Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for January 07, 2013

Good to see they still challenge kids these days.

I still remember our second grade class having spelling bees one day. I won the first one and during the second my dad came to pick me up. He decided to wait and watch from the doorway and I won that one too. I remember how proud he looked and I felt. One of my happier school memories.

i can see her swinging her feet back and forth, sitting on that too tall stool…: D

I’ll bet she learned this one from Mr. Evil Piano Teacher.

no points for showing of Pheebs. now spell Qualm. (points if you get the reference)

Also you must pay more attention to music class then I did since you know about musical flourishes that are not necessary to carry the overall line of the melody (or harmony), but serve instead to decorate or “ornament” that line.

I’m not going to lie – I had to google “appoggiatura”.

But it’s only when you get near the professional level that you learn how, for a couple hundred years, for songs and other stuff accompanied by only one or two instruments, the composer would just write the melody and the most important notes of the bass line, and let the organ/harpsichord/lute player and the bass player figure out the rest. (Hey, writing music with a dip pen takes a long time.) Only sometimes the vocal line would be likely to confuse the players, so a whole system was created for writing a simplified version of the melody that made it easier for the players to figure out the chords, while the singer had to learn that whenever a composer wrote a melody that went like /this/ you really had to sing /that/. For example, " mi | do do " (where | is a barline), almost always means you should really sing " mi | re do ". Of course, since every composer had his own habits, and even their habits changed from year to year, you can get a D. Mus. working on this stuff.

This system was used for most home music, so when you see the young ladies playing the piano in a Jane Austen movie or the like, remember, they’re actually playing from the period equivalent of a fake book.

When I was in fourth grade, Mrs. Booth would always give “Czechoslovakia” to winnow the last few out of the field. Every smart kid in the class learned to spell Czechoslovakia (always remembering “Capital C…”). To this day, I can still spell it. Good job, Mrs. Booth!

Correct Phoebe.

Is this a nod to “Psych,” where that longer word tripped up a contestant?

That’s what “appoggiatura” means in /modern/ music. But for a few hundred years it was used in connection with the practice I describe above—the extra and altered notes that the singer was expected to recognize and sing because they belonged there, even though they weren’t written down. (It also applied to solo keyboard music, written with only a simplified melody and an outline of the bass, with the player expected to improvise the details of the melody, the rest of the bass, and all the other notes in between.)

I’m still bitter that I got disqualified from a spelling bee back around Phoebe’s age for spelling ‘color’ as ‘colour.’ Not my fault the school library had lots of classic British literature in it!

show thoes skillz