Posts tagged with “music”
Top 10 Reasons NOT to write songs for your Church
My favourite reason: “There are so many great songwriters out there already, no one needs your songs”.
God has so ordered his church that each congregation will go through the same struggles in the same way, at the same time, causing those events to sync up with Chris Tomlin’s recording schedule in order to deliver the CD at just the right time for your congregation to learn. That’s what the doctrine of God’s sovereignty means, buddy.
This entry’s got me thinking about songwriting again!
A while back I linked to the trailer for a film I co-wrote the soundtrack for. As the link no longer works, here’s a Vimeo version. The music used was initially written for the emotional climax of the film, and given that I only wrote the music for one other scene, perhaps “co-composer” oversells my role slightly! Hope you enjoy it nonetheless, and I hope to badger the director to sell DVDs of it at some point…
Sleep My Child – Eric Whitacre
I was recommended this guy a year or so back, then recorded a choir singing one of his songs shortly afterwards. These two versions of “Sleep My Child”, from Paradise Lost, a work Whitacre describes as his “musical/opera/techno/taiko/anime passion project”, are exquisite! This kind of contemporary classical music is what I wish I’d learnt to write at uni.
ToneMatrix
A great little flash synthesiser/sequencer. My recommendation – start with a rhythm on the top line, then swirl your mouse round the rest of the boxes. Lots of fun!
hearts & minds
A new trailer for the film I helped write the soundtrack for has been released, using my music. (Click “Play full trailer”.) If you’re in Bristol next week, it’s being shown on Wednesday and Friday.
My co-composers were Pippa Cleary and Sara Garrard, who actually wrote most of it. I just got the two scenes of violence.
Edit: Jack Vaughan also wrote the music for one scene; I don’t know him personally.
Carson and Piper on music in the church
Starting at 19 minutes 50 seconds into this video, John Piper and Don Carson reflect on contemporary worship music. How do we convey the weightiness of truths about God appropriately in music? Is our only criterion for whether we sing a song orthodoxy? Food for thought. (Via Bob Kauflin.)
Bob Kauflin on musical snobbery
Is there anything wrong with raving about the music/artists we love and being swift to trash those we despise?
If we’re Christians, yes. Let me suggest ten reasons why musical forbearance might be good for our souls.
I found most of this relevant to me, and not just because I’m a music student.
Music and emotions revisited
Posted at 12:26 PM
Back in March 2008 I was writing a series on music, which included an entry entitled “Music and Emotions”. In it, I wrote about my convictions regarding (surprise, surprise) the place of emotions when we sing. A basic summary would be “Emotion is essential! Truth is essential! These things are related!”
This week I feel I have seen this modelled brilliantly by Stuart Townend and Phatfish. They’ve been great in many other areas as well, and I’ll begin with some of those, before moving onto the emotion-related stuff.
Read More »Hymns Ancient and Modern
Cousin Mark writes about a new “modern hymns” project:
As a Reformed Calvinistic Indie-Rock kid who is incredibly stuck up about music, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on the Page CXVI project; a group of people who’ve decided to make good, solid, glorious hymns accessible and modern and for a while release them free on the internet…. I’ve been listening to it all day and am more impressed as it goes on. So much of it could be absolutely awful, as so much of Christian music re-hashing old songs is. But they seem to have understood that these songs are good because their depth of theology should move people to tears and so that’s what the songs try to do. And they’re good.
Also worth a listen are Red Mountain Music, who write stuff more designed for congregational singing. Their song “Hark the voice of love and mercy” is perhaps my favourite song of the moment. (You might recognise it from the Theology Network podcast, where it’s used as intro and outro music.)
Writers’ block
Posted at 4:52 PM
I’m finding it hard to know what to write. This isn’t for lack of things to write about – on the contrary, my problem is I don’t know where to start. Those who have spent any amount of time with me probably know that I think quite deeply about lots of different things. My lack of blogging has, in a way, contributed to a build-up in things I want to think through – or rather, my lack of time to think things through has been the reason I haven’t been blogging. Or maybe both are true.
At the moment I’m trying to organise recording about four different ensembles, as well as writing a ten minute work for orchestra. I no longer have any official responsibilities in organising stuff for the CU, but am busier than ever. I’m still singing in a choir, doing solos and duets at concerts, cooking dinner for large groups of people, and trying to get along to the Aikido club (a Japanese martial art my housemates are involved with) but always seeming to have to schedule other things that clash with it. I’m also trying to find time to finish the audio mastering for the film I collaborated on a soundtrack for last term (which is proving difficult, as the director is in rehearsals for a play all evenings, and my fellow composer/sound-person has a day job!). I’m hoping to have some space to think soon, but whenever I have any free time it seems to get filled either by work (there’s lots of it) or time-wasting. So I’m just being my typical undisciplined self then. (Need to work on this.)
I feel I should end by enthusiastically raving about Flos Campi, a wonderful piece of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams that I recorded (as part of a longer concert) with Sara on Saturday. The problem is I don’t have any words to say about it, it was that good. When it had finished, I turned to Sara and for the first time in that concert was utterly speechless. (At least until we noticed the programme notes mentioned the “voice of the turtle” in relation to one of the movements…)