Large Ensmeble Repertoire DatabaseBelow is a list of every large ensemble piece I have preformed since high school. The list is organized by performance year. Classical Solo Repertoire databaseBelow is a list of every Solo piece I have preformed since college. The list is organized by performance year.
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While my time spent in the JMU School of Music has been fantastic, it struck me very hard to hear we would be canceling all public performances for my last semester here. This however had brought about a unique opportunity. Since we recorded every piece we played I was able to get a documentation of all my performances for my last semester using the high quality recording equipment the Forbes Center for the Performing Arts had to offer. Below you can see recordings of the JMU Jazz Ensemble, The Madison Sax Ensemble, as well as the Marching Royal Dukes. Enjoy! This document is being updated as the School of Music releases the performances weekly. JMU Jazz EnsembleVoodoo Chile - jimi HendrixMain Stem - Duke EllingtonAhunk Ahunk - Thad JonesJordu - Duke JordanMalinke's Dance - Marty Ehrlich arr. Chuck DotasMadison Saxophone Society Invierno Porteno - Astor Piazzolla arr. Will PeakMarching Royal DukesThe World Turned Upside DownHere will be a feed of me learning new instruments in order to better teach my classes in the future. I am a saxophonist, I have had little to none experience on other instruments before coming to college. Since my time in college I have been learning how to play, at an amiture level multiple instruments in the hopes of improving my teaching process in the future. Drums/PercussionLearning percussion has been very fun and very rewarding. The process of playing is a lot more difficult than it looks but when your in the learning process one can only help but have a good time. The biggest challenges for me has been dealing with all the adaptation from one instrument to the next. Each instrument is very specific in the way it needs to be played and it can be hard to remember it all. I feel like I am finally getting to the point to where its all overlapping. After spending 2 semesters in percussion tech, 1 semester in steel band, as well as bucket drumming this summer with the Jam Van. I really am starting to like playing percussion and I am seeing improvement. Piano and keyboardSince becoming a musician playing the piano has been an aspiration of mine to pickup as a second instrument for a long time. In my first two years studying in the JMU School of Music I had been required to take 4 very basic and fundamental piano courses to round me as a musician and teacher for the future. However, I did not think this was enough for me. I have desired a deep skill set for this beautiful instrument and I shall learn. It wasn't till the lockdown had hit until I had an elongated time to sit down and discover what the keyboard can really do. Since about March 2020 I have been spending 1-3 hours a day playing piano along with my regular 2 hours of saxophone practice. As I type this in December of 2020, I can say that my skills on the keyboard have drastically improved. In a video directly below you can see a recording of me play the popular jazz chart Have You Met Miss Jones? Playing chords, the melody, and shells chords in my right. I plan to keep on down this path so that sometime very soon I can use my piano skills to change the world. Love me do is a piece by the Beatles that I decided to arrange for orff instruments because it is melodically simple but is still a very exciting piece and brings a lot of cool harmonies to the ear. I have a variety of difficulties in the parts so the students who want different challenges can get them. I also have a fun improvised part that allows the students to challenge their creativity. I would like to if writing this in a lesson plan have the students write their own lyrics in the end and perform it for the class. What this was is that we had an opportunity to perform music at the voting polls on campus for the students. We signed up in groups and would come during a time slot and preform. I really liked the idea but their were a few things that were difficult to deal with. The first one was the place we were given, we weren't actually given a very good place to set up, in fact we weren't even aloud inside which sucked for all of our instruments. I was frustrated because we weren't really advertising a specific candidate so I didn't see why they couldn't let us in. Next the parking and getting equipment there was difficult, I ended up parking halfway across campus and running with my instrument because I couldn't park in the regular parking due to the basketball game. Seeing both of these made it logistically a nightmare for me. Lastly I didn't think anybody was even listening to us because everybody was either inside or walking by us to go inside. This was a good idea but I think JMU voting needs to do more on their end so we can do more on our end in this. As for what did civic engagement through music and its meaning to me. I think this has a lot of deep planted roots. I heard flutes playing yankee doodle and other people playing we didn't start the fire, I ended up just playing some jazz with a group. I really wasn't sure what to play, I wish in the future I would have a little more time to put this stuff together and plan so we can figure out songs and think about our groups. I think we gave it a good shot but this still needs serious adjusting to next year. I have a single picture from our group playing at this event posted below.
