Original Music

It's music time!

Today we looked at adding live music to our performance piece. We all brought a folk song into the session to work with, we particularly liked the traditional folk song 'Rose'.

The lyrics are as follows:

Rose, rose, rose, rose. 

Shall I even see thee wed?

I'm married that I shall, 

when thou art dead. 

We sang it in a round and the melody in each line created soft sounding harmonies when sung out of time. 

As part of the World War One group we are looking a lot at women's rights throughout the war, inspired by the round in 'Rose' we looked at also creating a song that communicated a message about the strength and unity of women both in WW1 and in Afghanistan. 

As a musician I created a small chordal progression that the group liked that went:

E, C sharp minor, G sharp minor, B

E, C sharp minor, G sharp minor, B

E, E, G sharp minor, G sharp minor

A, A, B, E.

Each chord lasts one bar and because of the four bars in four lines it would work perfectly as a round. 

We then looked at creating lyrics. As a group we collected some key words that we thought were relevant in the production to all the women characters both in WW1 and the war in Afghanistan. 

Work strong woman, 

Change your war. 

Two worlds, one war. 

Two worlds, one war. 

We then improvised a melody line that would create harmonies when sang in a round. You can hear us singing it in a round in the first clip in the video. 

After this we looked at the context of the song and were it could go into the performance, we imagined it in the end scene were only one woman (Marlene) was left in the factory. Marlene would hum the tune by herself and the other woman's spirits would return singing the song. Because of this we wanted to take out the round and sing it with some harmonies. I added some haunting harmony lines of the tune to add to the atmosphere. You can hear this in the second clip in the video. 

To then put it in context we performed the piece in front of the rest of the class starting with a soloist and then adding the other women. You can hear that we have considerable slowed down the tempo so that the tune was more haunting and wistful. You can hear this on the third clip in the video. 

Finally it was suggested that just after the first explosion in the piece the World War One group would return as spirits humming the tune as the modern warfare group carry attending to an injured solider in Afghanistan. This is the fourth clip in the video. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1JdvOze--M

I think the music we created is ideal for the setting we want to create and I am very very excited to create more and expand on what we have already got to use original live music in our overall production. 

-Kate