“I will be playing this in front of the whole class” lol okay : MaliciousCompliance

Having recently stumbled upon this subreddit, I think this might belong?

Second semester of my freshman year, I was taking a music theory course. The professor was very serious about her job and this class was a bit of a weed-out class for students who wanted to pursue Music Education. By the time the end of the semester rolled around, I got the feeling she didn’t really like me much because I didn’t pay attention in class but still got As on the homework/exams/playing tests, so she couldn’t really punish me for anything since I wasn’t disrupting the class, but was just a thorn in her side through lack of participation. As she passes out the requirement sheet, she announced that she would be playing these for the class, so we need to put in effort so that we don’t feel embarrassed by what she plays in front of everyone. The reasoning: 6 of the 7 notes are lowered a half-step. So it’s not a matter of thinking “Everything I see is lowered,” it’s “Everything but one note is lowered,” which is fairly hard to keep track of while sight-reading something that utilizes both hands on the piano

I spent weeks working on this because I wanted to make sure it was both well-written and an absolute bitch to play. I had upperclassmen take a look at it to make sure everything was labeled correctly, and they told me I was the most magnificent bastard ever because this prof had irked most of the students in the department who had taken her class. We all turn our papers in, and I’m visibly excited by everything. She pulls mine up about 2/3 of the way, sits down to play it, and stops at the first chord. She looks around, makes eye contact with me and straight-up glares before regaining her composure and plunking through my piece. There’s several chords that make a nice crunch before she corrects herself, and it sounds like whoever wrote this piece did a shit job because of how it sounded. At the end, the meek international student-who has Perfect Pitch-raises her hand, and goes “Excuse me, Dr. ? That piece just played… it has 6 flats in the key, yes?” Prof: “Yes, it did. I didn’t quite expect that” Student: “You.didn’t play all 6 flats, it didn’t sound.” Prof turns, glares at me, and goes “No, no I did not”

Got a 97% because she marked a chord label incorrect. Went back in and showed her that she missed the not-flat note in the chord, and that it was actually labeled correctly; got it changed to a 100%.

tl;dr Music professor ‘threatened’ to play our pieces in front of us so we would work harder on it.

Edit: I have the music, played by Finale NotePad, and have made an account just to upload it here: Enjoy! Unfortunately, I have no idea where the sheet music is at this point. That class was Spring ’09, and I’ve had a lot of life happen since then.