Author: lpennington

Love is presumably the most common theme within pop-culture music throughout almost all genres. Today we took a look at the theme of love in the Bible and in music derived from the Bible. There are many examples, but perhaps the most predominant is the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon. This text… Continue reading Love and Music

What is music for? Music communicates emotion, promotes healing and happiness, provides an escape from reality, and so much more. So, what happens when composers push musical “rules” beyond their limits? We can see the consequences of this through observing some works from Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg’s earliest atonal pieces seemed very dull and unorganized. In… Continue reading Escaping Tonality

I find it extremely interesting how much history hides in some pieces of music. From children’s music, to spirituals, to heavy metal, we often find that a lot of musical pieces have huge backgrounds and tell stories much larger than the songs themselves. Many times, the history of these songs have originated in the Bible.… Continue reading The History Behind Music

As we shared our children’s songs today, we came to a lot of interesting ideas. I think one of the biggest ideas that we touched on was that in the telling of Biblical stories, especially within children’s music, elements of the stories are often purposefully left out. A story in which this commonly takes place… Continue reading Children’s Music

Today in class we were asked questions such as “why does older music all start to sound the same to us?” and “why does contemporary music often connect with us more than old music?” An obvious answer to the second question is that contemporary music uses modern language, it is easier for us to understand… Continue reading Dissonance

In exploring the Magnificat, something I found interesting was that a single composer, Charles Stanford, set the text in every key. At first thought, I simply wondered why he would do that. But today’s class gave me a better understanding. The Magnificat was very popular, performed in church services repeatedly. The popularity and repetition of… Continue reading The Magnificat

Film making can add or take away elements of biblical stories. It is the choices and depictions of film makers that shapes each unique motion picture Bible story. Part of this variance comes from the fact that the Hebrew language did not use quotation marks. We see the effects of this today as, in different… Continue reading The Bible and Film Making

In observing, listening, and reading about Bach’s Passions, it was brought to my attention that not only does the word “passion” hold such a strong religious meaning and connotation, but the word also has varying meaning. The discovery that today’s connotation and common meaning of the word is much different than the true definition and… Continue reading Passion

Through listening to some excerpts from Handel’s The Messiah, we were able to observe how music can influence words and even entire scriptures and passages from the Bible. The music behind the lyrics can actually symbolize the words, providing listeners with not only a great image of the words but a greater understanding of the… Continue reading Music’s Effect on Words

As humans, when we read any kind of text, we subconsciously add details to that text. Seeing that no two humans have identical subconscious minds, our depiction of a text will never be identical to another’s depiction of the same text. Each person creates their own unique mental image of a text, adding details that… Continue reading Personal Depictions