your favorite pickup line is, "What's your favorite augmented sixth
chord?"
your second favorite pickup line is, "Would you like to raise my leading
tone?"
you only sing tunes that make good fugal subjects
you have a poster of Allen Forte in your room
you know who Allen Forte is
you dream in four parts
those "parasitic" dissonances make you queasy, especially when left
unresolved
you can improvise 16th century counterpoint with no trouble, but you
frequently forget how to tie your shoes
you can look at a piece by Bach and say, "You know, I think he could
have gotten a better effect this way . . ."
you can answer your phone with a tonal or a real answer
you like to deceive your friends and loved ones with deceptive cadences
you only drink fifths, and then you laugh at the pun
you feel the need to end Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony with a picardy
third
instead of counting sheep, you count sequences
you find free counterpoint too liberal
Moussorgsky's "Hopak" gives you nightmares
you wonder what a Danish sixth would sound like
you long for the good old days of movable G-clefs
the Corelli Clash gives you goosebumps
you have ever quoted Walter Piston
you can hear an enharmonic modulation coming a mile away
you like to march to the rhythms of Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du printemps"
your license plate says: T351.
you have ever tried to do a Schenkerian analysis on "Three Blind
Mice"
you have ever tried to do a Schenkerian analysis on John Cage's 4'33"
you confuse fish sticks with ground bass
you found No. 27 funny
you have ever had a "Gurrelieder" party
you have ever pondered on what an augmented seventh chord would sound like
bass motion by ascending thirds or a sequential pattern with roots in
ascending fifths immediately strikes you as "belabored"
you lament the decline of serialism
you know what the ninth overtone of the harmonic series is off the top of your head
you have ever dressed up as counterpoint for Halloween
you can name ten of Palestrina's contemporaries
you enjoy the tang of a tritone whenever you can
you have ever found a typographical error in a score by Berio, Stockhausen,
or Boulez
you have ever heard a wrong note in a performance of a composition by Berio,
Stockhausen, or Boulez
you have ever played through your music as if the fingering markings were figured bass symbols
you suspiciously check all the music you hear for dangling sevenths
when you're feeling prankish, you will transpose Mozart arias to locrian
mode
you keep a notebook of useful diminutions
you have composed variations on a theme by Anton Webern
you know the difference between a Courante and a Corrente
you have trained your dog to jump through a flaming circle of fifths
you have ever used the word "fortspinnung" in polite conversation
you feel cheated by evaded cadences
you liked differential calculus because it reminded you of set theory
every now and then you like to kick back and play something in hypophrygian
mode
you wonder why there aren't more types of seventh chords
you wish you had twelve fingers
you like polytonal music because, hey, the more keys the merrier
you abbreviate your shopping list using figured bass.
you always make sure to invert your counterpoint, just in case
you have ever told a joke with a punchline of: because it was polyphonic!
you know dirty acronyms for the order of sharps
you consider all music written between 1750 and 1920 to be "rather
elementary"
you memorize dates and times by what they would sound like in set theory
but you also know what page it is on in the Riemenschneider edition and how many
suspensions it has in the first seven bars
