Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

This assignment was initially a challenge for me in the autobiographical portion. The thing I often use when talking about myself is music, but seeing as traditional musical notation was out I had to go to the next best thing: the fact that I want to be an elementary school teacher. My composition is basically a picture book with a sound setting. This is something I could easily adjust and use for my elementary students. I love coming up with different musical activities for my classroom. I love music and I think it is vitally important to everybody especially children.

My piece begins by everyone channeling their inner first grader and all of us singing our ABC’s together. (It is crucial that everyone know their ABC’s for my piece.) The book is Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. I will be reading the story and every student in class has a part. Everyone will receive a copy of the “score.” My non-traditional notation is color. There are 14 instrument parts that correspond with letters or groups of letters of the alphabet. When we come to a letter, the person assigned to it will play their instrument. The instruments are ordinary objects you could find in any elementary school classroom. Individual instrument parts are highlighted in pink. When a word is highlighted in blue every instrument is played at the same time. There will also be about 4 people doing a chant underneath my reading. The chant and its rhythm go like this:


The chant goes on throughout the piece and occurs under any line highlighted yellow. There will be a line of just chant by itself after the ABC’s and before I being the story. The chant will pause at the end of each line to allow me to turn pages. I will then cue the class on each line by taking a big breath before I begin reading. If a phrase is highlighted orange, it will be spoken aloud by everyone in class. The piece is rather slow, about 60 or so, to allow everyone to play their part easily. This is what my notation is going to look like: (it's okay that you can't read it, everyone will get copies in class.)

What to Listen for in the World

I began reading What to Listen for in the World by Bruce Adolphe thinking he was just another author. But very early he beings talking about when he went to school with Yo-Yo Ma and speaking in depth about a piece with Itzhak Perlman. Now I’m like “who is this guy?” I have never before heard of him, but I love his writings about music. Because I hadn't heard of him, I looked him up and I very much like the fact that he shares my birthday. The way he speaks about and explains inspiration and how he describes pieces of music as tomatoes or chocolate cake I absolutely adore. I think as a musician it is necessary to have a visual to go with every piece of music you play. After I finished playing a piece, my cello teacher would often ask me what I saw. Sometimes it is almost given to you, such as in a piece I played called Papillion. In Italian it means butterfly and it certainly sounds like a butterfly to me, with fast paced sixteenth notes flying all over the place throughout the piece. I am very curious about the piece of music Perlman called “chocolate cake.” I think this work of writing does a very good job of demonstrating that every person has their inspiration come from a different place, and creativity and imagination are in everybody in very different ways.

Yo-Yo Ma
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89sFEuEuTYM&feature=related

Itzhak Perlman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16XQTpm_OIk

Put some radio static in your music

When you picture a composer, one usually thinks of a Caucasian white haired guy. You think about the great classical composers: Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart among others who fit this description. When our guest speaker composer Paul Elwood walked in the room he fit this description as well, but his music was not very Mozart like and definitely not what I was expecting. He plays and composes mostly bluegrass and Appalachian music on the bowed banjo. I have never seen anybody play a banjo with a bow before. To me, the sound was an oriental one with some Beatles influence. The piece he played for us was him singing and playing his banjo both with and without the bow. And in the background he had a track of him playing banjo and a track of air to ground traffic control from an airport. This at first seemed rather strange to me but it had quite an interesting effect. He has composed many pieces. One of which he was telling us about was a banjo concerto with hand bell accompaniment. He believes music is organized intentional sound. And his good piece of advice to all of us soon to be armature composers was to work around our limitations and don’t be afraid to write something bad. Hearing him speak was a very interesting experience, but I think it will make my composing experience a better one.

The Composer and his Message

This article is about the composition of music. I have been playing the cello for half my life and have composed a few pieces of music in my time, yet this article is still very much over my head. I feel as though many of the ideas and concepts Sessions discusses are very abstract and difficult to grasp unless you happen to be a real composer. I agree in the most basic level with Sessions when he says that the essence of musical expression is emotion. Much deeper than that and I am again lost. When he says “In trying to understand the work of the composer, one must first think of him as living in a world of sounds.” I find this most unhelpful, because if I could think like that I would understand, but I can’t think like that, so I don’t understand. Another statement he made just like this one is that “He [the composer] is not so much conscious of his ideas as possessed by them.” I feel as though I can’t truly understand that having never been in this situation. I think that if this article were meant to be preparation for me writing my own piece of music it was not very helpful because I am not a composer already. I think that the creativity it takes to compose music is the same as any other creativity and it is different for each individual person. Every person needs to find their own way of composing that works for them.

*Sonata for a Good Man*

I think it was totally legitimate that the winner of the 2006 Academy Award for best foreign film was The Lives of Others; a German film written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. If you would have asked me what this movie was about right after I watched it I couldn’t have told you. It initially was quite confusing reading English subtitles while trying to figure who’s who and what was going on. After some contemplation, discussion with classmates and reading reviews of the film I had a much better grasp of it.

The movie takes place in a 1984 East Germany when the Stasi were spying on everybody. Wiesler was a Stasi operative who thought there was something fishy about the artist Georg Dreyman. Wiesler bugged Dreyman’s apartment and began to listen to his every move. Dreyman shares his apartment with his girlfriend Christa Maria Sieland who was an actress. The act of suicide committed by Dreyman’s good friend caused him to want to write about the horrific suicide rate of the hopeless people in East Germany. This begins to be quite the conspiracy, especially with Wiesler listening in. However, constantly listening to the artist was giving Wiesler his first taste of art. When playing The Sonata for a Good Man on piano, Dreyman questions how anybody who really hears this music can be truly bad. This is very true for Wiesler. Listening to Dreyman and Christa’s life had exposed him to art, passion and true love. Because of this, Wiesler begins to leave incriminating things out of his official reports.

I really liked the character of Wiesler, especially how he changed even though it was said at the beginning of the film that people do not ever change. The movie had amazing themes of love, passion and fighting for what you believe in while showing us what it was like in that day and age. It really makes me appreciate how blessed I am and what an easy life I have. I greatly enjoyed The Lives of Others.

This is a clip of a really good part of the film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r9W-FjyYss

Improv Sketch CORE

This is the CORE (character, objective, relationship and environment) of me and Jessica's improv sketch that we are going to do in class.

Character
-My character’s name is Kristi. She is not the brightest crayon in the box. She is a total girly-girl, the complete stereotype straight from Beverly Hills. She loves to get her hair and nails done and loves buying expensive clothes. She gets very panicked and angry if things don’t go her way. She is a cosmetology major in school. She is living in the dorms with her best friend Jessica.

Objective
-Maintaining her hair, nails and clothes while trying to survive. She is very concerned with keeping her appearance up and protecting her reputation. She really wants to make it to her hair appointment.

Relationship
-Kristi and Jessica are best friends and roommates in the dorms at school. It’s one of those relationships where you don’t really know why they are best friends but they are. Jessica is very down to earth, studious and realistic and she keeps Kristi in check. Kristi depends on Jessica a lot, especially in their present predicament.

Environment
-Nobody knows why but Kristi and Jessica were kidnapped and left in the desert. They come across a wide variety of desert-y things like sand, rattle snakes, camels, cacti, mirages and no cell phone service.