Wizards vs. Sorcerors
Nov. 2nd, 2023 02:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverThis past Tuesday was Halloween here in the U.S. It was also the regular weekly rehearsal of the concert band that I primarily play in. Thus, only about seven people showed up to rehearsal, and that number includes our two conductors, Tim and Sherry.
We decided to play anyway, because honestly, playing music is fun and that's what we're there for, so why not? We arranged ourselves in a circle, and luckily both conductors had brought their own instruments, so they played as well. (Tim plays trombone on some pieces while Sherry conducts so he always has his, but Sherry plays drums while Tim conducts, so she doesn't normally bring her instrument, which is clarinet.)
This was honestly the most fun rehearsal I've been to in a long time. I always enjoy band rehearsal, but this was different because it was small and intimate, and also because we were just playing music, not rehearsing. Rehearsing implies actual work, like running through difficult passages over and over to get them right, stopping to work with a small subset of the band on something, etc. Even though we were missing a lot of parts, we were just having fun playing music, and it was wonderful.
But I noticed something really cool, as I was listening to Sherry and Tim playing with us. It takes a bit of explanation.
Both Tim and Sherry are retired music teachers, so they both know how to play all band instruments, though of course they're not experts in all of them; they have their specialties. Sherry's a classically-trained clarinetist, and she's excellent. She probably could have made a career of playing in an orchestra, but chose education instead. As it is, she's the principal clarinetist in the local symphonic concert band. (The principal clarinetist in a band is like the principal violinist in an orchestra, who is called the concertmaster and is the primary leadership position among the musicians.) (Edit [8-Nov-2023]: I found out last night at rehearsal that Sherry actually did play in our city orchestra; she was principal clarinetist for twenty years, and teaching was her day job.)
Tim, on the other hand, is not classically trained. He started as a self-taught guitarist and, like many guitarists, played music by ear. Sometime in his late twenties, he decided he needed to actually have a career, so he went to college to become a music teacher, and that's when he started learning formal music theory and how to read music. More recently (as in, post-retirement), he fell in love with trombone and has been concentrating on that and playing the music he loves, which is traditional jazz.
So, on Tuesday night, they both played with us, but Sherry didn't have clarinet music ready for herself, and Tim only had a couple of the trombone music ready (since he normally plays trombone only on some of our pieces). Thus, Sherry used the score, which is the book of all the instruments that the conductor uses while conducting a piece, and she switched back and forth between different instrument parts, playing the melody wherever it was. That means that if the melody started in the alto saxes then switched to the flute, she'd play the alto sax part and then the flute part on her clarinet.
The thing that probably isn't apparent is that all these different instruments are in different keys, so to play the music with us, she had to transpose on the fly - alto sax and flute and clarinet are all different keys, so she had to transpose alto sax to clarinet while keeping in time with the rest of us, and then when she got to the flute part, she had to switch again, because the transposition between flute and clarinet is different than between alto sax and clarinet. And she still played it correctly and kept in time with us!
As an analogy: Imagine a short story that's written with some parts in German and and some in Japanese, and even switches languages in the middle of a sentence. (Yes, yes, I'm familiar with both German and Japanese grammar and know this is more or less impossible, but just go with it). Now, you have to read it out loud to someone, but in English without pausing or stumbling. That's basically what she was doing.
Tim can't do that. He doesn't read music particularly well - in fact I can read music a lot better than he can, and I'm not a musician in any sense of the word. However, at one point, there was a passage where the melody was in the euphoniums, which a clarinet is not suited to mimic (euphoniums are low and brass; clarinets are high and woodwind). So Tim asked Sherry to look at the score and tell him what the first note was. She told him, and he hummed the melody to himself, then put his trombone to his mouth and played the passage through perfectly. Because he knew the melody and plays intuitively, he could produce it from just knowing what note to start on.
Two amazing, brilliant performances, from two completely different kinds of musicians.
I told this story to my husband and he said, "That's wizards vs. sorcerors right there." In D&D and many other fantasy IPs, a wizard is someone who becomes proficient at magic by studying; they cast their spells out of spellbooks and have access to all the known spells, but without their spellbooks, they can't do a thing. A sorceror is someone who has innate magical ability; they can see what effect they want to make and manipulate the magic to do it, but they can't make heads or tails of a spellbook.
Sherry's definitely a music wizard: she can do amazing things with written music, but ask her to improvise and she's lost. (Which frustrates Tim to no end, when she's playing drums and he asks her to ignore the written music and do something much more interesting, she just can't - even if she tries (which she'll usually refuse to do), she'll just revert back to what's written.) Tim's a music sorceror: if he tries to read the written music, he might succeed if it's not too complex, but give him a jazz chord progression and what he produces with it is just brilliant.
