Gospel Music v. Other Playlists

The question was posed as to why I prefer the other music that we have listened to over the gospel music that we recently started listening to. Well...since I know very little about the technicalities behind music I tend to focus mostly on rhythms and lyrics (if they are decipherable) or just the over all melody. The gospel music has pretty clear lyrics and I'm not a huge fan of religious music in general bacuse it makes me feel as though I'm being preached at. Some of the music we listened to before had songs that I couldn't understand the lyrics in at all and I liked that better because I focused on listening to the voice to try to understand what the singer was feeling, but I had no desire to feel what the musician was saying while listening to the gospel lists. In addition to that I just related better to some of the other songs that we have listened to. I suppose if I were to listen to these lists in full (I only made it half way through the second list because it wasn't working properly and I had spent over an hour there already) perhaps I would enjoy the music better, but from my taste of the gospel music, it's just not in my realm of enjoyment.

Gospel Music Listening..or trying

So I tried to listen to the second gospel music list today, but it's not streaming so well. It keeps having to stop to load the music and once it does load, it has been playing songs over each other (two songs playing at once) so it's pretty difficult to decipher which songs are which. Thus far I'm not a fan of this playlist. I probably won't make it through the whole list because it isn't playing right, but a lot of the music so far reminds me of church music but more peppy.

I liked the first list quite a bit better, but as a whole I like the other music that we've listened to in class much more than the music of late. The last list had a few songs that were familiar to me such as "John the Revelator" and "Rock My Soul." "Yonder Come Day" (2nd list) is one song which I'm actually kind of liking. The clapping and the main voice make for a good rhythm and melody to the song and the back up voices just fill out the song nicely.

Weekend Festivities

It was quite the weekend for artistic performances on campus. My roommate is in danceline and participated in the play-in-a-day so I went to both to show some support. I missed out on the jazz show this weekend, but it was really good the last time they had a concert and I'd assume that they kept it up this week. The dance ensemble had several different types of dances. The variety was nice so that if you didn't like some there were probably still at least a couple of dances that were interesting/fun to watch.

The play-in-a-day was wonderful. I was impressed by how well together everything seemed to be despite only having 24 hours of preparation. I used to do stage crew for plays in high school so I appreciate the fact that not only did the actors memorize their lines and blocking, but there was even some tech involvement. I knew several of the ac†ors and writers from improv, swing, and seeing them around in the dorms. After something like seven hours of practice the actors showed us what they had gotten together. There were three separate plays which each lasted about 10 minutes. Each had been written by a different playwright and had its own director and cast. All in all they did a fine job of creating over the 24 hour period that they were given and were able to pull together quite the show!

Any of you who haven't gone out to see the festivities on campus should definitely start checking some of them out! I would strongly suggest going to the play-in-a-day next year and trying out the jazz and dance shows if you get a chance.

Tuesday Swing

This Tuesday one of the guys from Swing Club, Alex, is going to come to Louie's Lower Lounge to practice with us. He should be helpful in helping us teach the guys their footing and some of the moves (since I tend to want to follow rather than lead it makes it difficult to show many of the moves). He hasn't been to Swing Club the last couple of week so he won't know some of the moves that those of who have gone learned, but he knows the stuff that we learned the first couple of months. Alex is also planning to join us at the Jamboree.