ESSAY 2

Introduction

I chose this theme because I love music, music is an important part of my life. I can find a lot of feelings, colors, flavours with the different kind of music. All my life I have been related with music, a lot of members on my family are musicians and this is the reason I like music.

The music has many eras, since Prehistory to our days, all this music is very important, we can see the progress in genres like rock, tropical and latin.

But forgetting the old eras I´m going to talk about modern music, I decided to talk about modern music because it´s the music I have been listening all my life and I like it.

Modern Music

Music is an art form in which the medium is sound organized in time. Common elements of music are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives from Greek μουσική (mousike), "(art) of the Muses".

The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to individual interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within "the arts", music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art.
How to define music has long been the subject of debate; philosphers, musicians, and, more recently, various social and natural scientists have argued about what constitutes music. The definition has varied through history, in different regions, and within societies. Definitions vary as music, like art, is a subjectively perceived phenomenon. Its definition has been tackled by philosophers of art, lexicographers, composers, music critics, musicians, semioticians or semiologists, linguists, sociologists, and neurologists. Music may be defined according to various criteria including organization, pleasantness, intent, social construction, perceptual processes and engagement, universal aspects or family resemblances, and through contrast or negative definition.

To people in many cultures, music is inextricably intertwined into their way of life. Greek philosophers and ancient Indians defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies and vertically as harmonies. Common sayings such as "the harmony of the spheres" and "it is music to my ears" point to the notion that music is often ordered and pleasant to listen to. However, 20th-century composer John Cage thought that any sound can be music, saying, for example, "There is no noise, only sound."
Music is found in every known culture, past and present, varying wildly between times and places. Scientists now believe that modern humans emerged from Africa 160,000 years ago. Around 50,000 years ago these humans began to disperse from Africa reaching all the habitable continents. Since all people of the world, including the most isolated tribal groups, have a form of music, scientists conclude that music must have been present in the ancestral population prior to the dispersal of humans around the world. Consequently music must have been in existence for at least 50,000 years and the first music must have been invented in Africa and then evolved to become a fundamental constituent of human life.

A culture's music is influenced by all other aspects of that culture, including social and economic organization and experience, climate, and access to technology. The emotions and ideas that music expresses, the situations in which music is played and listened to, and the attitudes toward music players and composers all vary between regions and periods. "Music history" is the distinct subfield of musicology and history which studies music (particularly western art music) from a chronological perspective.

Classical music is a broad, somewhat imprecise term, referring to music produced in, or rooted in the traditions of art, ecclesiastical and concert music. A music is classical if it includes some of the following features: a learned tradition, support from the church or government, or greater cultural capital. Classical music is also described as complex, lasting, transcendent, and abstract. In many cultures a classical tradition coexisted with traditional or popular music, occasionally for thousands of years, and with different levels of mutual borrowing with the parallel tradition.

The field of music history, sometimes called historical musicology, is the highly diverse subfield of the broader discipline of musicology that studies the composition, performance, reception, and criticism of music over time. Historical studies of music are for example concerned with a composer's life and works, the developments of styles and genres (such as baroque concertos), the social function of music for a particular group of people (such as music at the court), or the modes of performance at a particular place and time (such as the performance forces of Johann Sebastian Bach's choir in Leipzig).

The first studies of Western musical history date back to the middle of the 18th century. G.B. Martini published a three volume history titled Storia della musica (History of Music) between 1757 and 1781. Martin Gerbert published a two volume history of sacred music titled De cantu de musica sacra in 1774. Gerbert followed this work with a three volume work Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra containing significant writings on sacred music from the third century AD onwards in 1784.

In the twentieth century, the work of Johannes Wolf and others developed studies in Medieval music and early Renaissance music. Wolf's writings on the history of musical notation are considered to be particularly notable by musicologists. Historical musicology has played a critical role in renewed interest in Baroque music as well as medieval and Renaissance music. In particular, the authentic performance movement owes much to historical musicological scholarship. Towards the middle of the twentieth century, musicology (and its largest subfield of historical musicology) expanded significantly as a field of study.
Concurrently the number of musicological and music journals increased to create further outlets for the publication of research. The domination of German language scholarship ebbed as significant journals sprang up throughout the West, especially America.

According to Richard Middleton, the strongest criticism of (historical) musicology has been that it by and large ignores popular music. Though musicological study of popular music has vastly increased in quantity recently, Middleton's assertion in 1990-- that most major "works of musicology, theoretical or historical, act as though popular music did not exist" -- holds true. Academic and conservatory training typically only peripherally addresses this broad spectrum of music’s, and many (historical) musicologists who are "both contemptuous and condescending are looking for types of production, musical form, and listening which they associate with a different kind of music...'classical music'...and they generally find popular music lacking".

Notational centricity also encourages "reification: the score comes to be seen as 'the music', or perhaps the music in an ideal form." As such, music that does not use a written score, such as jazz, blues, or folk, can become demoted to a lower level of status. As well, historical musicology has "an ideology slanted by the origins and development of a particular body of music and its aesthetic...It arose at a specific moment, in a specific context - nineteenth-century Europe, especially Germany - and in close association with that movement in the musical practice of the period which was codifying the very repertory then taken by musicology as the centre of its attention." These terminological, methodological, and ideological problems affect even works symphathetic to popular music. However, it is not "that musicology cannot understand popular music, or that students of popular music should abandon musicology".


· It is true that international music is now in hearts of most of the young people all over the world, and traditional music of one’s country is not given much importance. As I said music is music let it be international or traditional and all efforts should be made to preserve one’s own traditional music.

ESSAY

Music has been a great influence in the lives of many people through lyrics and rhythm. There are many different styles that can be performed by either a male or female. Music has been around for many years and is constantly changing. Music has been divided into six periods: Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Twentieth Century. Music is written in symbols that represent musical sounds. The system of written symbols is called Musical Notation. "The primary requirement of any notation is that it be suited to the music it represents." The simplest texture of music is monophonic or single voiced texture. Gregorian chant is an example of monophonic texture. All music up to about a thousand years ago, of which we have any knowledge, was monophonic.

Its melody is heard with out a harmonic accompaniment or other vocal lines and attention is focused on the single line. To this day the music of the Oriental world - of China, Japan, India, Java, Bali, and the Arab nations -is largely monophonic. Polyphonic or many-voiced texture is when two or more melodic lines are combined. Most Medieval polyphonic music is anonymous, though some composers were so important that their name was preserved along with their music. The polyphonic texture is based on counterpoint: the art and science of combining in a single texture two or more simultaneous melodic lines, each with a rhythmic life of its own. The development of counterpoint took place at a time when composers were mainly occupied with religious choral music, which was by its nature, many-voiced. Polyphony had to be written in a way that would indicate the rhythm and pitch precisely. It brought the emergence of regular meters that enabled different voices to stay together. Polychoral music is music for several choirs singing in answer to each other across the huge recesses of the church. Homophonic texture is a single-melody with chords. Homophonic means "same" or similar sounding. Its texture is based mainly on harmony. This texture dominated the Classical style. The Medieval period was the longest and most distant period of musical history and consists of almost a millennium worth of music .

One of the difficulties in studying Medieval music is that a system for notating music developed only gradually. A musical notation system was started in the 12th or 13th century. Notation in music, for several centuries, only indicated what pitch (or note) to sing. The Renaissance (1400-1600) began in 14th century Italy and its name means rebirth. A cultural break with medieval tradition was the Renaissance idea of humanism. The Renaissance was a time of brilliant accomplishments in literature, science, and the arts.

During the Renaissance there is an increase in individualism that is reflected by the changing role of the composer. In late Renaissance instrumental music went toward an independence from vocal music. Most of the popular songs were played on the lute. The Renaissance, in the arts, was on of the most innovative and active periods in the history of Western man, based partly on the philosophic movement called humanism. The Baroque period (or Middle Ages) (1600-1750) is divided into three fifty-year periods, early, middle, and late Baroque. Music of the Baroque era was characterized by the vastness of proportion, rich counterpoint, great splender and a highly ornamented melodic line. Baroque music is often highly ornate, colorful and richly textured when compared with its predecessors ("Historical"). The term Baroque came from a French word for an imperfect or irregular pearl. The early baroque was a time of intense experimentation, led in large part by Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi." Many aspects of the Baroque art were determined by religion. "The intensity and immediacy of Baroque art and its individualism and detail - observed in such things as the convincing rendering of cloth and skin textures - make it one of the most compelling periods of Western Art." Major events of the early 17th century were related to the invention of a new method of composition called monodic style. Monodic style music was for one singer with an instrumental accompaniment. It was achieved by a group of Florentine writers, artists, and musicians known as the Camerata, a name derived from the Italian word for . Opera was born around 1600, the beginning of the Baroque era.

Opera was considered by many to be the single most important achievement of the Baroque period. The first great opera was Orfeo, by Claudio Monteverdi and was first performed in 1607. The Classical period (1750-1825) centers about the achievements of the four masters of the Viennese school Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Vienna was the most important center of the classical period. The growth of the public concert was one of the most important developments of the classical period .

Writing music was much simpler than it was in the Baroque period. Composers were now able to survive with out being the employee of one person or family and concerts were no longer limited to place drawing rooms. Composers also started organizing concerts that featured their own music. This would often attract large audiences. The size of the orchestra was gradually expanded, by composers, to accommodate the expanded musical version. "Although chamber music and solo works were played in the home or other intimate settings, orchestral concerts seemed to be naturally designed for big public spaces. The popularity of the public concert had a strong impact on the growth of the orchestra. During the Romantic period (1825-1900) typical symphony were extended from thirty minutes to well over an hour. Gifted performers - particularly pianists, violinists, and singers - became enormously popular. In addition to seeking the sights and sounds of other places, composers began exploring the music of their native countries. When nationalism became a driving force in the late Romantic period composers wanted their music to express their cultural identity . Color was an important feature of Romantic music . Music has been around for many years and has been through many changes, not only in the styles, but also in the way it is written, read, and sang. It exists in all known societies and has many uses.

Music plays a role in all societies, and it exists in a large number of styles, each characteristic of a geographical region or historical era.
Music is the expression of emotion through the medium of sound. Music can be the sound of a beautiful songbird on an early Spring morning to the sound of a singer screaming in a rock and roll band and everything in between. Some think music can only be found at the opera or in the orchestra. Other’s find music at the ballet , the church choir, Broadway, or at a live jazz festival. It is found in nature, on television, at the mall, a contemporary rock concert, radio, and even most grocery stores play music for their customers. Music is everywhere in life. It consumes and surrounds us.

Music is life! No matter who you are or what type of music you prefer, it surrounds us and remains a part of us forever. It is ever changing, and always exciting. Music creates mood, memories, life experiences, feelings, and, is the height of creativity in my opinion. I cannot imagine a world without my beloved music.

Music is one thing, in this world , which nobody hates. A person may not like to hear music always, but he will definitely not hate music. This is the reason; there are many different types of music in the world today. Music can be played in many ways; one can play with strings, sticks, or just a humming. In olden days music has a very good medicinal importance. A pregnant woman, who is in contractions, is relieved of pain with a type of music. Music eases a person out of stress or anger or frustration. Music is also used to lit up a pleasant mood in a vexed person, who works in today technically busy world. There are many more advantages of music.
Traditional music of a country is more important than the international music is a debatable issue. Both the types of music has their own respect and importance. It is rather dependable on ones mood and place. For example, a person in an irritable mood may like to hear rather slow, soft traditional music or may like to hear rock or jazz music to shut off all the sounds and drown into his own world and be in peace of mind. Let’s say in today’s world pub culture has become mundane, in pub all young hearted people like to dance to the glory with some fast and rock music, where its not possible with slow or silent music.

The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to individual interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within "the arts", music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art.

Rock music is a genre of popular music often, though not necessarily, employing electric guitar, bass guitar, and drums. Many styles of rock music also use keyboard instruments such as organ, piano, mellotron, and synthesizers. Other instruments sometimes utilized in rock include saxophone, harmonica, violin, flute, French horn, banjo, melodica, and timpani. Also, less common stringed instruments such as mandolin and sitar are used. Rock music usually has a strong back beat, and often revolves around the guitar, either solid electric, hollow electric, or acoustic.

Rock music has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll and rockabilly, which evolved from blues, country music and other influences. According to Allmusic, "In its purest form, Rock & Roll has three chords, a strong, insistent back beat, and a catchy melody. Early rock & roll drew from a variety of sources, primarily blues, R&B, and country, but also gospel, traditional pop, jazz, and folk. All of these influences combined in a simple, blues-based song structure that was fast, danceable, and catchy." In the late 1960s, rock music was blended with folk music to create folk rock, blues to create blues-rock and with jazz, to create jazz-rock fusion, and without a time signature to create psychedelic rock. In the 1970s, rock incorporated influences from soul, funk, and latin music. Also in the 1970s, rock developed a number of subgenres, such as soft rock, glam rock, heavy metal, hard rock, progressive rock, and punk rock. Rock subgenres that emerged in the 1980s included new wave, hardcore punk and alternative rock. In the 1990s, rock subgenres included grunge, Britpop, indie rock, and nu metal.

A group of musicians specializing in rock music is called a rock band or rock group. Many rock groups consist of a guitarist, lead singer, bass guitarist, and a drummer, forming a quartet. Some groups omit one or more of these roles and/or utilize a lead singer who plays an instrument while singing, sometimes forming a trio or duo; others include additional musicians such as one or two rhythm guitarists and/or a keyboardist. More rarely, groups also utilize stringed instruments such as violins or cellos, and/or horns like saxophones, trumpets or trombones.
In conclusion, it is true that international music is now in hearts of most of the young people all over the world, and traditional music of one’s country is not given much importance. As i said music is music let it be international or traditional and all efforts should be made to preserve one’s own traditional music as well, as old saying goes "old is gold"

Brochures

Here are the web links of the brochures

http://www.mybrochuremaker.com/save/707973/11ce309e20a
http://www.mybrochuremaker.com/save/711087/11d0349e649
http://www.mybrochuremaker.com/save/711102/11d0354c30f
http://www.mybrochuremaker.com/save/711112/11d035caa30
http://www.mybrochuremaker.com/save/711125/11d036a3f15

Sources

There are the 5 sites that I visit and choose for my investigation:

http://www.geocities.com/papandrew/
http://library.thinkquest.org/15413/history/music-history.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_history
http://www.enjoythemusic.com/history.htm
http://www.ipl.org/div/mushist/

I am

Hi!
My name is Fernando Mora, I´m sixteen years old. I like to play soccer, I like to skate, to listen to music, watch tv, read magazines and some books that interesed me.
I don´t have brothers or sisters, I like to travel, specially to the beach or nice places. I don´t like that the people lie. My favorite music is: indie, indie rock, some reggae, alternative, screamo.

Well it´s all.