The Bible and Music

We also discussed in class today the physical aspects that come into play when listening to music.  The emotions and vibrations felt when listening to certain songs.  Endorphins are released from the brain that make you feel good inside when you listen to music.  Our bodies are connected to sounds and rhythms, just as the nursing home video showed us.  Music takes us to a new level of emotion and feeling, far beyond what words can do.

Today we discussed John Rutter and his association with religious music but not religion itself.  We basically came to the conclusion that as long as the basis and meaning are the same, it doesn’t matter if the composer is religious or not.  We assume that if someone is not religious that they know nothing about religion.  After learning about John Rutter, it is clear that that is not the case.

I have started to learn to play the ukulele for class. It is still an adjustment positioning my fingers on the chords. I only know the basic chords so far and can play “You Are My Sunshine” with a few pauses. I am hoping to write a reflection paper on all of this once I learn more. I would say the biggest challenge is memorizing the chords and switching between them effortlessly. I have been practicing simple exercises and common chord changes in order to get better. I want to be able to play songs fluently. I have enjoyed learning to play it so far. I always wanted to learn to play it, but never had a reason to start until this class.

Since the last class about rhythm and meter was interesting to me I applied them to some of the songs on my favorite album, XInfinity by Watsky. Seeing how he added his enunciation to the lyrics gave me a new perspective on what he was saying. I was able to write out the corresponding numbers under the lyrics to see what he was doing then experimented with what I thought would work.

Rhythm and meter have always confused me leading up to this class. I’ve come across it in classes like English when reading Shakespeare and quite frequently in Latin poetry. Applying it as we saw fit to the passages in class helped me better understand the importance of it as it denotes the meaning of the entire passage.

In class on March 19,  we discussed how the Bible can be dramatized. A good example of this was in the movie Jesus Christ Superstar. It took place through the last week of Jesus’s life. This movie was very controversial because it was about Mary and Jesus’s relationship. The perspective was through Judas. He betrayed Jesus because he was paid off, something more than just money. This was an inner circle betrayal. There was some mismatch between the Bible and the lyrical text, and the criticism is that it’s not what happened, but we questioned “can you ever really know what happened?” Written stories and sources can be wrong or untruthful.  History is hidden beneath the surface. We can only assume what events we think happened behind the text.

Also, we discussed what a magnificat is, and that is a music project. An oratorio has no acting or staging. An opera has staging and acting, for example, Les Miserables and Jesus Christ Superstar. Musical theater has words and acting involved with it.

The main part of class was an activity we all participated in. The activity was to take these 4 lines and add beats to them. This was difficult for me because I was not sure exactly what to do.  I am also not very good at keeping rhythm. It was interesting to see what words people held for a longer time. Most of those words were the important words in those lines. For example Lord and Savior were held longer than my or other common words. I think that add a beat to the words did many things. It helped the words become more of a song. It made the passage more interesting. Finally it showed the importance of some of the words in the passage. Overall the assignment was a fun learning experience and may help me in my final project.

Today in class we talked about Mary in the Bible (both the virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene). For some reason this bridged into a conversation about what to do when you have no idea what to do or no inspiration for an assignment. Then we proceeded to assign different amounts of beats to each word in the song of Mary and shared for the class.  Something I noticed was that a lot of people chose to emphasize the same words, such as Lord or soul, by assigning them longer times musically. I think that it comes naturally from our exposure to media and stuff and how certain things are portrayed to us in the media or in religious education, as well as just the flow of language.

This class took me a bit out of my comfort zone, but not in a bad way. We took a look at a few pieces and talked about Mary, which I found out was a very common name during those times. The activity we did in class was fun yet kind of difficult to me. I haven’t learned much about music or beats or how to incorporate beats to lyrics so it was interesting trying to do that. I always try so hard to not make eye contact so that I don’t get called on, but this class I was interested in trying to hear what I came up with. We tried adding beats to the first two lines of a familiar song, and everyone had come up with something different. My take away was being able to relate to other who deemed some lyrics more important than others and these are the words that held longer notes or had more instances. I went home and tried to clap along to some songs and write out the syllables, I still need more practice!

Monday, we took a look at Jesus Christ Superstar which is something I had never seen before. We talked a bit about dramatization within the film. Growing up, my mom never let us watch any movies or dramatizations about Jesus she was all about reading the Bible and going to church. Everything I knew was kind of left to interpretation or something I had heard from the pastor. There was an interesting dynamic between Judas and Jesus, it almost seemed as if Judas was trying his hardest to warn Jesus, which makes us feel a little bit of sympathy for him. Judas was more comfortable with the way things had started and he noticed everything was going in a different direction and it was nice to see the change within both characters. What really caught my eye in the film was the clothing they wore. Every time I have seen Jesus, he looks pretty relaxed in his clothing but to see Judas in a leather jacket was a complete shocker.