimum of music theory classes that would get me the pre-requisites to get into the electronic music courses. And then the year that I qualified to take them, the electronic music department traded The World's Largest Analogue Synthesizer (no, *really*) for a pair of samplers. That was the end of that, then. How different my life and music would be if I'd stuck with it. But I went to check out the samplers, and the bloke in the lab had spent all afternoon sampling a Hendrix guitar tone. I turned around and walked out.

I took African and Latin percussion classes for two months ten years ago.

I started taking singing lessons when I was nine and stuck with them on and off (mostly on) through college. My junior high school had a v. good music program with choirs that competed internationally -- that's where I learned to read music. Also: did talent shows, musical theater, all the age-appropriate stuff.

I had a little keyboard that I'd been fucking around on, but my parents replaced that with a semi-nice one in eighth grade and I took piano lessons on it for a year and a half (although I never played what I was supposed to; I was always making my own songs up, or transposing rock songs by ear). I regret not taking my piano lessons more seriously; there's still some music theory I feel shaky about all these years later, even after having studied it endlessly in high school.

I went to high school at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music and Art and the Performing Arts -- otherwise known as "the Fame School" (or the conglomeration of the "Performing Arts" and "Music & Art" schools). Famous LaGuardia students: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Adrien Brody, and Samantha Maloney (who played drums for late incarnations of Hole and Motley Crue). All three were there when I was a student. (Gellar left to attend the Professional Children's School -- other attendees of that school include Alicia Keys and Vanessa Carlton.)

At LaGuardia we got to pick a major, so I chose voice. The program was a mixture of academic classes, solo voice classes, chorus, and theory/composition classes. I also took a semester of piano there, but it was more or less a reinforcement of what I already knew.

I got kicked out of LaGuardia right before my senior year, for reasons that have nothing to do with music. Did my senior year at one of those "alternative" high schools that all the screw-ups get sent to.

In college I took some more music classes, sang in the chorus and did a bit of solo study, played piano in the basement lounge of the arts building.

Between then and now: Got back into singing choral music (my first love), gave up the piano (which is a shame), learned to play a bit of guitar and bass. I've been involved in a couple of short-lived bands and half-assed musical projects and singer-songwriter nonsense, but nothing entirely serious. In the next couple years I'll get myself sorted and form an actual band and make actual music. But not yet.

Basically majored in 20th Century American music history, if that's possible (there was no such major, but that was my concentration in my specific major). Studied with Richard Teitelbaum (MEV), Thurman Barker (AACM), Kyle Gann (writes for the Village Voice) and Bob Bilecki (sound engineer for Laurie Anderson and La Monte Young). Wrote a gigantic senior project on Tony Conrad, some of which is here.

No idea how to break into this "field," at this point I'm more satisfied with my current career than I probably would be in the academy.

i have no proper musical education but have spent many many hours at live shows, watching guitar players do their thing.

I majored in performance, though should have done theory/composition.

Did you go to Bard, Hstencil?

My undergrad degree is in philosophy and music composition. I'm now a grad student in composition at a university in the Northeast.

Yep.

I'm doing my MA in composition at York in Toronto.

I played the damn accordion for years.

so with the exception of hstencil, you've all studied more on the performance side of things??

No, sundar and I study composition.

i guess what i mean is performance (writing, playing, etc) vs. studying the history of (cultural, stylistic, etc)

i'm interested more in the later. i play music, but realized many years ago that i don't want to play in bands or record. but i love knowing about all sorts of music, where it came from, the people who produced it.

I studied piano for three years as a child (which was where I learned to read music and got the fundamental music theory), tenor sax for five years (fifth grade through ninth grade) and have sung in choirs since I was 12 (excuse me while I brag: I sang in the ACDA Junior High Honor Choir in 1985, which was made up of kids from Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois; Minnesota All-State in 1991, which led to a performance at the Ordway; my high school choir's trip to Kennedy Center; several groups in college that led to performances at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Westminister Abbey, Ely Cathedral, every major concert hall in Japan, the royal concert hall in Teipei, the big concert halls in Seoul and Kwangju, the cathedral at Windsor, the Concertgebauw and several festivals in Germany; and now the official chorus of the BSO and Boston Pops, which has led to concerts at Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, and the big concert halls in Edinburgh, Luebbeck and Lucerne). I also studied voice for a year and took a year of music theory and a semester of choral conducting in college.

btw I did study some performance and composition too, but more as an aside to what I was concentrating on in my history work (played in some improvisation workshop groups, composed/recorded some electroacoustic music, etc., etc.). It was fun but not really my interests at the time.

I am not a music major (in my last semester as an English major) but I took a couple theory and jazz history courses and played drums for the Black Music Ensemble (which included calling Richard Davis every morning at 7 am for a semester and singing to him) and the big band.

So, I just played drums for the jazz groups that I was interested in (which almost none of the percussion majors did) and bypassed all that classical stuff.

* Four years of trumpet in concert/marching band, grades 4-8.
* Appearances in musicals at summer camp, where I realized I could not sing solo at all. (It took me another two decades before I dared try public singing again - I'm still shaky.)
* A couple of music theory classes in college.
* Guitar lessons, 7th grade. Two years later, I picked up an acoustic guitar around the house and relearned the chords.

and that's about it. Almost everything I know about recorded music and instruments I picked up myself. Maybe that's why I'm so gung-ho when I hear obviously untrained musicians and songwriters - I can relate on some level.

Oh, and by the way: one of the reasons I went into music journalism and DJing is because I realized that's where my true skill lies. I mean, I like playing with my four-track and releasing short-run CD-Rs, but I'm under no illusion that they're any good. But get me going behind a couple of turntables or a computer and I'm much more at home.

Hey Nick: I'm in a library myself. What's your policy re vinyl these days? I'm struggling to convince people to keep it here.

I did some sort of music course in primary school