While I was thinking of a good topic to post about, I remembered a quote from a book that I had been reading a couple of weeks ago, (one of the best books ever, in my opinion) Harry Potter. The students had just finished singing the Hogwarts song, and Dumbledore stood, wiped a tear from his eye, and said, "Ah, music, a magic far beyond all we do here." And music is just that. It has great power and can be used to uplift, to celebrate, to tell stories, to release oneself from the cares and hardships of the day. It both defines and unifies cultures. It can be used to tell a history, how something once was, and can be passed from generation to generation.
I was involved in music through high school and learned to love both instrumental and choral music. However, with choral music, I saw something at the corner of many of the sheets of music that I did not usually see in band-the words traditional or folk song. These were songs that had been passed down for so long, usually to tell a story, that no one knew who wrote them.
My favorite type of music that we performed were the both the African and the African-American songs. They just had this great beat and soul to them. These songs were passed down from generation to generation, and the people were able to sing to remember their country and heritage as well as to plead for freedom. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass said, "They would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought came up, came out-if not in the word in the sound-and as frequently in the one as the other."
(see http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Douglass/Autobiography/02.html)
Being able to weave one's soul into music is what makes it magical, where it can touch the hearts of many generations and live on for ages.
I also think music is one of the most powerful forms of communication - even without words, people can use music to help change their moods or just tell how they are feeling at the time. I think the kind of music people listen to is as important to understanding them as, say, what books they like to read or what their hobbies are.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with Jenna's observation that music conveys the emotion and soul of a person. This form of communication has always been prevalent in my life and especially as a way my brother and I could communicate. One example of this special and personal form of communication was when my brother and I wrote and performed a song for my family to represent his leaving for a mission and summarize what was important in both our lives and to convey how we feel about the new change coming about. In this way we were able to use music to convey our emotions to our parents. We were able to tell my parents how we felt in a way we couldn't do through just words or paper. This would be an example of music being used as domestic folk knowledge which differs from Jenna's example of music in her life with choral and instrumental music in high school.
ReplyDeleteI joined the Church a year and a half ago, and, socially speaking, I was impressed how much Latter-day Saints love to dance in an environment that is permeated with music. I think that music can combine one soul with another, which is probably why a bride and a groom's first song that they dance to after they are married is so important and special. My mother is a pediatric nurse, and she has told me stories of working with pregnant women. It always makes her smile when she does an ultrasound and can see the unborn infant dancing, in a sense, when a song is played in the room. Music is powerful, and if you disagree, listen to a song on the radio that you heard when you were driving to school on your first day, or a song that you heard when you were picking up that girl for that dance and had that first kiss. Music is so powerful, that just a beat or a lyric in a song can bring memories, the sweetest of memories, some that can only be remembered through the sweetest of songs.
ReplyDeleteI think folk songs are a great example of folk knowledge! In the specific case of African-American work songs, they're an awesome example of tradition passed down orally and a blending of different cultures. Cool connection: there's actually a YouTube video of a prison crew in Texas singing a traditional work song (watch it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oms6o8m4axg). Even after slavery ended, this oral tradition continued in African American culture.
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