Monday, October 04, 2004

The Rhythm of Searches

In the last 100 referrals to this blog, 10 were google searches for "hemiola," 5 were for "imitative counterpoint," 5 were for some variant on "idiophones membranophones aerophones and chordophones," and one search each for "Antecedent and consequent," "understanding musical meter," "define nonmetric," (good thing you found it Jessi!), "Simple meter and compound meter," "ostinato," and "baliwood musical."(And so Shua takes over the internet.)

In addition, Roger Robert Gable has written an article for NewMusicBox about music blogging, in which he mentions The Musical Crematorium:
 Already, blogs are subdividing into various specialties. Examples of the diversity include a personal view, a broad set of entertainment and culture criticism, life in a particular urban center, a geographic and personal view, an American heartland cultural focus, an English cultural focus, a classical music blog written in Italian, classical music news, CD release news, online contemporary music, a blog written by a college class describing musical terminology, a conversation of music critics (and others) , Elvis Costello news and gossip, and reviews (in order) of UK #1 hits since 1952. Specialized by utility rather than content, MP3 blogs provide (or link to), hopefully legal, MP3-formatted sound files of merit for download. Examples include older pop music, current art-pop music, or better yet, aggregated MP3 blogs.

The "blog written by a college class describing musical terminology" links directly to this blog. Several visitors have come to this site because of that link.

Good work, everybody.

Sunday, October 03, 2004

Performance and Resumes...Week 2

I really enjoyed hearing everyone perform this past week. Up to this point, we haven’t heard each other play beyond the practice rooms, so it was fun to see what people are working on towards their major. I think that performing is one of those lifelong skills that is necessary despite if you enjoy it or not. Some people actually live for and thrive on performing in front of others and these people usually make the best performers in the music field, however, this quality is unique. A few years ago, I read about a poll conducted that asked Americans what their greatest fear. You would think that death would be our greatest fear, but it isn’t. It came in a quite distant second. What, you ask, do Americans fear more than death? Speaking in front of others. The more you think about it, the more absurd it sounds that we get nervous about speaking or performing for people that are genuinely interested in what we are doing and yet most of us experience it at some point. Perhaps the reason that we fear it more than death is that it is a more present issue that we are forced to face than death is and it really is something that everybody needs to cope with regardless of their field. Throughout high school, I found that the best speakers were either debaters or musicians. The debaters were good for obvious reasons, but as musicians we have experience focusing all of our attention during intense performance situations. Although I am not a great speaker nor am I very comfortable performing, I found my ability to coherently convey my ideas for English speeches to be far greater than most students’ skills due in part to my performance experiences.
Throughout the week, we compiled our past musical experiences into resumes before our performance. Although I already had one pretty much completed from high school, it was good to update it with new information. Although it was the hardest part of writing the resume, the “objectives” section of the resume was quite important for me to complete. For me, who is not completely sure what I want to do with my double major, it was a good exercise to get me to think about what I really want out of my education. Like Prof. Foy said, although it may change by tomorrow, it is important to track your goals and to write them down. Although performance skills and improvisation are both broad subjects and rather difficult to get through in two weeks, we really got through a lot of useful information for the amount of time that we were given.