Random ponderance...

[candyland]

I was hanging around on Cass's writing journal (found at cassandra_lynn8 for those who want to go say hi), and she was talking about how she figures she's bad at math because it's all about rules and the rules never change, but as a writer, she's constantly bending rules that aren't even concrete to begin with. Writers depend on the fact that they can change and bend the rules. I am a writer myself; ergo, I understand this.

I am horrible with numbers, unless they pertain to music. And usually in that case, you are counting to four...unless you've been doing rhythm clapping for five hours and it's two in the morning. Then you can't even count to one--just ask vixieangel and she'll tell you the same thing. My math and science skills are pretty much zilch unless they apply to music. Cass no doubt remembers us dragging each other kicking and screaming through Algebra II. Math and science are all about rules.

If you look at music, it's the exact same way. There are rules, rules, rules. Then there are specific exceptions to every rule, and those exceptions are written out, to be memorized and referred to. There's a lot of numbers and counting involved, and even the most dissonant, seemingly random piece has a certain degree of structure to it. When you get down to it, that's what musical analysis is: finding the structure according to the rules and their written exceptions.

So here's the real ponderance: why is it that I can take four semesters of Music Theory and (thus far) one semester of Conducting at the university level and get A's straight across the board, but I could barely manage to pull a C in high school Algebra II and Chemistry? They're really quite similar--numbers and structure and rules and exceptions to those rules.

Or maybe I'm just thinking too hard about random stuff when I should really be focusing on my stupid Conducting homework that I hate so very much. *proceeds to killie Conducting homework with a wooden spoon*