The Bible and Music

Today, was the last day of class. We watched and looked at the remaining projects. I was impressed again with the talent in our class. The final projects were truly amazing to watch and learn more about. Everyone did such a great job!

All in all, this class went well. It was a little challenging at times, but it was worth it. I am happy that I took this class. It opened my eyes to some new topics and points of the connections between Music and the Bible. It is hard to believe that this semester is over already! Have a great summer.

Once again the projects were really outstanding and I think people got a lot out of the process. I really enjoyed how people were able to reinterpret biblical stories and use modern language intertwined with wording from the bible. I feel like it might be easier to set a psalm to music because they were already written to be sung and have a certain rhythm to it. However, telling a whole story without using language from the bible takes a certain amount of imagination and reinvention.

I thought the first day of presentations went very well. There was so much creativity expressed and I was especially impressed by those who chose to rap because that takes an incredible amount of attention to detail and timing. You can’t just manipulate the syllables like you can in less rhythmic styles. I was also happy my take on the project was so well received I wasn’t quite sure people would enjoy having the visual aspect.

Hello! Here’s the link to my final project and my reflection on creating it!

Reflection: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AmX4dl8vvanTjh7sMqqLtPfCEB4K

Project:

Wednesday’s class was a lot of fun and incredibly interesting. We started sharing our final projects with each other and everyone came up with really cool and unique ideas. We have a class full of very creative and talented people so I really enjoyed seeing what everyone came up with. I really liked the rap and dance projects and the projects that dealt with original song making. They were really interesting and it was fun to hear about how they came up with their ideas and how they worked out everything for them. I also got to share my project and was really happy with the way it turned out. There are a few things about it that I would like to change but at the same time I don’t want to mess with the original because it really did help to convey the creation story and the creation of light itself. Overall, it was a really fun day and I’m excited to see what the rest of the class shares next Monday. Great job guys!

On Monday during class we had a guest speaker, Gabrielle Cerberville, come into class and talk to us about her journey in composing and studying music. One of the most interesting things about her visit was the fact that she used her synthethesia to create her pieces, making them look totally unconventional but also perfectly artistic and functional. Her idea for the dome was also really interesting, because I personally never thought of a performance being played above me while I was on the stage inside of a structure. It was a really cool and unique idea that I had definitely never come across before. She also gave us a lot of great insights into the world of a composer and what it’s been like for her since graduating from Butler. I also really enjoyed that when I mentioned finishing my final project that she asked me several follow up questions like the instruments I used and how that’s also a really important part to how a finished piece sounds. I was really excited to share my piece with the class later in the week.

In class on April 18th, we looked at songs by U2 and the Melodians, specifically their song, “Rivers of Babylon.” When Professor McGrath played the song, I swear I thought I’d heard it somewhere else before. Then we started exploring how that song had evolved over time and I realized I had heard it before just from a different band. I really enjoyed looking at the songs from the Caribbean because they have a very interesting and unique sound compared to other music around the world. I was also interested in learning about the biblical allusions that they put into their pieces, especially because during my senior year of high school, I took a mission trip to Barbados. The music there was just as unique and interesting as the music that we listened and explored in class, and I was overall very pleased with gaining more knowledge about them.

During class on April 16th, we discussed the final project in greater length and talked about the various ways that we could go about creating our own piece of biblical music. I was originally planning on creating a children’s song when someone in the class mentioned the creation story and setting music to that. I remembered a previous class when we had talked about it and even came up with what it would kind of sound like but during class on the 16th, an idea sparked in my head. I started thinking about a melody and started writing out what it sounded like on a piece of paper. I was really excited about this idea and knew that I was going to run with it and make the creation story the theme of my final project.

In class on April 11th, all of us spent time sharing what we found from the scavenger hunt. Finding songs with biblical allusions did prove to be challenging for me but once I finally started finding some songs, it became easier and easier to find pieces that have allusions in them. A lot of us came up with similar songs which was cool but it was even cooler to see people who found allusions in songs that I would never have thought would have any in them. The most surprising song with biblical allusions in it that I found during the scavenger hunt was in Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never. This surprised me a lot because I’ve heard a lot of his songs and none of them seemed like that they would have an allusion to the Bible in them but when he talked about fighting his giants like David and Goliath, I was proven wrong. Overall, I thought the scavenger hunt was really fun and gave me a new way to look at popular music.

Class on April 4th was seriously one of the most interesting discussions we’ve had. I love looking at the allusions that songs from the modern era and history have to the Bible. I was especially excited to talk about modern Christian music and the more obvious biblical allusions in these songs. Contemporary Christian music makes up the majority of the music that I listen to so I was really happy to learn more about the allusions and the messages that these songs bring out. I also found it interesting how we were challenged with finding biblical allusions in secular music, something that I thought was going to be a serious challenge but overall I was very excited about facing the challenge and discovering what biblical allusions are hiding in popular music throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries.