Music and Me (Blog assignment 1)

 Intro:

Hello fellow musicians! For those of you who I have not yet met or do not know well I am Ryan Reynolds a Clarinet Performance and Composition major. I was born in Lynchburg Virginia but have lived in Spartanburg since I was three years old and have been around Converse for various musical endeavors since the 6th grade. I am a commuter student and live at home with my mom, dad, and Sister pictured here.

 In addition to music I enjoy running, playing (overly complex) board games, swing dancing and love learning about pretty much anything that falls into the category of nerdiness, particularly in the fields of philosophy, aeronautics and U.S. history. Oddly when I learn more about these very disconnected subjects I always find some useful piece of information that helps my music making. 

OK, enough stuff about boring old me.

1. A Piece I like (a lot): 

I have been playing music for a long time now and love learning he intricacies of the theory and philosophical basis that produced many of the greatest works of all time. I have been obsessed with (ask anyone I've talked to in the past month if you don't believe me) a piece I discovered just 2(ish) months ago that namely, Jean Sibelius's magnificent symphony no. 5, particularly the 3rd movement. Sibelius has an interesting way of developing his melodies by cycling them in and out of the forefront as can be seen here, however the main thing that makes this piece stand out is the big beautiful French horn line starting at 1:25, the first time I heard it I almost cried, hopefully you will as well.

You can't deny that you liked it at least a little, right?

ok now to something....Different 

2. What I would pick as a walk up song.

I experienced indecision of great magnitude over this one, I listen to almost exclusively instrumental music which is not particularly well suited for walking up and therefore my pick will take a bit of explanation. Despite the fact that my dad was literally a baseball coach my only real experience with baseball (and therefore a walk-up song) was wii-sports. SO in honor of one of my favorite big bands (they won a grammy with video game covers!), my weird love for video game scores, and my lack of formal experience with hitting airborne spheroids with conveniently weighted metal tubes, I present the 8Bit Big Band's jazz cover of the "Wii sports theme". Don't hate on it 'til you try it!

Now that you've had your daily allotment of childhood flashbacks of getting beaten at virtual baseball by siblings we shall move on. 

3. Something I don't really like all that much (or at all)

I am very narrow in the scope of what I listen to myself but am generally neutral to a lot of music even if I personally don't listen to it. The one genre I have never felt any connection to is rap, probably due to my overarching non-conformity and its prominence in pop culture. Despite this I would not even know where to start in finding a specific piece I don't like so I will try another method. My sister often plays songs in the car which I find a general distaste for so I asked her for something she remembers me not liking. The consensus she came to is that Taylor Swift was at the top of my list of unfavorites, which is probably not wrong as I am neither a middle school girl nor in need of bad relationship advice an consequently can't relate to this type of music very much. Here is an example.

Yes Taylor, you are the problem, it's you... Anyway

4. Bonus Round:

Ok, as many of you know I am very...enthusiastic...about composition and showing everyone random things I've written. And in light of that vein after seeing Dr V's post I am going to share one of my own pieces, you don't have to like it, I won't care. This particular piece is based off of a place (the Milliken arboretum) where I ran cross country and track practices for approximately 7 years. When you run at the same place for that long you begin to internalize how you portray the various changes in season through music, which is exactly what I did here. This is a set of variations each representing a different season starting in and cycling back to winter. The other cool thing about this piece is it uses several designated motifs to indicate specific places or things, these come and go throughout the piece making an interesting soundscape (I like that word) of sorts. Hope you enjoy "The Milliken Variations". Bonus points if you can tell me some of the external references I used (both in form and thematically) when composing this.

Thanks for reading this intro to my personal taste in music, hope you found something of value in it!