MUSIC TO GET RICH BY - Dave Barry

Music Lessons
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MUSIC TO GET RICH BY -- Dave Barry
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Basically there are two kinds of music:
: "CLASSICAL" music, which is the kind written by dead German guys and played by people wearing tuxedos.
: "REGULAR" music, which can be written by anybody and played by anybody and gets on the radio a lot.
If you want to make large sums of money, you should get into regular music. These days classical music is popular with only about three hundred people, the same ones who contribute voluntarily to public television. Classical music tends to go on for days, which is why it is played by "orchestras," or groups of four hundred fifty to five hundred people whose parents made them practice classical music when all the other kids were out learning how to french-kiss. Orchestra people divide up the labor: one group will play a batch of music,or "movement," then everybody sits back and reads magazines from little magazine stands while the "conductor" consults his notes and decides which musicians will play next. Sometimes the conductor singles out a musician who has been chewing gum or fooling around and forces him or her to play all alone while the other musicians snicker. If you ever have to be in an orchestra, you should try to sit in back, near the guy who plays the triangle. You'll hardly ever get called on.


Music scholars divide orchestra instruments into five families:
: Instruments You Blow into and Eventually Have to Get the Spit out of (tubas, whistles, cormorants, tribunes).
: Instruments You Hit (drums, triangles, rhomboids, homophones).
: Instruments That Are Easily Concealed (piccolos).
: Furniture (pianos).
: Instruments That Could Turn out to Be Worth a Million Skillion Dollars (violins). The really valuable violins are the ones made by Antonius Stradivarius, which are prized because they were made with exquisite care and craftsmanship and each one contains just over seventeen ounces of gummy bears in a secret compartment which you open by pressing with your chin.
Classical music gradually lost popularity because it is too complicated: you need twenty-five or thirty skilled musicians just to hum it properly. So people began to develop regular music. The most profitable kind of regular music is rock 'n' roll.
Rock 'n' roll comes from the blues, a kind of music developed by American slaves. It is called the "blues" because it is very sad. Evidently the slaves found slavery depressing.
Blues lyrics generally go like this:

> My woman she done left me <
> My children left me too <
> My mule done kicked my kidneys <
> And my income tax is due <

For a long time, blues music was popular only with black people, who were then known as "Negroes." Black blues musicians played in lowdown bars for very little money. Then, in the early 1950s, young white people got interested in the blues. They developed a modified version called "rock 'n' roll," which became enormously popular and turned many of them into millionaires. They routinely paid homage to the black blues musicians who paved the way for them, who made it all possible, and who continued to play in lowdown bars for very little money.
The principal difference between rock 'n' roll and classical music is that your average piece of classical music has about a dozen melodies and no words, whereas your average rock 'n' roll song as one melody (sometimes less) and about a dozen words. When rock 'n' roll composers are in a hurry to finish songs so they can get to important luncheon dates, they sometimes make up some of the words. Take, for example, the words to the 1960s hit rock 'n' roll song "Sittin' in La La":

> Sittin' in la la waitin' for my ya ya <
> Uh huh, uh huh <
> Sittin' in la la waitin' for my ya ya <
> Uh huh, uh huh <

Probably the composer planned to go back and put in real words for "la la" and "ya ya," but before he could get around to it somebody released the song and it sold several million records. Another example is "Land of a Thousand Dances," whose composer evidently got called away to an urgent appointment after he had written only two words:

> I said na na na na na <
> Na na na na na na na na na na <
> Na na na na <

The other kinds of regular music you can make money from are country music, which is popular with people who like songs about drunken infidelity but requires singers with funny clothes and Southern accents; big-band music, which is popular with people who like big bands but requires big bands; and easy-listening music, which is popular in elevators and super-markets but can be sung only by groups of heavily sedated suburbanites. You should steer clear of jazz, opera, folk, marching-band and bagpipe music: the market for these is minuscule. You never will see hordes of fans clamoring for the autograph of a bagpiper.