“It’s much too late to do anything about rock&roll now..”

video for the song Yun and I will be doing for our third presentation - Spirits in the Material World by The Police 

being a psychology major, especially interested in cognitive psychology, i can’t help but be intrigued by the idea of the way our brain hears and interprets words. i’ve always wondered why certain words are aesthetically pleasing while others are not. for the past week and a half actually, my boyfriend and i have been doing this thing where we pick out words that we like while in conversation with each other, or just ones that we randomly think of. i dont even know why we started doing this, but it’s funny that we should talk about it in class yesterday. here are some of the words we’ve come up with: melody, inverse, love, asphalt, meandering, harmonize, and mellow.as far as words i don’t like.. clock and blog top the list.

The song Meagan and I are doing for our presentation tomorrow… “How Deep Is Your Love” by the Bee Gees:

I’m basically just gonna use this blog entry for a little promoting..This Friday night, April 14th, at 7:30pm in Dodd Auditorium is the Wind & Percussion Ensemble’s big Centennial Concert. I play flute (I’m a flute performance major) and I will be playing many a solo :p and we will be doing world premieres of two pieces, composed by Dr. Long and Dr. Naylor, two of the music professors on campus. We will also be playing an AWESOME jazz piece called Blue Shades, Amazing Grace as a tribute to Dr. Norwood (a music professor who passed away at the beginning of this semester), along with a bunch of other songs. You should totally try to make it if you can - it’s free but we request that you bring a non-perishable food item that we will donate to the food drive at the end of the concert if you can. Also, as you may know, Saturday is the multi-cultural fair. I’ll be playing with three or four other members of the flute ensemble outside GW at 10:25 and I know the jazz ensemble is also playing a bit before then and they are really good too. So yeah, come hear some great shows and support music at UMW! :) 

As a huge fan, I feel it is my duty to inform the world that Counting Crows has just released their new album “Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings” You should go listen listen listen! It is currently #1 on iTunes and Amazon and in addition, Counting Crows will be going on tour with Maroon 5 and Sara Bareilles this summer, working with Reverb, a non-profit environmental organization. This basically just means they’ll be using environmentally safe fuel and other materials on all buses, flights, etc. and educating fans. So check it out, I’m excited!

so we didn’t have a q&a session in class today after the presentations, and I have a question that doesn’t really pertain to any of them, but it’s something i’ve kind of been thinking about in general.. i know there are a lot of aspects that need to be considered when deciding what the genre of a song is, but how important do you think lyrics are in categorizing a song? there are other factors such as instrumentation, but i know for me, when i’m deciding whether or not i like a song, the lyrics play a huge part in my decision. so i was just thinking about it and wondering whether lyrics largely influenced other things as well, specifically the classification of a song into a certain genre. what do y’all think?

In regard to what was brought up in class about the blogging and del.icio.us-ing, I can understand and relate to what people were saying about the problems we’re having. Personally, it’s not that I forget to write, I just never know what to write about when I sit down to do it. I then get frustrated when nothing comes to mind and as a result, have adopted this view of blogging as almost being a hassle. I am also guilty of not keeping up with other people’s blogs. I do check the class site occasionally, but I’m sure I don’t read the posts as thoroughly and thoughtfully as I could, and rarely ever give feedback by commenting. As far as del.icio.us goes, I never have to time to just browse the internet and find interesting music sites to bookmark. My schedule is so full and I get so overwhelmed by everything I have to do that it’s just something I don’t think about doing. By no means did I intend for this blog to be packed full of excuses, but more as a reflection on what I’ve been doing (or failing to do, for that matter) over the course of the semester so far, to be used for coming up with a solution. In general, I do believe that if everyone puts forth a little more effort and commitment outside of class, collectively it will really make a difference in the interactivity and unison of this class that Dr. C. is trying to establish. Anyway, just putting my thoughts out there… and from now on, I’m going to focus on making more of an effort.

The first week of presentations is over and I’m really enjoying them. I’m the inquisitive type of person who likes to know everything about anything, and I never settle for looking at something from only one perspective; I like to take everything into consideration. I think that’s why I really like the way the presentations are structured, where two different ways of analyzing each song are argued. A lot of times, a person hears a song and recognizes that it sounds like rock, for example, but after close examination it begins to seem like something entirely different. Personally, I had a good time preparing my presentation. The only problem I really ran into was working with the reading material. Progressive music isn’t really discussed in the books, so I found it hard to find quotes to use in my presentation. I really liked researching progressive music though. I feel like rock and soul are more concrete genres and the same arguments will be brought up over and over again, where progressive is more experimental and creative and provides a lot more to work with. It’s fun

So I was just reading a couple passages in the Bible and in Matthew 9:20, it says “And behold, a woman who had suffered from a discharge of blood for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment, for she said to herself, ‘If i only touch his garment, I will be made well.’” I instantly thought of being in class listening to Sam Cooke’s song “Touch the Hem of His Garment” and Dr. C. telling us the story behind the song - how the woman was so desperate to touch the hem of Jesus’s robe because it would heal her and “make her whole”, which is the same story being described in this passage. It was just one of those moments where you go “woah! that’s really cool!” I mean, I knew that soul music is gospel-derived, but there are Sam Cooke’s lyrics directly out of the Bible!

I’m really glad we got to listen to Sam Cooke and Otis Redding in class yesterday because I had never really heard any of their music except for maybe a song or two and I realized that I haven’t listened to much soul at all in general really… I was pretty blown away by the power behind the vocals and how they’re sung with so much strength yet at the same time the artists still have so much control over their voice and there is still even a bit of vulnerability to be sensed. I found “Soul Man” by Sam and Dave to be quite different though, I guess because there is more emphasis on the instrumentals. Either way, I’m excited to hear some of Aretha and James Brown’s music  tomorrow