Performing Arts Essays - The K.G.B., Diver Down,

Performing Arts Performing Arts Essay Adam Buckle January 5th 2001 The poem Trying to show and introduce various ways of writing and making music. Introduce Motifs Process of devising and improvising and performing music How we were able to devise and actually write the piece, refer back to examples. Include Melody, Harmony, Timbre, Texture, and Rhythm. Our performed piece was based upon the poem called Amber written by Jennie Fontana. This was our stimulus and my first impression of the poem was of the sea and waves. This was the overriding theme for the piece, which we were to perform. To introduce us to the end piece we had to first understand what it was we were dealing with, in musical terms. We learnt the basic terms of music and what they meant and we tried to create a little piece which demonstrated at least one of characteristics. The piece, which I created, was based upon tempo and pitch. I played a basic set of notes on the keyboard and then speeded them up and then I stopped, (using silence) and then proceeded to step up an octave. I did this three times. Everybody else in the group did this so we could have some sound recognition about what each sounded like. After this we had to be taught simple ways of writing down music in terms that we could understand. I have had previous lessons in guitar so I know the basic chords and notes, however with the class we learnt how to write it in a way that we used numbers and lines, TAB. The way we were taught to right a minimalist form of notation was to produce dots. Say you were using a drum and you were counting your beats, one, two, three, four. And on every third of the four beats you would hit your drum. We would write this down like this: This gave us a way of remembering the rhythm of the piece and who should be playing what were. This was very useful especially with four people playing instruments. We used this form of notation in a piece we created. This was were we all had percussion instruments and had to come up with 4 lines of 4 bars. We had to use the above notation to create the rhythm and the piece. When it came to rehearsing the major problem was keeping time as we all set off at 1-line intervals. So you had other instruments playing a different set of notes as you were trying to concentrate on yours. However we got through that and we performed what I considered a very good piece of exploratory music. We then after that went on to produce Motifs. These are where they can represent something, conjure up something and can be perceived to be an emotion or character. One of the pieces of motif work which we studied was performed and written by Tschaikovsky. This showed how a simple motif could be changed and adapted to take on what would seem like a completely different melody. This was achieved by either quickening the tempo of the piece of music or playing it in different octaves, to produce more sinister sounds if played within a low octave. I produced a motif which was a basic riff on the piano going up and down the notes within one octave played really softly, this was to suggest loneliness. By now we had a fairly good but basic understanding of the basic concepts of music. This then led us to our final piece. As everybody seemed to have a group I went away and did something myself. This didnt work, as I couldnt play everything that I wanted to play and everything that I wanted to perform. I decided to find myself a group and try and pass, on some ideas. This is where I started using the wave idea and thanks to the keyboards memory banks, the keyboard could play wave sounds at different pitch levels this gave us a background and an introduction to a tone, which we could set for the overall piece. The texture of the sound was of smooth cloth of silk with ripples going through it. This was very effective and instantly produced a relaxed