Hi – Robo here. I’m sorry I haven’t blogged in awhile. Since it is summer my dad has been planning a bunch of adventures. Today I went to the beach at Lake Michigan for the second time this week. Tomorrow I’m going bowling with one of my school friends. So that’s why I haven’t been blogging.
So anyway…today I’m going to talk about my Rock and Roll guitar camp at my music school Suzuki-Orff named after a famous German composer named Carl Orff. At camp we played in a band and we named it Das Kool. My Dad was playing the drums in the band.
For the show on the last day of camp we played these songs:
Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple
Misserlou
Wild Thing – The Troggs
Oye Como Va – Carlos Santana
Back in Black – ACDC
Good Riddance – Time of Your Life by Green Day
The first thing I’m going to show you are two pictures of how you hold an electric guitar and how you hold a classical guitar. Do you notice the difference of how the guitar is sitting on my leg? On the classical guitar it is in between my two legs but on the electric guitar it is rested on only one one of my legs.
Next I’m going to teach you how to play two chords and play a song for you.
Learn how to play E and A Minor chords
Robo on electric guitar playing a Deep Purple song
sca-tol-o-gy (scatological): Obscene language or literature especially that deals humorously with excrement and excretory functions.
Okay. Thanks a lot dictionary. That is the definition of scatology. In case you don’t know what those big words were. In other words, someone had a potty mouth.
This is a picture of a sock monkey dressed as Mozart (from mediamolecule via Compfightcc). And you are probably thinking right now at your house, “Why does he even put a picture of a sock monkey dressed as Mozart?” Well here’s your answer. Mozart had scatological humor. In other words, he had a potty mouth. According to my music teacher, Scott, Mozart would say something really really bad in front of someone who would say, “Oh my goodness.” And Mozart wouldn’t even care.
You see, sometimes famous musicians sometimes have a negative aura.
aura :1. An invisible breath, emanation, or radiation. 2. A distinctive but intangible quality that seems to surround a person or thing.
On December 8, 2012 I went to a performance for kids at Symphony Hall in downtown Chicago. The title of the performance was It’s Time to Play.
It was different from other concerts because Edwin Outwater, the conductor, talked to us about the music he was conducting instead of just playing the music.
My favorite piece was Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, Mvt. 1. I liked it because I’ve heard it before and the conductor said that you should picture a stormy night sky in your head because that is what Beethoven is intending to do. One of the things that the conductor talked to the audience about it that Beethoven wanted to make his music suspencful so that audience would be like, “I wonder what is going to happen next?”
You can listen to this piece here (this is a different orchestra playing the song):
Also, there were members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra playing the instruments and they had a lot of instruments. Some of the instruments were oboes, trombones, bassoons, timpani, violins, violas, cellos, french horns, tubas, and a computer. In the last piece called Mothership by Mason Bates there was a computer that made sound effects and each key had a different sound effect on the computer.
I think that they did this performance to entertain and inform. I think that they wrote this to inform because the conductor he told us what the composers meant for us to think while the music was playing in your head. Like in one of the pieces Beethoven wanted you to think of a thunder storm at night. Charles Ives wanted to make you laugh when you heard his Symphony No. 2, Mvt. 4. It was entertaining because in the piece that Charles Ives wrote he would take a wrong note and stick it at the end of the song and it wouldn’t sound right. Before the performance the conductor asked us to sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat and then make the most obnoxious sound at the last note. It was really funny.
Some of the other pieces that they played that I didn’t tell you about in the other paragraphs were Symphony No. 6, Mvt. 1 by Franz Joseph Haydn and Symphony No. 94 (Surprise), Mvt. 2 by Franz Joseph Haydn also. There was also Symphony No. 4, Mvt. 4 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and also Symphony No. 9, Mvt. 3 by Antonin Dvorak. And the last one was Symphony No. 6, Mvt. 4 by Ludwig van Beethoven.
If you have a child I would recommend going to this next concert that they have on Friday, May 3, 2013 at 10:15am and 12:00pm. It is called Get Up and Dance. They also have another performance on March 15, 2013 at 10:15am and 12:00pm called Now Let’s Sing. I would recommend you take your child because the conductor talks to you instead of just playing the music. If he just played the music you wouldn’t know what was going on. This is the website to find out information http://cso.org/Institute/ChildrenAndFamilies/FamilyMatinee.aspx
IMHO...thoughts from a Windy City kid 