Wrap Up

1. I learned a lot of interesting things about different cultures. I learned that some cultures have a lot of different instruments made out of very different things (like China and Vietnam) and other cultures only have a few main instruments (Australia). This intrigues me-- I'd like to investigate why this is, maybe do some research on the environments of said cultures to find out more about why some instrument making practices exist.

2. I realized that there is lots of meaning surrounding our own musical culture. There are many different cultural influences on our mainstream music today, and that was very interesting when pointed out. I can recognize more Middle Eastern and Indian influences on modern music here in the US.

3. This course has inspired me to learn more about Indian music and the raja. I'm very fascinated by this concept and I want to see if and how I can apply it to some of our music.

Cool Stuff #3

So there's a pattern here....

So this is from India's Got Talent. It's really interesting to see how different the "spectacular" acts are-- we have our fair share of strange talents on our version of this show, and this one is the same but with an Indian flare. You also hear a mixture of English and Hindi.

This is from Indonesian Idol-- another singing show that has managed to stretch its franchise across borders. Again, there's a mixture of English and Indonesian being spoken, and a famous American Beyonce song is chosen.

This is from Afghan Star. No English in this one, and yet again, it's very interesting to hear the song selection and how it differs from the song selection seen on these shows in the US.

Music and Family

My father waxing eloquent about his musical experiences.

Where did you hear music?

"You're talking about a child, early or later or what? We would go to church on Sunday and when I was young we did Latin mass so it was sung. That was one thing. My mother- grandma- she had several record albums, I'm talking really young, she had uh, mainly sacred music. The other thing was, I don't know if you've heard of Mitch Miller? It was this sing along thing you would do on TV. Mitch Miller sings or something like that. My uncle-- Uncle Pete-- he would come over and play guitar and we would sing. We lived in Arlington Virginia we used to go to the folk music festival. We heard people like Doc Watson, we heard all kinds of music. We would also go to, uh, Cellar Door had an outdoor concert series. We would listen to, uh, it was either Friday or Saturday night, we would listen to people like Roberta Flack. We would go, uh, we actually had a group we started, as a family, and we would play music for church. It was a folk mass. I played tenor banjo and Joe and Chris played guitar and Steve played the mandolin. "

What are the instruments you played?

"Oh-- I mainly played tenor banjo and five string banjo. Um, not much else. "

What were your singing experiences? I know you were in a barbershop quartet for a while.

"That was when I was older, in my twenties. I also in high school was in chorus, in Arlington but not here, not in high school. I sang some in musicals. I mainly did plays. I also did, when we, uh, when grandma and I made musical instruments we would travel and play all over the place. Like Galax and Smithfield, Tennessee."

Were you ever exposed to any music of other cultures?

"Yes. Um, when we went to those Smithsonian folk music festivals, they would have people from all different areas. From Africa, there were all kinds of different folk music from around the world. Mainly this country, but other cultures as well."

Can you list some of your favorite musical artists?

"Probably Eugene Hutz, John McCutcheon, Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary, Greg Brown and Allison Krauss, Gene Ritchie, uh, Bob Dylan and the Band, The Beatles, (Woody Guthrie! my mother shouts from the background)  "

Can you tell me about the business you and grandma had making instruments?

"We made dulcimers mainly. Almost exclusively. Grandma made bread dough flower arrangements and saved enough money to buy a kit. And then we took it to a local place and had them duplicate the kit ten times and then we made dulcimers from those ten. All we had to do was glue them together. After that we decided to make our own, we made 211 dulcimers total. I made four or five banjos. Basically we talked to other makers, but we mainly did it our own way because we used the tools we had. Grandma used to make the pegs. We both had our different jobs. She did most of the carving and made the pegs. She made them on a belt sander. We sold them at folk festivals. The odd thing was that we made the dulcimers and sold them for 120-150 dollars, bu people wouldn't just buy them on the spot. They'd take your brochures and think about it. What we did figured a way of making whistles from the extra wood and sold them for $2 a piece and we'd make our gas money. Otherwise we'd go to a show and get a single order and it could get pretty lean. That's how we started and we did okay. We figured out how much money we were making and it wasn't very much. We ended up going into other things. "

Cool Stuff 2

So in this cool stuff blog post, I'm going to introduce you to a few of my favorite blues artists. I'm going to throw in a few more funky pieces too.

This is Memphis Minnie. She not only sings the blues, she plays the guitar too. She's one of the only female blues artists to do this. She broke countless barriers for female musicians. She died penniless like most blues musicians, so Bonnie Raitt erected a headstone for her at her grave site in 1996.

