Extra Credit – Spotify Premium & New Music Tuesday

Spotify has been around for a while now and is one of the most popular music streaming services in the world. I love Spotify but I haven’t always loved it. When Spotify first came on the market I used to listen to Pandora Radio because Pandora was one of the few music streaming services around. When Spotify came out I hated it, they had a limited selection and the premium service was expensive and I thought it was a waste of money. A few years go by and one of my friends is telling me how he loves Spotify and how that is all uses to listen to music. He mentioned that he loves using the app and that the premium service is very good if you are driving a lot. So he had me intrigued to give Spotify another shot. He told me about their Spotify Premium service and how it only costs him $5 per month for the student service. I was shocked at how much cheaper the premium service had gotten. I was also shocked at how large the music library had gotten. I’ve been using Spotify Premium for almost three years now and I absolutely love it. I am able to find almost any song in whatever genre I need.

The best thing that I love about Spotify is a playlist they feature call New Music Tuesday where every Tuesday, Spotify has a playlist of all the newest music releases in popular music. I have experienced so many good new releases of music in genres that I normally do not listen to. I love listening to this playlist on my walks to class in the mornings. If you are interested in signing up for Spotify Premium, you can do so at: https://www.spotify.com/us/student/.

Extra Credit – Opening My Mind to Music

I used to be very closed minded when I came to different genres of music. In high school or use despise country, rap, heavy metal and some pop music. I wanted to be a classical musician and would spend much of my time listening to the local classical radio station and I would be quick to turn my nose up at other genres of music because I didn’t want to spend my time listening to “lesser forms of so called music.” There were only a handful of popular songs on the radio that I would listen to and everything else was rubbish to me. I considered rap to be more noise than music or at the very least, a weird form of poetry. This was my way of thinking for all of high school and for about two years after that.

I’m a music education major it didn’t occur to me until a couple years ago that as a musician, I am doing myself, my art form, and my future career as a musician a great disservice by being closed minded to so many other musical genres. Listening to Spotify is one of the ways that I began to discover different genres. I would listen to different playlists on my drives back and forth from central Florida and also walking around campus between classes. I’ve now started listening to more genres over the past two years that I never would have listened to had it not been for music streaming services like Spotify or Pandora. Opening my mind to a broader range of music has helped me become a better musician.

DRONES – Album Review

It’s finally here!

That’s right. If you haven’t heard, Muse’s latest album is out and available for purchase and streaming on Spotify and Spotify Premium. I wrote about my favorite music in an earlier blog post which was about Muse being my favorite band to listen to. I and many others have been waiting for this new album for a while now.

After listening to the album two times and reading the lyrics online, I have a greater understanding of what this album as a whole is all about. It is one of those instances where I would highly recommend listening to the entire album and following along with lyrics, if they are hard to understand at times, because Muse has a way of putting so much thought into each of their albums and this one is filled with so many subtle nuances that it would be extremely hard to recognize a lot of them if you do not read deeper into the lyrics of each song.

 

There are twelve tracks on the album. Two of the tracks are dialog and they each act as an intro to the songs that they precede. Track two, Drill Sergeant, is the intro to track three Psycho. In Drill Sergeant, the dialog is of a drill sergeant giving instruction to a recruit. The track is supposed to represent the military recruiting individuals that they can break and turn them into “a f**king psycho” that will follow and command given and not questions it. For example, being told to kill someone and not thinking twice about it.

In tracks seven and eight, JFK and Defector, the “f**king psycho” depicted in tracks two and three is now beginning to think about what he or she is doing and is beginning to question everything they have been ordered to do and is now becoming a defector.

The Globalist is the penultimate song on the album and it’s also the longest song on the album at just over ten minutes. This song and the final one on the album, Drones, ties everything in the album together. The Globalist is also the long awaited sequel of Citizen Erased from their 2001 album “Origin of Symmetry”, which is about the rise and fall of a dictator or person of power. In The Globalist, the betrayed, is a person that has risen to power and is about to crush all of his or her protagonists that are trying to overthrow him by the most extreme measures. In the middle of the song after the line, “I have given you the code”, you hear sound clips that are played at a faster speed and they sound inaudible to make out. Supposedly, Muse embedded a code in this song. If played backwards at a slower speed, you will be able to hear a line from each of the previous songs on the album. After that happens, a countdown is played and the mood of the song shifts as the dictator realizes he’s destroyed everything and there is no one left to love and now he is alone. One of the things I love about this song is that Matthew Bellamy uses parts of Edward Elgar’s Nimrod Variatons in the music.

