Final Project: For The Glory of Adoring You

 My final project is called "For The Glory of Adoring You" and it is a sort of musical collage/montage of clips from my Senior Recital. The goal with this project was to string together lyrics and musical passages from songs I performed in my senior recital that paint a picture of what music means to me. The lyrics and songs I picked were:

"...and the world opened wide, and the world was inside of me."
- No One Else, Dave Malloy

"Und meine Seele spannte weit ihre flügel aus, flog durch die stillen lande, als flöge sie nach Haus."
- Mondnacht (Moon night), Robert Schumann

Translation: And my soul stretched its wings out far, flew through the still lands, as if it were flying home.

"Un rêve que dieu bénit, où l'âme à l'âme s'unit, oh! J'en veux faire le nid où ton cœur se pose."
- Rêve d'amour (A Dream of Love), Gabriel Fauré

Translation: A dream that God blesses, where souls are united, oh! I wish to make of it the nest where your heart might remain.

"If she on earth, no more I see, my life will quickly leave me."
- Black is the color of my true love's hair, John Jacob Niles

"Amando penerò, ma sempre v'amerò, sì, sì, nel mio penare, penerò, v'amerò."
- Per la gloria d'adorarvi (For the glory of adoring you), Giovanni Bononcini

Translation: In love I will suffer yet always I will love you. Yes, yes, in my suffering, I will suffer, I will love you.

The title of the work comes from the title of the last song. In a way, I was very fortunate to have this project the same semester as my senior recital, as music is the language I feel most comfortable expressing myself with. Music is my world, and how I share my soul with the world. It's also how I connect with people around me. I consider it to be the one thing I cannot live without, even with all of the street it causes me. When picking these lines, I wanted to use not just lyrics that fit those feelings, but also songs I love performing (although that was most of the 15 songs I performed in my recital). My relationship with music and performance is something that I have explored a lot throughout this semester through my self-portrait projects, and many of those concepts are brought back in this project. My photo series was about the struggle and process of creating music, and my collage brought the idea of using performance to connect with other people.

This semester, I have also taken a Music History course, and in the latter half of the semester, we covered composers from the 20th century. As technology improved with music, the use of recording and playback is something that some composers included in their work intentionally, as opposed to as just a method of preservation. Composer Edgard Varèse took this to a new level by creating a piece that was fully controlled musical playback with controlled visual playback. This work was called Poème électronique, and while my project doesn't have the same level of detail and abstraction as Varèse's, the idea of fixed musical and visual playback as a wholly new musical composition was something I took from Varèse.