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.

Pure Movement

The entirety of my dancing experience consists of a year of tap dance in third grade. The reason I quit was because wearing tights made me itchy. Thus my loathing of tights ended my career as a dancer. My lack of dancing experience made Mary Wigman’s Composition in Pure Movement somewhat foreign to me. I thought her process of coming up with her dances was quite free sounding, just as she described it. I also found it interesting that she thought “the creation of a dance to music already written cannot be complete and satisfactory.” I never really thought of dance this way. To me it was always the creation of only movement to preexisting music. The fact that she just improvises with her musicians until it all works and fits together is quite fascinating. The thing about improvisation that scares me is that you have to be okay with making mistakes. Its hard for semi-OCD perfectionists like myself to really throw myself out there and be okay if what I do is bad. But I suppose all creation is just throwing yourself out there and seeing what comes out. I agree with Wigman when she talks about being a firm believer in individual freedom. I think creativity is completely unique to each person and we shouldn’t try to put anybody to a mold and make them the same as everybody else.

*Abstract or not abstract: that is the question...*

In my original collage I included a lot of things that describe me. Some of these include photos of my family and friends, sheet music, song quotes, Disney stuff, teacher-y things like crayons, the Lorax and the Magic School Bus emblem. I have a hard time with collages because I am very much a scrap booking kind of person. I like things to be neat and lined up and not too cluttered, so I had a hard time cluttering my collage enough to get a good abstract. I ended up adding things to my collage. The most difficult thing about the abstraction process for me was the technology. I had a very hard time trying to figure out the iphoto application so I just did it on an application I was more familiar with, Print Shop. The abstraction process itself wasn’t difficult; it was just a matter of choosing which abstraction to post because the options are literally endless. When it comes to the question of success as an abstraction, that entirely depends on your definition of abstract. I personally think of abstract as something that isn’t anything. A painting with three lines on it, for example, I would see as abstract. If the artist were to tell me what those three lines were I might change my label of that painting. Because I know what my abstraction is of, I don’t see it as an abstraction. Although someone else with my same definition might see my piece as abstract because they don’t know what it is of. So the meaning is what really matters to me in terms of abstract or not.

Delight

DH Lawrence in his Making Pictures realizes that everything that can be painted has not yet been painted. This is something I love about paintings. you can have four paintings of the exact same park from the exact same spot. But each artist brings something different to it. If I were to paint, my goal would be to show the viewer how I see something. Something can look completely different to two different people. I feel like painting is an insight into the artists mind. I really like how the author said “the picture happens.” That is a really cool thought that once you get going the picture just happens, not necessarily just through your efforts. I also totally agree that he says a picture isn’t a picture unless it has delight in it. Even the saddest picture I can still delight in it, mostly because it is a work of art I appreciate. When he discussed that words have a more unconscious delight and paint was a more conscious one. Those really made me think for a minute. And I agree that the two medians do different things to you and we react to them in different ways.
My favorite line from the Zervos piece is “There is no abstract art. One always has to begin with something.” I like this a lot. The reason I don’t really like abstract art is because I don’t know what the artist is trying to convey. I’m not getting a good look into their minds. If I have the story behind an abstract piece, that makes it more meaningful to me and I enjoy it a lot more. I also really loved when he said “ Everybody wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of birds? Why does one love a night, a flower, everything that surrounds a man, without trying to understand it all?” I think art needs to just be appreciated. And it needs to be appreciated individually. Nobody else can tell you how to appreciate a piece of art. For me, having the meaning behind an abstract piece of art isn’t me trying to understand it, its me trying to really appreciate it for what it is.

*Creativity's place in education should be everywhere...*

I really enjoyed reading this article, Creativity- It’s Place in Education. This is something that is really applicable to me since I’m going to be a teacher. I totally agree with the basic premise of the article that creativity is necessary in schools. It absolutely kills me that in budget crunches the first things to go are art and music. I think that CSAP has everyone going crazy pushing for literacy because if a student is struggling on their literacy they are even losing science and social studies for more literacy practice.

I laughed out loud when I was reading Tom Peter’s vision about education. One of the lines states “a society that respects their teachers and principals, pays them well, and grants them the autonomy to do their job as the creative individuals they are, and for the creative individuals in their charge.” This is almost sadly unrealistic. Teachers get paid next to nothing for all the work they do. We are so vitally important to society, and a strike would show them that, but teachers would never strike and abandon their students. We are also so restricted with what we teach because of the greatly demanding curriculum.

I also thought the section “Why Should We Bother” was interesting. They said the main crisis in schools was irrelevance, as in music and art are not literacy, so they are irrelevant. I believe that is untrue. Music and art can help kids with their literacy. Arts integrated into every subject help the learning process greatly and makes for a more rounded education. They also say that “Creative students lead richer lives and, in the longer term, make a valuable contribution to society. Surely those are reasons enough to bother.”

I found the Jordan Aryn scenario appalling. A very creative kindergartener received an unsatisfactory grade in art for refusing to color inside the lines. A little part of my soul died as I read this. We are putting kids into little boxes and molds to be all exactly alike and that is just not the way kids are. I think it’s important to color outside the lines and be creative, imaginative and unique. We need to teach kids to strive to be individuals and not conform to the rest of society.

“We have an interesting paradox. We have industry commentators saying that, for a successful future, we need people who think, are creative and innovative and yet our education systems seems to be working against this.” Unfortunately, I find this totally true and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. It will be interesting to see what kinds of changes are in store for No Child Left Behind, but I don’t think anything will be enough after all we’ve been through.
No Child Left Behind is also known as NCLB or more appropriately nicknamed No Child Left Untested, No Teacher Left Standing, Everything Left Behind Except Literacy and I’ve even seen Harry Potter has done more for literacy than NCLB ever will.

They suggest some things in the reading of how to encourage creativity. Two of these are classroom climate and classroom environment. In our education program we learn all about how to create positive, creative and enriching classroom climates and environments. Everyone agrees this is important enough to be readily taught to future teachers. The others are time, materials and resources. These are not as widely recognized. With the curriculum restrictions placed on us we do not have the time to allow children all the time they need to explore their creativity. Materials and resources both require money. This is one of the reasons that NCLB didn’t work, because all these great ideas were proposed but then it was unfunded. We don’t have the money to provide abundant useful and interesting materials and resources. This is hurting our kids. When I become a teacher, there will always be music and art in my classroom because I understand just how important it is and how useful of a learning tool it is. The removal of arts and music from schools is bad and until people recognize that, nothing is going to get better. That makes me fear for our future generations.