We decided to play anyway, because honestly, playing music is fun and that's what we're there for, so why not? We arranged ourselves in a circle, and luckily both conductors had brought their own instruments, so they played as well. (Tim plays trombone on some pieces while Sherry conducts so he always has his, but Sherry plays drums while Tim conducts, so she doesn't normally bring her instrument, which is clarinet.)
This was honestly the most fun rehearsal I've been to in a long time. I always enjoy band rehearsal, but this was different because it was small and intimate, and also because we were just playing music, not rehearsing. Rehearsing implies actual work, like running through difficult passages over and over to get them right, stopping to work with a small subset of the band on something, etc. Even though we were missing a lot of parts, we were just having fun playing music, and it was wonderful.
But I noticed something really cool, as I was listening to Sherry and Tim playing with us. It takes a bit of explanation.
Both Tim and Sherry are retired music teachers, so they both know how to play all band instruments, though of course they're not experts in all of them; they have their specialties. Sherry's a classically-trained clarinetist, and she's excellent. She probably could have made a career of playing in an orchestra, but chose education instead. As it is, she's the principal clarinetist in the local symphonic concert band. (The principal clarinetist in a band is like the principal violinist in an orchestra, who is called the concertmaster and is the primary leadership position among the musicians.) (Edit [8-Nov-2023]: I found out last night at rehearsal that Sherry actually did play in our city orchestra; she was principal clarinetist for twenty years, and teaching was her day job.)
Tim, on the other hand, is not classically trained. He started as a self-taught guitarist and, like many guitarists, played music by ear. Sometime in his late twenties, he decided he needed to actually have a career, so he went to college to become a music teacher, and that's when he started learning formal music theory and how to read music. More recently (as in, post-retirement), he fell in love with trombone and has been concentrating on that and playing the music he loves, which is traditional jazz.
So, on Tuesday night, they both played with us, but Sherry didn't have clarinet music ready for herself, and Tim only had a couple of the trombone music ready (since he normally plays trombone only on some of our pieces). Thus, Sherry used the score, which is the book of all the instruments that the conductor uses while conducting a piece, and she switched back and forth between different instrument parts, playing the melody wherever it was. That means that if the melody started in the alto saxes then switched to the flute, she'd play the alto sax part and then the flute part on her clarinet.
The thing that probably isn't apparent is that all these different instruments are in different keys, so to play the music with us, she had to transpose on the fly - alto sax and flute and clarinet are all different keys, so she had to transpose alto sax to clarinet while keeping in time with the rest of us, and then when she got to the flute part, she had to switch again, because the transposition between flute and clarinet is different than between alto sax and clarinet. And she still played it correctly and kept in time with us!
As an analogy: Imagine a short story that's written with some parts in German and and some in Japanese, and even switches languages in the middle of a sentence. (Yes, yes, I'm familiar with both German and Japanese grammar and know this is more or less impossible, but just go with it). Now, you have to read it out loud to someone, but in English without pausing or stumbling. That's basically what she was doing.
Tim can't do that. He doesn't read music particularly well - in fact I can read music a lot better than he can, and I'm not a musician in any sense of the word. However, at one point, there was a passage where the melody was in the euphoniums, which a clarinet is not suited to mimic (euphoniums are low and brass; clarinets are high and woodwind). So Tim asked Sherry to look at the score and tell him what the first note was. She told him, and he hummed the melody to himself, then put his trombone to his mouth and played the passage through perfectly. Because he knew the melody and plays intuitively, he could produce it from just knowing what note to start on.
Two amazing, brilliant performances, from two completely different kinds of musicians.
I told this story to my husband and he said, "That's wizards vs. sorcerors right there." In D&D and many other fantasy IPs, a wizard is someone who becomes proficient at magic by studying; they cast their spells out of spellbooks and have access to all the known spells, but without their spellbooks, they can't do a thing. A sorceror is someone who has innate magical ability; they can see what effect they want to make and manipulate the magic to do it, but they can't make heads or tails of a spellbook.
Sherry's definitely a music wizard: she can do amazing things with written music, but ask her to improvise and she's lost. (Which frustrates Tim to no end, when she's playing drums and he asks her to ignore the written music and do something much more interesting, she just can't - even if she tries (which she'll usually refuse to do), she'll just revert back to what's written.) Tim's a music sorceror: if he tries to read the written music, he might succeed if it's not too complex, but give him a jazz chord progression and what he produces with it is just brilliant.
