You Might be a Music Geek If...


You look at a piece by J.S. Bach and say, "You know, I think he could have gotten a much better effect by ...."

You like marching around the room to the rhythms of Le Sacre du Printemps.

You love to quote Walter Piston.

You long for the good old days of movable C-clefs.

You feel the need to end Tchaikovsky's Pathetique with a Picardy 3rd.

You can improvise 16th-century counterpoint with no trouble, but frequently forget how to use a can opener.

You lament the decline of serialism.

Instead of counting sheep, you count sequences.

You sing only tunes that make good fugue subjects.

You find free counterpoint "too liberal."

You wonder what a Danish 6th would sound like.

You attempted a harmonic analysis of John Cage's 4'33"

You have ever hosted a Gurrelieder party.

You know the names of twelve composers who played the viola.

You know what the 9th overtone in the harmonic series is off the top of your head.

You can name ten of Palestrina's contemporaries.

You have ever detected a wrong note in a performance of a piece by Berio, Boulez, or Stockhausen.

You have composed variations on a theme by Anton Webern.

You know the difference between a Courante and a Corrente.

You know the names of all the Valkyrie, and their voice ranges.

You have trained your dog to jump through a flaming circle of 5ths.

You feel cheated by deceptive cadences.

Every now and then you like to kick back and improvise something in hypophrygian mode.

You wonder why there aren't more diminished-7th chords.

You abbreviate your shopping list using figured bass.

You have ever told a joke that had this punchline: "...because it was ENHARMONIC!"

You know dirty acronyms for the order of sharps.

You consider all music written between 1750 and 1920 to be "rather elementary."

You can not only identify any of Bach's 371 Harmonized Chorales by ear, but you also know on what page it appears in the Riemenschneider edition, and how many suspensions it has in the first 7 bars.

You take bets on chance-music, but insist on odds for aleatory music.

You think Carmen should have killed Don Jose; it's a much better ending.

You got more than half of the jokes in this list.


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