The Bible and Music

Today in class we had a guest speaker named Gabrielle Cerberville who is a music composer who graduated from Butler. She writes modern music and made this cool dome thing that is in Iceland. The concept is that the audience sits inside of the dome and listens to music through speakers. The piece that is associated with was made exclusively from sounds that she recorded around town. She also had this interestingly scored piece that looked like a piece of artwork with different shapes and colors. Coming from a musical background, I could see where instrumentalists would be confused because there was a lot of things up to interpretation. I was a member of EYSO for five years and one year one of the other orchestra did a piece that was like a blueprint and up to each individual’s interpretation. It ended up sounding like more of a mass warm up then a piece of music so I do not really understand how it is supposed to sound but I guess that’s art.

Below I have put my final project reflection (in a word document) attached. I also included the text from the Bible that I chose to work with, as well as the website I used to obtain sheet music from, in case anyone is interested. If anyone would like to know, I chose to go along the route of changing lyrics from a preexisting song and inserting Biblical text while keeping it set to the same song (I have included the instrumental version). As I will explain when I present and in my reflection, I tried many times to record myself singing it, but I sounded absolutely awful, so I will be walking everyone through what I did and explaining key points of why I chose the song I did and the Psalm I did. 🙂 Hope everyone has a wonderful summer, we are almost done!!!

Final Project Reflection

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+22&version=NIV

https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-US/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceJD-2w5xCo

Today we had a guest speaker, Gabrielle Cerberville, come in to our class and let us listen to some of her compositions. I thought this was really cool. She said she has not figured out her style yet, but I feel like she kind of has a dark, mysterious, ominous sort of sense to her pieces. I really appreciated the fact that she offered insight into what she does for her creative process, which she said she just writes a bunch of stuff and makes a “dumpster fire” with whatever she doesn’t want. She was a really down to earth, friendly, honest person and I think she can be an inspiration to a lot of young students with a passion for music.

In order to get ahead of the game a little bit I have been learning classical singing from my friend who is a music education major.  It has been an eye opening experience for me because my knowledge of singing extends to the middle school choir (so not too far).  I used to think that those who could sing did it naturally, with little effort, but that is definitely not the case.  Singing takes talent, persistence, and a ton of strength both physically and mentally.  My voice is not nearly as good as my friends’, or anyone else’s for that matter, but I completed the job and learned something new.  Now on to our final projects.

Preparing for our U2 class I have been listening through the album that iTunes force downloaded on our phones a few years back.  I am interested to learn about the ties that U2 has to this class, as they are a favorite band for many people.  Their songs are relaxing and more modern than what we have been learning about this semester, so I think it will be more interesting.

Here is the link to my reflection on my final project process:

FINAL PCA KKAHN

Here is the video to my final project:

Today, we had a guest speaker in class. She was a composer, that went to Butler. Her goal is to make music in a way that is easy for the general public to read and work with. She created a very cool dome experience for people to listen to some of her pieces. She was very unique to hear from and learn about. I liked how she adapted the idea of creating music, into something that was her own. Seeing how she composed music for the public, was very interesting and made you think outside the box. It gave some more perspective that you can adapt music to whatever you want it to be. After her presentation, we had some time to ask questions. Then, we just discussed final project logistics.

Today in class, April 23, we had a guest speaker. I was excited for our guest speaker because I unfortunately  missed the last class period when we had a guest speaker. The last time in class we had a guest speaker and I attended it was when we had the cantor come speak to our class. I enjoyed listening to the cantor’s background story and how he connected it to our class. Our guest speaker today, Gabrielle Cerberville was a graduate from Butler University in 2014. I believe she said her major was composition and theory and she has resided in Indianapolis since graduating from Butler. One of the first pieces to her presentation was about the Skammdegi Artist Residency that she helped build in Iceland. Gabrielle lived in Iceland for a period of time. When I saw Artist Residency structure, it immediately grabbed my attention, due to the fact that I had never seen one before. She focused on attracting it to children because of how picky they are. This is an interesting way of design but one that seemed to work well.

Gabrielle continued her presentation by sharing some of her music. Her music was a good kind of different and one that could be listened to for several minutes. Gabrielle mentioned that she encouraged her listeners to step away with listening it and come back, which could allow them to hear something new. Each piece of music that Gabrielle allowed us to listen to had its own melody and individuality with harmony and instruments. I enjoyed listening to the “Messier 83” and how she brought in the violin. Gabrielle also stated that she has not found her exact style as of now and that is something that stood out to me. Gabrielle had some great advice on how she goes about composing her work. One of the quotes that she said that helped me was when she said, “Most of my most memorable and cherishing work was the most frustrating making.” This is relevant to our final projects and creating some that reveals our own creativity. Overall, I enjoyed the class time hearing Gabrielle’s story and accomplishments!

I’ve been coming along with relearning the saxophone. The three years of rust have certainly been a challenge to scrape off but I’ve begun to remember the simpler scales by memory and I’ve noticed that note reading is much faster and my fingers and eyes are starting to sync up again. Hopefully I’ll be moving back onto real songs soon.

The discussion in class really helped me understand what to do for the final project. At that time I was roughly half way done with what I wanted to do for my final. I wasn’t sure of exact specifications and rules beforehand but the question period helped. I wish that we didn’t have to preform them. As someone with no signing experience it can be very intimidating and no one really knows anyone else in the class.