This week we got a whole bunch of music to listen to. It exposed me to a whole realm of music that I'd never heard before, as well as different renditions of songs that I had heard before.
A common theme of many of these songs is "going home" and what happens when it's all over... "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Since I've Laid My Burden Down"... which is what inspired my art for the week. The general sense of a better future life.
"Since I've Laid My Burden Down" was my favorite song of the week: there was something about it that really resonated inside me... Not sure what or why...
In one of the YouTube videos Tony posted, someone said that "a moan turned into a song." I found that to be symbolic. Despite the conditions and the context in which they were sung (the cause of the moan), there is a positive mood to all the songs. The songs were a way to persevere and an effort to make the work they had to do easier. The ability to do this is arguably one of the most impressive things about all of these songs (again with the positive psych).
Of course, not all the songs were like that. For example, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Moteherless Child" reflects more closely what Leroi Jones was talking about when he explained that Africans were brought to the US to be slaves where their culture and their basic human rights were completely disregarded.
Yet all the songs revealed quite a bit about the history. As Leroi Jones puts it, "the music was an orchestrated, vocalized, hummed, chanted, blown, beaten, scatted, corollary confirmation of history ... The music was explaining the history as the history was explaining the music."
Below is the artwork from last week:
A common theme of many of these songs is "going home" and what happens when it's all over... "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Since I've Laid My Burden Down"... which is what inspired my art for the week. The general sense of a better future life.
"Since I've Laid My Burden Down" was my favorite song of the week: there was something about it that really resonated inside me... Not sure what or why...
In one of the YouTube videos Tony posted, someone said that "a moan turned into a song." I found that to be symbolic. Despite the conditions and the context in which they were sung (the cause of the moan), there is a positive mood to all the songs. The songs were a way to persevere and an effort to make the work they had to do easier. The ability to do this is arguably one of the most impressive things about all of these songs (again with the positive psych).
Of course, not all the songs were like that. For example, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Moteherless Child" reflects more closely what Leroi Jones was talking about when he explained that Africans were brought to the US to be slaves where their culture and their basic human rights were completely disregarded.
Yet all the songs revealed quite a bit about the history. As Leroi Jones puts it, "the music was an orchestrated, vocalized, hummed, chanted, blown, beaten, scatted, corollary confirmation of history ... The music was explaining the history as the history was explaining the music."
Below is the artwork from last week:
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