" Music is the use of sound to express ideas and feelings"
This simple sentence is not so easy to remember, when you are doing all the other things that we will be doing in class. We will be here to get better at learning how to use sound to express ideas and feelings. You are already musicians, because you already know how to select sound to do this. If I asked anybody here to express the feeling of anger, what sound would you make? Now lets listen to how experienced musicians have selected sounds to express anger.
This simple sentence is not so easy to remember, when you are doing all the other things that we will be doing in class. We will be here to get better at learning how to use sound to express ideas and feelings. You are already musicians, because you already know how to select sound to do this. If I asked anybody here to express the feeling of anger, what sound would you make? Now lets listen to how experienced musicians have selected sounds to express anger.
Most of the popular music today is made to accompany words being sung, called songs. In songs there are ideas, which are mostly made into expressive sounds through the word's literal (or dictionary) meaning, and feelings, made into sound by the band, and the vocalist's expressive choices. Composing is the craft of selecting sounds that express the ideas and feelings that you are applying for an effect on your audience (listeners). Consider the choices made here: They include the words (when in songs we call them lyrics), and the way that they are sung. Singing is a style of saying a word by prolonging vowell sounds, A,E.I.O.and U. The choice of accompanying sounds, like which instrument plays and when, will be chosen to assist the singer express the meaning intended by the composer. In a performance that the audience can see, like this concert, there is the added element of the setting (or context), the ensemble's (or group's/band's) appearance, and in the way that the performance is recorded, that should also be contributing to the intended effect. What you are doing when you consider these questions is called musical analysis.