Carillon

I got a chance to go to up the Lurie bell tower on North Campus today! Qi, one of my classmates, invited me up there today to listen to watch him play, so I went up there to watch. (Sorry I don't have any pictures. I didn't want to look like a n00b compared to the people who were used to it. If I get another chance to go up there, I definitely will, though.).

The view from the top of the bell tower was awesome! Watching them play the carillon was amazing. It's like a ginormous piano that you use your fists to play, and with pedals like the organ. Watching them play was really interesting, especially as the instructor gave some critique afterwards. [Qi just sent me this link. Listen!]

I'm not a musically gifted or knowledgeable person, and I'm not going to pretend to be, but the carillon teacher said something today that really rang a bell in my head (see what I did there?).

Music is meant to be interpreted, not just played as is.

The carillon teacher talked about how after Beethoven, there was some sort of switch in mentality about music, and that the music composed was then viewed as the gold standard, and you weren't supposed to deviate from it. However, the music before that (the teacher mentioned Bach's music) was more obviously written to be interpreted. The instructor basically implied (I think) that when playing the music, it's important to  capture the original spirit of the song. It's really too bad I don't actually know the musical terms for it. Qi played a cool song, and one of the critiques that the instructor had for him was to play it more "playfully", as it was originally intended. This is one of those things that seems hard to read from just notes on a page, but thinking about the composer's original intent sheds more light on the music. o

Similarly, the history of the Bible (and all things historical) are meant to be interpreted.

Last week in GIG, Pastor Bob talked about how the books of history in the Bible were written with the intent of being interpreted, and that there was an original spirit and intent behind the writing of the history books of Scripture. It's foolish to assume that historical writings were written without some agenda, hidden or not, in mind. All history is interpreted. However, we now think of history as science, totally neutral. [I'm not advocating loose Biblical interpretation. You know I wouldn't.]

I just found it interesting that this shift from interpretive to "scientific" exists in music, as it does in reading history and Scripture.

I don't really know music, so I hope I wasn't just speaking gibberish. It was just cool to see a link between what I learned recently with music.


[This post sucked. Sorry. It's late.]