Today, Tuesday September 21, 2021, we talked about in class musicals, operas, oratorios, librettos, as well as our own depictions of the the Bible and stories within the Bible. In talking about operas and oratorios we talked about how an opera has singing but the characters are acting as well, versus a musical in which there is singing and acting but also speaking parts that are not sung, versus an oratorio in which the characters only sing and there is no acting or costumes or anything of the sort. In doing some research the reason for oratorios versus opera was in earlier centuries oratorios dealt with more sacred topics making it more appropriate for use in church at the time versus an opera which dealt with history and mythology topics. For me opera is not a very interesting thing and I don’t find myself listening and enjoying opera, but the video on “The Prince in Egypt seen I enjoyed and was better able to understand the song as it had words that went along with it and it seemed to have more emotion in the music for me versus some of the other videos presented in the reading. Another thing that helps that particular style of musical, rock opera, is that it is telling a story that I am familiar with and the film adds more to the story to help you visualize the music better. Then we started to talk about our own depictions of stories in the Bible and what kinds of things we add to the story when visualizing it in our head. The was very interesting because I had never thought about what I added to stories told in the Bible such as in some cases I find myself creating a setting that has greenery like you find here, versus what would actually be found in the Middle East. Also just adding things such as my depiction of certain characters and how they look, are generally based off of paintings of Biblical characters and children’s church books. Another thing would be just taking certain things from the text and just assuming that if Jesus was laid in a manger after he was born, that he must have been born in a barn, although the text doesn’t give us an exact description of the building of where he was born. When depicting certain stories, we generally tend to depict them with our own culture in mind and we have different ideas of what certain things would look like based off of where we are from and things we have seen even if that may not be completely accurate if we can understand the context of what we are reading. We might make these depictions because it helps to maybe make the text more applicable to our own lives and makes the text feel more personal and comfortable to us.