Week Three 07/10/14

Work in Lecture

In this lecture, the group were required to perform their devised pieces created throughout the previous week. I felt that this task has assisted us in terms of preparing for our final performance as I personally have discovered what works and does not work within a created piece. As well as this it has been helpful to have the opportunity to provide both positive and constructive feedback to other groups performances as well as receiving it ourselves. The assessment criteria we created as a whole group for this task included:

• Musicality
• Timing
• Context/Meaning of the piece
• Use of music/Use of voice
• Structure
• Quality
• Ability to make the piece interesting/engaging
• Vocal devices used e.g. harmony, riffs, trills
• Other devices used e.g. dynamics, tempo, melody, lyrics
• Is the piece fitting to the chosen genre
• Emotional connection with audience

The criteria which intrigued me the most was the idea of 'musicality'. This term involves numerous aspects to make music music and to make a performer musical. Greg Howlett said in his 2011 blog named 'How to develop musicality' that Musicality means different things to different people, but to me, musicality is the ability to rise above the technical aspects of a piece of music and communicate at a deeper level (Greg Howlett 2013).

When assessing others and being assessed myself, the idea of 'musicality' really stuck out to me so this was my main focus. The final recording of our original devised piece is displayed below:

We strayed slightly from our original ideas as we only included one section of the speech as lyrics. We further developed the idea of layering the piece by introducing instruments one by one which increased the dynamic and made the music a lot more interesting. We received both positive and constructive feedback about our piece. The more negative feedback was essential and will most definitely help us in the future when considering our final practical performance. I feel that our group had challenged ourselves the most by choosing such a difficult genre that we were not familiar with, but all of he groups did exceptionally well with such a difficult task. Our feedback is displayed below:

Positive

• Original
• Rhythmically synchronised
• Fitting to the African style/genre
• Good use of rhythm
• Great use of instruments and the build up of instruments
• Really imaginative piece
• Good use of vocal tone (tone matched the upbeat nature of the instruments used)

Negative

• Slightly repetitive at times
• More/varied piano chords could of been featured
• More lyrics could of been written and performed
• Try to be more consistent with timing so everything is perfect throughout

After this lecture, I am even more passionate about wanting to learn to play an instrument within this module; either piano or guitar. As we have started to look at more in depth theory, I will be able to understand more musical terms. For example knowing and being aware of the different scales and chords as seen in Fig.6:

Fig.6

The first chord learnt was the C Major chord. I now know that within a chord, only the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes are used, as displayed in Fig.7.

Fig.7

 

I also learnt that to build harmony, vocalists simply sing a note within the chord. This was extremely helpful for me as I also struggle with harmonies when singing. As well as learning to play an instrument, I am also learning how to develop my vocals. I am hoping to develop my knowledge and skills further as the module progresses using theory sessions as well as teaching myself in my own time. Hopefully I will progress and gain more confidence in terms of playing an instrument as I would love to be able to accompany myself when singing.