The Bible and Music

Our groups in class today continued in our attempts to set various Psalms to tunes we already knew. My group set Psalm 125 to Joy to the World. We quickly discovered that in order to make it work, some liberties had to be taken with the text. The words can be changed and slowly the meaning changes too, some people have really strong opinions about changing what they perceive to be the true words of the Bible, even though the English words we see are translations already, and has been adapted many times from language to language, and although many languages have words that overlap, they don;t mean exactly the same thing. There are a lot of challenges in setting words to music, whether or not the words or music are in existence first.

Another topic we started exploring today in class is the Baroque era in classical music, J.S. Bach specifically, and how he was ground breaking with sounds in his time. Now, when we listen to Bach we find it dull, not exciting, maybe it even puts us to sleep, but back in his time, Bach was revolutionary. We didn’t have much time to explore this further, but we have some listening to do and I expect to uncover new things through it.