Week Seven 04/11/14

Work in Lecture

In this lecture, my main personal focus was deciding on what my final individual performance was going to include, as well as allocating myself into a performance group and discussing performance ideas. My group consists of myself, Devin, Jen and Gil.

To begin with, the groups within the class performed their individual arrangements to receive feedback. Our arranged performance ended up being a collaboration of two songs; Stand By Me by Ben E King and Beautiful Girls by Sean Kingston. Both songs share an extremely similar baseline so it was rather straight forward for us to create the piece. We included numerous harmonies and overlapped the songs to add texture and make the performance interesting for our viewing and listening audience. With a recorded vocal baseline, we were able to create three parts within the chosen songs including difficult harmonies. The feedback we received is displayed below;

• The group had very good stage presence when singing and created an effective ensemble layout by being spread out. This meant each section could be heard clearly.
• Good quality of performance generally, it was evident that a lot of time and effort was spent to make the vocals tight.
• The selected songs really complimented each other so the arrangement was strong in terms of the overlapping and harmonising.
• The recorded baseline was effective within the performance. Originally, I was going to perform the baseline live but the piece seemed empty. With the baseline recorded, I was able to add more dynamic to the performance and sing harmonies to make it more full and interesting.  

The group was referred to as being extremely similar to a female barber shop which inspired us in terms of brainstorming ideas for the final marked group performance. It was a huge compliment to us as we realised just how well our voices complimented each other and how well we were able to create music without the use of instruments.

 

 

Group Work For Assessment

 

We want our final performance to show how our work has developed from this performance so we think the best option is to create an arrangement. After carrying out numerous pieces each week varying from abstract pieces to musical arrangements, we weighed up the positive and negative aspects and think that an arrangement would be beneficial to us in terms of creativity as well as challenging us musically. Our group discussion is displayed within Fig.13;

Fig.13

After carrying out some research into the chord progression including C G A F, I have found that there is numerous popular songs which have this included in them. This means that we have many options to choose from to create the piece. An example of how certain songs can mould into one and overlap is the YouTube video titled '24 song titles form a 4 chords song (C G A F)'. I think this example; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQYg6uZLRKE will benefit us greatly when it comes to beginning our groups creative process. We are going to use experimentation, improvisation and chance techniques to see what works and what does not necessarily work. As the group performances are required to be a minimum of five minutes we have decided to think about a second idea to create and perform, as shown in Fig.14;

Fig.14

Although this idea will be a lot more difficult in terms of creativity, I think it will be good for the group to be challenged musically. It is extremely difficult to change a song in terms of genre to make it sound different but I think if we focus and work well together, we will be capable of doing it successfully. I think it would be beneficial to take a song that it is more out of our comfort zone in terms of performance and transforming it into a piece that we are more comfortable and confident with. In the upcoming weeks, we will need to decide as a group which genre we are going to be working on and research potential songs we could perform.

 

 

Individual Work For Assessment 

In terms of my individual performance, I think I am going to work on an arrangement. The original requirement was to create an original composition lasting between approximately three to four minutes, this could be either performed live or played on a recording. We were asked to write both the music and the lyrics involved within the performance. As I am not yet comfortable with playing an instrument, I would not feel completely confident accompanying myself when performing. My idea for my solo performance is to use an already existing piece of music and write new lyrics to sing to the chosen track. I may also choose to change the genre of the original song to put a twist on my piece and make it seem more original. I want my performance to show my creative identity and I think this type of piece will do exactly that. I am going to carry out intensive research into numerous genres and backing tracks to see what I feel drawn to in terms of writing lyrics and creating a song.


Individual Vocal Work

In terms of my own personal development I have been working on my vocal warm-ups to develop my vocal range, strength of my voice, voice placement, diction and ability to sustain notes. I have been carrying out these warm-ups before any vocal performance to ensure that my voice is not damaged in any way. When considering my devised solo performance, I want to develop and improve my vocal technique so that I am capable of a lot more within my performance. I want to be able to reach more demanding notes with confidence, use vibrato effectively and be able to pronounce all of my written lyrics with good  quality diction. The warm-ups I have been using are displayed below;

 

1. The first exercise moves up and down the scale using an 'ah' sound. This developed my range and the strength of my voice when singing.
2. The second exercise also moved up a scale using the vowel sounds 'A, E, I, O, U.' This also developed my range as well as improving my diction.
3. The third exercise includes moving up a scale using the lyrics from the song 'Doe a Dear.' This exercise again developed my vocal range, strength and my ability to sustain longer notes.
4. The final exercise includes the song 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' to develop diction and ability to sing lyrics clearly. This exercise improved my diction when singing and voice placement.

  

 

Individual Instrument Work

As well as working on my vocals, I have also been looking into lessons on YouTube for beginners learning how to play the piano. One video that I have found included teaching note names, finger exercises for strength and dexterity, how to play piano with both hands, simple chords and basic improvisation with chords and a melody. I am going to use this video to begin to learn the piano and progress through each of the lessons to improve. There are numerous lessons from Mark Andrew Hansen which I am hoping to progress to in order to learn more skills and develop as a musician. It would be ideal for me to be confident enough to play the piano and accompany myself within my final solo performance but I need to be realistic.