Drones, the final track of the album is the most unique in that it is entirely a Capella singing by Matthew Bellamy himself. It’s in a four part descant style and the lyrics to the song are very dark and somber and it creates an almost eerie tone to song. At the end of the song, Bellamy ends the album on a plagal cadence by singing “amen”.

FSU Summer Band

On May 28th, 2015, I attended the FSU Summer Band concert that was held in the Owen Sellers Amphitheater. It has been a tradition for many years for the College of Music to put on “Pops” themed concerts in the Owen Sellers Amphitheater during the summer and the concerts attract many loyal local residents and newcomers as concertgoers. “Pops” is short for popular and the tag started to be used when major symphony orchestras would play concerts in the summer during their off season. The Boston Pops and the Cincinnati Pops are just two examples. The orchestras would play popular music at these concerts and they would typically be held outdoors in a casual environment that the entire family would enjoy. The popular music included music from Broadway musicals, movies and big band jazz charts. The FSU Summer Band did just that!

I have a good bit of knowledge about the band itself because I am a student in the College of Music and most of performers of that were on stage are friends and classmates of mine. The FSU Summer Band is unique in that Dr. Patrick Dunnigan, who leads the ensemble, let’s students from his conducting class conduct pieces on the concert. The student conductors get rehearse a piece with the band and also conduct it on the concert. If I recall correctly, there were eight student conductors on the concert I attended.

Of the pieces on the concert a few stood out to me that were my favorites. The first of which was Amazing Grace by Frank Ticheli. I’ve played in band for many years and have had the opportunity to perform this very piece and this performance was excellent. I like this piece because Frank Ticheli takes a familiar spiritual and writes a very moving piece for band with it. The piece opens and closes with a saxophone solo playing the melody and then the melody is passed around to different sections of the band as the piece goes on. The second piece that I really liked on the concert was Prelude and Fugue in G minor by J. S. Bach. The main reason I enjoyed this piece is because I’ve listened and played a lot Bach’s music. This piece in particular is in the key of g minor for 99% of the piece until the very last chord. The piece ends on a major chord or the tonic. Some people like to describe the difference between major and minor keys with happy sounding for major and sad or dark sounding for minor. I like it because the piece mostly sounds somber and eerie and the last chord brightens up the entire piece.

The highlight of the concert for me was when the band played Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Finale by John Williams. I am a huge fan of the Star Wars Saga and I love hearing the music. The best moment of the piece came at the very end when the timpani player came in so loud that it surprised some of the players in the band. It was definitely a great finish to a wonderful concert!

United States of Eurasia

I must say this was no simple task. Nonetheless, I was able to narrow down my favorite music to one genre, alternative rock. I do listen to many other genres but I love listening to alternative rock. My favorite song in this genre is United States of Eurasia by Muse, from their album, The Resistance. I’ve listened to Muse since they came out with their 2004 album, Absolution. I was completely entranced by what I was listening to and I could not get enough of it.

United States of Eurasia is my favorite mainly because of how the song is structured and the story it tells. It begins with Matthew Bellamy, the lead vocalist/guitar/piano/awesomeness, playing piano softly. Then enters a STRING SECTION for crying out loud! When I first hears it, I thought to myself, “Oh man, how can this get any better…”, and then it does…The music does a complete 180 degree turn and ramps up to a “jam out, head-banging, smash-a-thon” is the only way I could describe it. When the loud section ends, the music settles into a mellow tune titled “Collateral Damage”. This tune includes a variation of Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne In E-Flat Major, Op.9 No.2  as well as the sound of children playing in the background.

My thoughts on the story behind United States of Eurasia from what I’ve read about it and the lyrics is that it is a dream of a utopia society where everyone lives in peace, united under one nation in order to survive. It’s about how wars are killing us all and that if nothing is done about it, we will never live is peace. The dream never come true. If you listen closely to the end of the song, you will hear the sound of aircraft flying over. The sound is of fighter jets that are carrying atomic bombs to crush any last remaining hope of peace.