Episode 128: Inside Music Literacy and Music Studio with San Diego!

Welcome back to Artbeat Radio!  In this episode, service users from the Music Literacy and Music Studio classes at Able ARTS Work San Diego invite listeners to hear about what their classes are like, what they are excited about learning, and what they have been working on!Featuring: Jonathon Garcia, Stephanie Monis, Liam Porter, Claire Feth, Santiago Milanino, Sam Beyer, Matthew Fotinos, Sarah Shaw, Kaitlyn Johanson, Josh Andrews, Max Lecanu-Fayet  Thanks for listening and tune in next time! For more information about our organization, please visit our website www.ableartswork.org  Audio Transcription: (Please listen on Podomatic or Spotify to view the full transcript) *Intro music by Artbeat Radio staff*  Music, stories, and more! You’re listening to Artbeat Radio, a program of Able ARTS Work. *Music plays  (Matthew) Alright! Do it!  (Jonathon) Hello everyone and welcome to Art Beat Radio.  (Stephanie) This week’s episode will be featuring students from the Music Literacy and Music Studio classes at Able Arts Work San Diego.  (Start background music)  (Liam) You may be asking yourself, ‘what is music literacy?’  (Liam) Basically, music literacy is how to read, write, and understand music.  (Claire) We start class with music appreciation.  (Santiago) We listen to a song carefully and explore the emotions it makes us feel.  (Liam) Doing music appreciation teaches us how to explore our emotions because songs can have more than one emotion.  (Jonathon) Mixing major and minor chords can give us a complex feeling like bittersweet.  (Stephanie) If you want to be literate in music, first you need to learn the musical alphabet. The musical alphabet has 7 letters.   (Sam) A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.  (Jonathon) Sometimes a note can be sharp.  (Claire) That means the note goes up.  (Stephanie) Sometimes a note can be flat.  (Santiago) That means the note goes down.  (Liam) You can take notes and put them together to make chords.  (Stephanie) Every basic chord is a triad – three notes played together.  (Stephanie) We have learned that in any key, you can make major chords, minor chords, and diminished chords.  (Santiago) Major chords can make us feel happy, calm, good, or bright.  (Claire) Minor chords can make us feel tense, dark, down, or sad.  (Jonathon) Diminished chords are even more tense than minor chords.  (Liam) After a few weeks, we used all of this knowledge to start writing our own song together.  (Stephanie) To come up with a chord progression, we started with the I chord, then experimented with other chord numbers until we came up with something that sounded good.  (Jonathon) For the verse, we wrote a chord progression that goes I to iii to vii to I.  (Liam) For the chorus we wrote a chord progression that goes V to vi to vii to ii. When the chorus repeats, we replace the ii chord with a IV chord.  (Stephanie) Next, we experimented using notes from the chord triads to write a melody. Once we had our chord progression and melody, we listened to it carefully to figure out how the music made us feel.  (Santiago) We chose one emotion to focus on with our lyrics.  (Liam) We chose to focus on heartbreak because we agreed that the music sounded bittersweet.  (Claire) Now we were ready to start writing the lyrics.   (Jonathon) We used a rhyming dictionary and a thesaurus to help us craft the lyrics.  (Santiago) To capture the bittersweet emotion of the music, we focused on the bitter in the verses, and on the sweet in the chorus.  (Stephanie) Once we had the lyrics, we started choosing the instruments we wanted for our backing track and writing those parts(continued)