I first saw The Blues Brothers at about 11, and for years I would play the soundtrack we had in the living room and dance around to every song. This was my favorite, although a close second was Minnie the Moocher. This is a good example of the transitional genre of funk blues, which, in my opinion, is one of the most fun genres ever created.

This is Steely Dan, one of my all time favorite bands EVER. This is a little later than the blues, but I couldn't resist sharing it. It's pretty infectious. The music itself is genius too-- the rhythms are extremely intricate and the harmonies are fantastic.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a video of Sarah McAndrew beatboxing on her didgeridoo, but this guy is almost as good. This didgeridoo has a really cool bulbous opening at the end too.

Music and Gender

I have definitely noticed a gender difference in a lot of music. In high school, I was in two district choirs-- one year I was in the SATB, the next year I was in the SSAA women's choir. I thoroughly enjoyed the SSAA choir more, and I am a fan of all women's choirs (yay Converse!). I was also in a children's choir for about 8 years. It was always the same choir, but I moved through different sections as I got older. When I got to 11th grade, I graduated to the Chamber Singers, which included guys who's voices had dropped. We were able to sing more complex pieces, and I've noticed that while there are also very hard pieces for women's choirs, I've seen more of them in SATB choirs.
I know that in the singing world, male singers are precious, valuable things that are often hired more than women. Part of that is, admittedly, that there are simply more sopranos in this world than anyone could imagine, but the male singers I've known personally through high school who also went on to sing in college were not held to the same standard as many of the sopranos I've known.
I'm going to backtrack a bit and talk about middle school. In middle school, you had to participate in art or band, and because I completely lack artistic talent, I chose band. I played clarinet because it seemed easy-- at least the stuff we were doing in 6th grade was. I wanted to play trumpet but didn't have the gall to (this was a long time ago). In my middle school band, there seemed to be the girly instruments-- flute, clarinet, some saxophones-- and the boy instruments-- percussion, trumpet, trombone. There were crossovers in each of those instrument groups though. In high school, I decided I wanted to play the tenor saxophone in the jazz band, which was mostly male dominated. I felt empowered playing an instrument that I'd seen only males play. The saxophone was also as tall as I was, and it was impressive that I could even hold it up.

Cool Stuff: Native Americans

This is a video I found of a few Native American teenagers just singing in the car. I don't know what song it is, but it's beautiful. I really like it and I really appreciate the whole teenagers respecting their heritage thing.

This seems to be a theme with me. I just really like the spontaneity of all of these young men and how similar they are to me. I sing a lot of blues or folk songs that I learned growing up when I'm in the car, and that's exactly what they're doing, just with a different culture.

Okay so I found this beat maker that uses Native American melodies and influences to create back beats for tracks. It's really cool stuff. It's just a plain backing track, but the influence is evident and it sounds really mysterious and ethereal.

Music and Religion

When I was growing up, I didn't really have any significant religious interventions. My parents are Unitarian Universalists, so the church we went to accepted everyone from pagans to atheists to recovering Catholics. We would sing a lot of varied music for the services-- a fair amount of folk songs or more earthy pieces, some more traditional church hymns, and spirituals. I never really attached religious meaning to any of these songs because I wasn't brought up in a religious household. My dad's side of the family is very Catholic. My great uncle is a Catholic Priest and my grandma is very religious. I went with her to a few Catholic masses, and the chant like music we sang there fascinated me. It was hauntingly beautiful and had much more meaning than the religious music I was used to. The people in the mass there took it much more seriously and had everything memorized.
I started working for St Paul United Methodist Church in the fall of my sophomore year of college. We sing a lot each service-- three hymns and an anthem. The vast majority of the hymns we sing are the typical plagal cadence, 4 line numbers. These hymns are easy to sing-- conjunct motion, easy to hear final cadences-- for the people that aren't interested in being challenged musically. The anthems we sing are more creative, but still don't hold a specific meaning for me. I tend to think that some people find the music gratifying and others just find it cumbersome-- it's become rote for almost every church service in the western world.
I'm convinced that the church has greatly influenced the production and development of music, especially since the invention of the German chorale. Singing in church gave people a way to be practically musical and involved in their religious experience (especially in the western world). As we saw with the Native Americans, music was a direct link between them and their deity (deities). I think that the same can be said about western religious music, I just never really felt that way personally. Because religious music was a very common form of music and one of the only ways most people were musical for a long time, it has had the drive to be developed more than secular types of music and has experienced a lot of change over time. There will always be a market for and people who want to compose religious music, and that security gives that music a weight that secular music doesn't possess.