Japan...Vietnam..Not the same thing, but oh well.

So, while I was reading the chapter from Noise/Music entitled "Japan," I was reminded a lot of the performances I've seen via VHS from Vietnam. Although I've never really considered what I heard to be noise I could definitely see a connection, especially when describing the performer/audience interaction.

Let me first explain what I've seen. Everytime I go to my Ba Ngaoi's (grandmother's) place, she always has these VHSs or DVDs playing that she got in Vietnam. The music I hear is typically far from genius and very poppy in characteristic---and I don't jut mean the music, but also the clothes, the audience interaction and the movement. Talk about cheesy. But, whatever, the audience seems to dig it. What cracks me up the most is that a lot of the time they will sing covers of American songs and I can almost swear that the singer doesn't even really know what they are singing...to them, they are just words.---And this brings me back to the Noise/Music chapter, entitled "Inept."

Everybody wants to be a rockstar.

It seems to me that this genre and culture of music that I've seen throughout my life--not of my own willingness--demonstrates a demographic that I, perhaps ignorantly, mimic along with my sister. It's so easy to make fun of the fact that other than the singer there are no musicians playing typical instruments on stage, yet the crowd is going crazy. At the same time, however, I have to admire the fact that the interaction between the stage and the audience is one of two-way admiration. It doesn't seem to matter in the end how the performance is done...the fans are there and they are there to support the performer. This support system is such a huge part of why musicians do what they do, whether inept or not...it works.

I am not a bass.

So...I've been working on my next piece which an an a capella cover of "Wine Red" by The Hush Sound. It's proving to be harder than I had anticipated to do all the different parts--soprano, alto, tenor, bass...and the solos. Sometimes the bass is just toooo low for me to even hit an octave above! It's causing some difficulties but I WILL get this done this weekend...and it's going to be great.
I've had a couple of other ideas as well, but am having trouble executing those as well. My other idea was the take the piano piece that I'm currently working on for my applied music course and added some other elements to it. I've always loved classical piano and I think it'd be really cool to take a classical piece on the piano and then add some synths or some beats (or both) to it.
My other idea was to record the songs that I've written in the past and also add some new elements to those as well. As the end of the semester is approaching I'm realizing that I'm running out of time to accomplish the goal that I had in mind, which was to create a compilation of various songs that I had worked on. So far I only have one completed piece because I've worked on so many things that I ended up just scrapping because I didn't think they were good enough. Maybe I'm being to picky.