音楽を書いてる (Part 1)/writing about music (Part 1)

Hello,

How are you? Do you remember the four pieces of music I played for you in class? We'll do something more with them now! This is a Part 1 post - Part 2 will follow.

I would like you to go through your paragraphs about those pieces of music, and listen to the first two pieces of music again - and this time to click on some videos of the first two artists whose pieces of music I played. I also have information links you can click on about these artists. 

Would these video images, and reading about these musicians, change your ideas about what you wrote? 

First - below is a video sound file of the first piece of music you heard - Jacques Loussier and his version of J.S. Bach's "Siciliano in G Minor."  

If you want to know more about Jacques Loussier, click here for a Wikipedia article (in Japanese) about him. 

Next - here is the second piece of music you heard - Moondog's "Dog Trot."

Here is a video file of this piece of music:

If you would like to learn more about Moondog, click here for the Wikipedia article (日本語) about him. 

What do you think of these artists? Does seeing the artists' pictures or some image connected to the music, or reading about them on Wikipedia, change your own images of the music? Write comments on this blog post about what you think!

Hope you enjoyed listening to them again.

See you next time!

Image: "Old Piano Keyboard" (courtesy of Sura Nualpradid)/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Words on Music (Part 1): Jacques Loussier - Siciliano in G Minor (J.S. Bach)

Hello to all my students,

Image "A Lot Of Pink Brown And Orange Dry Leaves Lying On The Ground" courtesy of sritangphoto/FreeDigitalImages.com

How are you in this new year? I hope you had a relaxing holiday. Here I will introduce a new collection of your writing called Words on Music. It's your writing on the pieces of music that you did before. 

I hope you can enjoy this writing again, and I hope it can help you in your final writing projects. I was very impressed with what many of you did in writing about music. 

To save time, I will only publish a selection of your writing, and not all of it, but will try to show some good examples of your writing. So here are some samples of what you wrote on the first piece of music - Jacques Loussier's version of Bach's Siciliano in G Minor. Here is the music from YouTube once again: 

Video uploaded from YouTube. I do not own the rights to this video. No copyright infringement intended. 

It is uploaded strictly for classroom use.

I have edited them as little as possible, to keep your thoughts and feelings as true to yourselves as possible. Here they are:

This piece of music is such a sad image. I can image a story from this song. The girl agonizes about something. She wants an answer something. But it doesn’t seem to find. So she decided to go for a walk. After a while, she saw a forest and a lake. There are many little birds and creatures. And she thought it is great for living things all over the world.

I associate this with a young clergyman walking in the morning. He is in a big church and he is exposed to alight from glasses. However, his face looks not happy as if he has an anxiety. He cannot afford notice calling his name by bishop. The road in church is too short for him to walk and think so he will go out soon. 

This is a strong image is a bar. In bar, I am drinking wine with my boyfriend. We enjoy spending time along together, and we drank a lot of wine. Time passed very slowly. In that place, so we have a very relaxing time. That day is our anniversary, so I was given the present by him. I was very glad to get this present from him, and I give a present for him. He was glad too. I felt like our relationship got deeper.

I felt both sadness and pleasure from this music and I imagined the story about two children, one is boy, other is girl. They are playing together happily in somewhere, but it is imagination of boy grew up, so it is past of this boy. He remembers, but his memory never came back. What happened to boy and girl, he only knows. It is sadness I felt from this music. 

This music is romantic. I imagine two people, a man and a woman. They are eating at quality restaurant. They drink wine. In their circumference, there is the person dancing to music. A man stare her in the face. They are in love each other. He cannot convey love to her. She feels irritated because she wants to tell her feeling to him early, too. They continue silence for a while. When the music stop, he says “I love you.”

This is quiet and elegant. The main sound is a piano. This is repetition but I thought that music is to listen to again and again. When I studied to listen in this music, I will be able to learning to relax. I often listen to this music in coffee shop or otolaryngology. I think the story of this music is that one man is listening to this music quietly while sitting in a chair in a café in a small port town. The man was dumped by women. He was shocked enough to drop.