Posts tagged with “music”
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…)
Listening to Music for the Glory of God
Bob Kauflin writes about how we can determine what music is “good” for us to listen to. The answer, as it happens, is not just listening to contemporary Christian music – which is a relief, because a lot of it is both artistically and theologically rubbishdubious.
As predicted, a noticeable pause
Posted at 9:15 PM
As predicted in my previous entry, the “next few days” I was going to posting entries in vanished rather quickly. Term begins officially tomorrow, and I’m exhausted after three weeks of overtime and some late-minute music organising. Before normal service resumes (always an interesting phrase with this blog, where I haven’t made it into double figures of entries since November 2006), a couple of things I’ve picked up over the past weeks which are well worth a perusal, and an event I’m looking forward to!
My cousin Mark quotes Martyn Lloyd-Jones on emotion, which I’ve written about too (longer quote at his site):
Many of us are afraid of emotions. Our whole training and upbringing, the whole attitude to life, is one that curbs the emotions. We feel that it is not quite respectable, it is not nice. We are steeling our emotions, curbing this God-given thing… This is not a plea for emotionalism, which I have denounced, it is a plea for emotion.
Even better, his entry on differences between conservative and charismatic evangelicals (which I’ve also written about) contains a fantastic John Owen quote. But as Mark writes:
Alas, because he’s John Owen and obtuse (and because he’s living in 17th century England) in explaining all this he doesn’t make the obvious analogy; Charismatic Evangelicalism is biscuits, Reformed Evangelicalism is cake.
The whole thing should be read!
Finally, the event: the Co-Mission Media Forum has been announced, which sounds like just the kind of thing anyone with any creative thought or inclination should do their best to get to! Looking forward to Matthew Mason on music, having heard him speak on Song of Songs at a church houseparty.
Freshers arrive tomorrow. Crazy. This summer has been very peculiar in different ways (being properly unemployed for the first time, as well as living in Bristol, not with my parents) and while it feels like years since I was last working towards my degree, the term has sneaked up too quickly.
Terra Incognita
Posted at 7:41 PM
“During the flight I saw for the first time with my own eyes the earth’s spherical shape” – Major Yuri Gagarin: 13th April 1961
See her then swing through space, another moon
Wrapped in a shining singleness, an Earth
That no division knows nor count of time,
Nor name for war and peace, dying and birth:
See her with mountains, but no barriers,
Countries, but countries by no owner claimed,
Continents linked in passionless embrace
Neither by greeds nor loyalties inflamed.
If such the bright impersonal wanderer -
No guarded frontiers, no jealous dates -
Such too the unknown Earth on which we walk,
Hid by our map of human loves and hates.George Rostrevor Hamilton
Terra incognita, a setting of the above poem, was my final project for studio composition this year. The brief merely stated that some form of live electronics be used; I used a vocoder to process the (spoken) voice with a synthesiser. It’s not perfect: the copy of the poem I used to record the text had an extra “d” after “an” in the second line (so yes, I do say “and Earth” by mistake), and the drum parts start off pretty bland and really should have had more work done on them. Apart from those minor points, I was reasonably pleased with this – particularly as the majority of it was done within 24 hours! It’s quite stereotypical of a particular genre – nothing groundbreaking, but at least it’s listenable to (I think).