Posts

Music and Society - How Music Serves a Societal Role

Image
                 Artists That Served a Societal Role           AJR and Juice WRLD have been favorite artists of mine for the last two years, not only because they make really hype songs, but because their lyrics define life in a way that everyone can relate to. To me, music has always been a vibe thing, a sort of tool to emphasize emotions that you might be feeling at a certain time. But then I realize that that ability to emphasize emotion in a way that many people can relate to is what makes an artist great. Juice WRLD created music that a lot of people could vibe with when they were sad, but AJR makes music that defines seasons of growth in life, songs about moving out of your parent's house and making a name for yourself. The role of music in society is to articulate emotions and ideas in ways that bring people together and help them to realize that despite our differences we all aren't so different after all. LUCID DREAMS  - Juice WRLD         Lucid Dreams was created by

Music and the Fictive Dream 2: Dragon Ball Super

Image
Ultra Instinct Theme             Yeah yeah, so I like dragon ball. If you haven't seen the original series, make a point to go and watch it sometime, because that is some quality content. The Dragon Ball storyline and creation all came from Akira Toriyama, but the art behind the manga and the anime is from Toyotarou. Toriyama has created the Dragon Ball content all the way from the original to where it is now in Dragon Ball Super. The last episode of the anime was released on March 25, 2018. The content of this series has Japanese origin of course, but it is now available in English for the manga and for the anime.  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -           The piece of the show that I am analyzing today is the Ultra Instinct Theme , created by the Toyotarou studio, released in 2018. This musical masterpiece is the quintessence of the storyline. This music plays when Goku is able to master the most difficult form known even to the gods. It is when this music plays that the most

Music and the Fictive Dream: Legend of Zelda

Image
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

The Role of the Performer - The Piano Guys

Image
  The Piano Guys have been an all-time favorite of mine for almost ten years. They started in a piano shop in Utah and released their debut album in 2011. Technically they are the duet of pianist Jon Schmidt and cellist Steven Sharp Nelson, but Paul Anderson is the man who owned the piano shop where it all started and was the first to record the music and post them on youtube. Anderson was just looking for a new way to market pianos, he thought that viral videos would help with the marketing process. In his search for internet fame, Jon Schmidt literally walked in one day to ask if he could practice on one of the pianos, and the rest is history. Schmidt had known Nelson for a while, and along with Nelson's talent and creativity, the group quickly became an internet sensation. They were known for beautifully blending popular music pieces together in ways that leave the audience in awe, using mainly the cello and piano of course.  Kung Fu Piano: cello ascends This song has always bee

A Musical Trip to Italy

Image
                                                                                               Now I've never been to Italy, and honestly, I've never really looked into Italian music. But today I decided to do a little research and find out what kind of stuff the Italians bring to the musical world. And I've gotta say, what I found was honestly pretty cool. It's a bit outside of the style that I usually listen to, but I still really enjoyed it. -----      The first song that I listened to is called En Cambio No by Laura Pausini, released in Italy in 2008. The song was very very pretty, I really enjoyed how calm and relaxing the beginning was and was then pleasantly surprised by the emotional rock sound that came about afterward. The piece as a whole was very moving, even if I didn't understand what she was saying.       A musical element that I noticed within this piece was consonance in the melody near the beginning of the song, Pausini's voice blended so smoo

Evolutions in Electronic Music

Image
       While I don't listen to it as much anymore, there was a point in life where I listened to a lot of EDM. The Monstercat music label was the one I enjoyed most, but there were certainly others. One thing that I enjoyed most about EDM was listening to it change gradually, from a sort of nerdy hype music to the more alternative pop music that shows up on the radio every once in a while these days.       One of my favorite artists, the Pegboard Nerds, had a bit of a transition over the time that I listened to them. Pegboard Nerds is a Norwegian duo that has been releasing music since 2011. The first song that I listened to and really enjoyed by them was the song Swamp Thing , which was released in 2015 from Norway. Swamp Thing  was, and still is, such a goofy and hype song, the kind of song that is something you jam out to with your friends, but definitely don't play around a group of people you don't know very well. Compare this to the more recent song by them, titled To

Musical Analysis of I'll Keep On

Image
  I'll Keep On - NF          This song is absolutely beautiful to me. Written by Nathan Feuerstein in 2015, and released in America, it was a part of the album Mansion that got Number 62 on the Billboard 200. The best part of the song in my opinion is actually how the melody gets more and more complicated in a way, going from conjunct to disjunct, it starts as something someone could sing pretty easily, but then transitions into something relatively difficult to sing or play. The song also transitions from singing solo to utilizing multiple singers and creating chords, in a way the piano plays chords in the background too, creating a wonderful wall of sound. This sort of building could also be described as the song transitioning from a monophonic texture to a homophobic texture, or from single note usage to multiple note usage. Also, over the course of the song, there was a building of volume from piano to almost a forte, because as the song continued it became more and more powerf