This Project was actually really fun, we ended up doing a decent job I believe. One of the issues we had to learn how to overcome was making a drum pattern, it was a difficult job and all three of us had little experience doing this, luckily I did some reflecting on what I learned in my music technology class and was able to figure it out and design a really cool drum beat to fit the song. We had some trouble at first also when we ended up recording the first time, we recorded without headphones and it caused all the recordings we made before to feed into the microphone and it started to echo and sound awkward. So a way of overcoming that is that we re did a bunch of the parts but with headphones. If I was given another opportunity from the start I would have saved a bunch of time and did this the first time. I also would have wrote out some of the music so we could play it on our instruments also, this was something I really wanted to implement but we didn't have the time to write the parts out. My biggest issue when creating the video was actually that I wasn't in a lot of the video, I made the drum pattern which was a big part but other then that we didn't know what I could do, we then tried to implement a saxophone part, but that ended up not working because we didn't have music and I was playing a lot of wrong notes. So to solve this problem, I ended up doing some of the claps and some singing but mostly dancing in the singing video we did. It was difficult doing the singing part because a lot of it was outside of my range. If I had another opportunity I might have looked up some of the chord changes before hand which would result in a better fit of my saxophone playing and the mixture between the melody and my sound. This really helped me develop as a musician in the sense that I don't get a lot of experience preforming pop music, its something I enjoy because of how energetic it is but it scares me sometimes because I am not that crazy when I make music, but having this opportunity it really helped me develop a sense of how to cover one, and it was a really helpful experience, and I hope to have more like this in the future. I linked my partner Davina's portfolio post on here but I was unable to obtain Erica's. Where I am as a musician does not disappoint me but I feel like I really could improve so much more in the future and grow to do great things on my saxophone. Right now I have posted a video of me attempting to play multiple parts of a pop song I like After I ended up performing a little more in college, I learned a lot more about using technology in my music. I learned about recording and using things like makey makeys and other devices. I felt like this was something I really had to work for in my education to become a well rounded music technology user. How I have changed as a musician since I have arrived at JMU has been immeasurable. I feel like how much I improve year to year as a musician in general is incredible. Ways I felt I have improved a lot in since I have arrived at JMU is I have become way more efficient with my air usage and preparing music. I have also learned to play my scales and arpeggios much better. I still have much more time to learn at JMU and by the time I graduate, I am aiming to be playing some of the premier saxophone repertoire in various ensembles.
https://soundcloud.com/gwatsky Here Is an artist I have been listening to on my iCloud. His name is George Watsky, he's been very popular in the last years, in 2010 he peaked at number 7 on the hiphop charts, he is also known very well for his fast rapping and poetry. He lived in los Angeles, he usually is addressed as "Watsky" as his stage name, and he was born September 15, 1986 (age 30). He is a Rapper/Hip-hop genre strict artist. He is signed for a company called "Steel Wool Media". I will now be posting some links to some personal favorite songs, Ive posted some of his pictures and a poem above, I will also post a link to his website above as well. Five favorite songs: (Click on the Text to listen) These five songs I feel best represent his style and his feeling of music. His Forms/Patterns: The forms and patterns are really unexpected especially in his song "Don't Be Nice" Their are a lot of hard to follow rhythms, and I can't tell if they are improvised or not. It always ends up leaving me in the dust when I try and follow and find out where he is doing with the rhythm's. Sampled Content: The only thing I found was a video which I will post Instrumentation: I have found nothing of any source of him playing any instruments, Im assuming he at leasts plays piano if he can create his own tracks. Texture: His texture can be very dark, a lot of hidden messages in his rapping and poetry, it also has a very good sense of humor as well. Genre Specifics: He has a very good sense of style when it comes to his work, I know I couldn't throw down sick beats like that at least not until later in my life, I feel like he might have started in a different place and came to rap and hip-hop meaning, most people come from a poor family of some sort and climbed to the top with their rapping, but I feel that Watsky might have just started from his poetry class or something like that. I will now talk about points as a musician that I noticed and some key points Id follow doing the same thing