Wednesday, 7 March 2007

This was the last class for this session. Classes will continue again on April 11th. We will be in a new location in the South Annex (room SA 302) of Seattle Central Community College. As last week we only had Nara and Izumi but it was a very fun session!

At the beginning of class Izumi mentioned that she likes classical music best and is classically trained on piano. I told her that the Seattle Symphony has a program specially for people in their 20's and 30's called Wolfgang.

Nara talked about a song that drove people to kill themselves. She wasn't sure which song it was but did a bunch of searching and found out it was "Gloomy Sunday". There is a whole Wikipedia entry about the song which explains it and some urban myths around it. Here are the lyrics and a fan-created video set to the version sung by Billie Holiday (bio).

We talked about how music has such an strong emotional effect on people. Nara and Izumi agreed that music is a universal language, that it evokes emotions in people regardless of their language or culture. For example, a sad classical piece will make a person of any culture or mother tongue feel melancholic. Izumi said music expresses more than words.

Izumi also noted that Beethoven had a sad life story and that his music is sorrowful. Yet when she plays the music she feels happy. She says that "inside" the music is pretty. Nara agreed that when she plays music she feels happy.

Nara wondered how someone could be so affected by music that the actually commit suicide! Izumi mentioned that music audiences in her home town of Nagoya have the reputation of being very passionate, that they often go onto the stage when performers are playing.

Nara said that she finds kabuki much easier to follow when watching it live than western opera. The main reason for this is that kabuki uses make-up, masks and physical movements to tell the story more clearly than western opera, which relies heavily on the words.

Since this is the last class for 5 weeks I suggested to Izumi and Nara that we go see the regular Tuesday night flamenco show at the Capitol Club next week. They are interested in seeing it. It brought up the question of what is "latin" music versus "flamenco". I referred to an earlier one of my classes where we discussed "flamenco" versus "salsa".