The Art of Listening to and Appreciating Different Styles of Music
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hi
today i’m going to share with you some
of my insight into appreciating music
maybe you’ll hear things that you didn’t
before
you’ll also understand better the
creative process of the composer or the
arranger
music is the most accessible form of art
because music is sound and sound is
all around us the basic elements rhythm
beat pitch maybe you’ve heard of them
maybe you haven’t
i’ll explain a little bit so you
understand as we go along
uh take for example the way you walk
right when you walk you walk at a steady
pace
you don’t take three quick steps and two
slow steps
so that steadiness that becomes the beat
you don’t really hear it in music
but that’s a steady pulse
the rhythm is like speaking it’s the
words that you say
it’s the sounds of the words the space
between those sounds
like the word rainbow or the word
chocolate or the word rain they all have
their own rhythm to it
let’s try that together let’s put beat
and rhythm together
this is the beat and the rhythm is going
to fall over the beat
peanuts and walnuts and hazel
nuts almonds and all other kinds
of nuts so there we go we have beat
and rhythm music really
expresses our emotions right so we use
music for celebrating when we’re happy
when we’re joyous
sometimes we use music to unwind perhaps
you could be driving home from work
completely tired and you
turn on the radio we can even use music
when we’re sad just to unwind and listen
to something that connects with us
and that’s because the lyrics and the
melody they come together
to express that emotion and all the
other things around that lyric and
melody
like the instruments or the genre of
music
enhance this experience
some of you might have heard this famous
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song
right this is the famous song favorite
things from the sound of music
most of you remember maria von trapp
singing it to those little kids
here the rhythm and the lyrics are very
straightforward
raindrops and roses and whiskers
on kittens it’s quite straightforward
it’s set in a classical musical theater
genre
let’s change the instrument a little bit
we have shown ramos
who’s going to play this on the trombone
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and off we can hear that the rhythm of
the notes has changed
he’s changed it from a straightforward
pattern where we have tattata
he’s changed it to
so it’s syncopated it’s off the beat
this brand new setting changes the way
we hear the music changes the
the genre of the music and now the
instruments that
are with are playing with the trombone
are gonna enhance this experience
and here we have a jazz setting of a
classical musical theater song
so one of the reasons why i love jazz
music
you know i was teaching a class a couple
of years ago and i asked i asked the
kids
what what makes jazz music different
from other genres of music
and this one kid says i know i know and
i asked him what and he says
jazz music has swag so there we go
that’s why i love jazz music
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wow
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i listen to all kinds of music mostly
pop and jazz but also choral music i was
part of a choir
now when you hear the word choral music
a lot of you only associate choral music
with
church music or classical music
but choral music can be a lot of
different things it can be
a choral arrangement of a pop song or it
can be an
avant-garde jazz arrangement so we’re
going to talk about choral music for a
minute
but before i do that i want to explain
to you the next
piece that we’re going to discuss in
2004
our group was invited to sing at a at an
international festival in cologne
germany
where we had to feature sacred choral
music from our country
now indian music is not coral in nature
it it’s not harmonic in nature and what
i mean by that
is the instruments that are used in
indian music
are primarily melodic you have the sitar
that plays a beautiful melody or you
have a singer
or you have
a tanpura right and then you have
percussion
that supports that so you have the dhol
or you have the tabla and
together they don’t form any harmonic
structure they form a melodic and a
rhythmic structure so
taking an indian melody and setting it
to choral music was a very new
experience for us
so we have this beautiful indian melody
in
the sufi style we’re just gonna have a
listen to it right now
me
right off the bat we can hear the
striking melody
that the boys are singing
your cry to god and that’s so
beautifully expressed
through the sufi melody as we
as we go through the piece we hear how
the melody
along with the harmony of the other
voices come together
now what are the other voices in a choir
we have the boys
that they and they sing the tenor and
bass voice and then we have the ladies
who make up the soprano and alto voices
so the the men that were singing were
the tenors
and now we hear how the the choir
supports the movement of this piece
so when we go to the next line terry
marziho
okay we hear how it sort of sounds like
the majestic
sound of the brass instruments the brass
instruments like the trumpet
or the trombone and they are announcing
the kingdom
so we hear this beautiful harmony
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right and you can almost imagine the
brass going
right the harmony is also
western influenced so that’s that
doesn’t exist in indian music
once we reach the top the the high point
of this melody
we come back to earth just as the lyrics
bring us back to earth
with the the lyrics bring us back down
to earth
on earth may it arrive and now the
melody also comes back down to earth
with the harmony let’s have a listen to
these two phrases
so here we have two very different ideas
a sufi melody which is the traditional
islamic devotional music and you have
the western harmonies coming together
to create a new genre
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now
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oh
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we changed the instrument to maybe a
piano
and we think about arranging a song just
for piano
right it changes our perspective a
little bit
so now we don’t have the other
instruments supporting the melody
but you’ve got to do that within the
melody itself so let’s
take this beautiful melody
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i’m sure most of you recognize it this
is somewhere over the rainbow
and you have this beautiful open sound
in the melody
in between that we can color it with
some chords or the harmony
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now the beauty about playing a piano is
that it kind of condenses what the other
instruments can do so it condenses what
you’d hear
in a band or in an orchestra even the
choir
and you have these beautiful moving
lines what do i mean by moving lines you
hear the moving lines
in between so let’s hear that once
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can you hear that
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and now we have some other moving lines
now we keep the we try to keep the the
harmony
really basic here and then we repeat it
the second time when we play the melody
again repetition is important
because it creates a familiar pattern we
don’t want to
overwhelm the listener right off the bat
now we come to the middle of the song
where we have these repeated notes
right and now we can color it in with
some cords
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now the chords not only add color but
they add
movement because the notes are staying
where they are
and the harmony moves up
and further up
and when we come back to the melody a
third time
we can slightly change it because we’ve
established a strong melody
in the beginning so we can change it
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and there you have it you have three
different ways of appreciating music
i hope the things that i’ve shared with
you really inspire you
to listen to music in a different way
maybe appreciate something that you
didn’t before
perhaps you’ll appreciate a genre of
music that you overlooked
music doesn’t have to be just one thing
it doesn’t have to have just one answer
uh when you maybe if you want to compose
or arrange
and when you approach a project perhaps
you think of
the instruments differently or the
genres of music differently
and always remember art takes time it
cannot be rushed
thank you