as Watsky has done. Thematic Content: This is the focus of his Genre, his theme. I felt that in his situation I wouldn't be the same genre as him so our themes would not be similar at all. I feel that this doesn't change much because I could still develop very strong bonds between his style and mine, I feel I could me more self expressive as he was and more independent as a individual, musician. Meaning and Message: He has a bunch of personal experiences when it comes to his rapping and he always finds a way to imbed it into his tracks, he talks a lot about the negativity to him in his life in his one song "don't be nice" as well. Poetic elements: If you watch the video of his poem above I posted, Its a great example of his style of rapping and poetry , he has a funny side to all of his poems but, as you listen to them they get deeper and deeper and more serous. This is kind of cool because he makes a smooth transaction in style as he also does a great job of adding variety and adding both spectrums of the poetic world. This artist has taught me a few things, I learned that rap is actually a form of poetry which then I recall somebody telling me long ago that RAP is actually an acronym for "Rhythm And Poetry" which is kind of funny because its hidden in blind sight. I feel like he didn't have both of these talents start at the same time, I feel that one had to have influenced the other or something. I feel like a key element in the hip hop frame of music is, solid rhythm, like dead on creative drum or synth drum patterns that have verity to draw in the listening for the whole track.I felt like hip hop is a very open genre with very little boundary that allows you to express yourself in anyway need by based on feelings. I also feel like what I learned and also had a good future idea for a music learning assignment is, I would make my students make some sort of poem, the typical rhyming poem no hikues or anything of the sort, then I would have them make a rhythm with a few other students and read their poem at tempo over them, this would help my students with their time and let them expand their creativity, and if students feel this is a bit easy they could try more difficult drum patterns at a faster tempo with longer or more complicated words, this way every student has a chance to grow. My experience was great. We were all standing in the middle of the classroom just waiting to attempt at this new technology that had just been revealed to us, we used computers with the programs of garage band and we transferred files of us playing to documents and sent them to the professor where they then, put all of us on the same track and looped us all together to make an interesting track. We used the computers and we also used the smartboard to show the photos we were using to describe our sounds as we played beautiful music. The teachers were also playing along, Jon my grad assistant in that class i noticed about halfway through the experience he was also recording and sending in audio clips to add to the experience, they also helped us by giving us reliable ideas of how we would make the music work with the technology exactly.
This experience matters because you want to inspire creativity into music when I would become an ed director, the good in this experience is I had to learn how to do it not completely on my own but for the most part, and I learned more and I spent more time figuring stuff out on my own which is what I need to develop to be a teacher. The experience I had in class fostered my life long engagement in music by enlightening my music technology experiences and I also learned a bit of theory and how you can link of different instrument combinations to create still to be great music. The understandings and skills I had to draw were a bit basic like understanding how my instrument worked and how chords worked exactly. I had to work on some of my tuning interval because of how my interment is laid out I had to bend some pitches to match some of the other interments and fit into the sound of the group. The teachers tried to help us make sure we developed an understanding of these skills by having us work independently and learn for ourselves, we demonstrated our skills by sending files of us playing as a group and also by recording ourselves and transferring the file into a midi and sending it through a google doc. I feel that the next step may be some sort of small group song composition, I have gotten these ideas from the fact that we have been doing a lot of work with garage band recently and also since we ended up learning how to use notation software, all being key points of knowledge needed to start composing our own pieces. I also felt that working with the combination of interments from last class also helped with reveling the first step because I feel like we might be recording real players for some parts of our project to take something from what we do in the real world and put it into written and computer generated music. I feel as that possibly our class will begin by building some basic parts like so we did for our last "go make" assignment and then continue our steps from their in future classes. |
Brandon RhinehartHere I will post videos of the performances I partake in. Archives
March 2021
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