Exploring Music
What Is Musical 8?
Musical 8 features very clear mids and highs with lots of detail and crispness. The vocals have great richness and fullness to them.
Nikolai Foster’s staging of this jukebox musical is lively and engaging, but it never quite gets up to the emotional peaks of the music. Likewise, it never really captures the full range of Carole King’s talents or how she blazed her own path into the industry.
Counting
Counting music is important because it reveals the structure of the beats. Virtually all dance music is structured in groups of four beats, with the exception of waltz, which is in sets of six beats. Counting helps you feel the underlying rhythm, which is what makes the beat workable for dancers.
The top number in a time signature denotes how many beats per measure, while the bottom signifies what note gets each beat. Usually, the lower number corresponds to quarter notes (crotchets), although it may also be half notes or even eighth notes in less common signatures.
To start with, practice counting to the lowest possible number of beats in a measure. As you do, gradually add syllables for smaller notes: “ONE-two-three-four-five-six.” This will help you get used to hearing and counting the smaller beats. When you get good at this, you can try adding syllables for even smaller notes and then progressing to the full range of tempos that a musical piece can be played in.
Melody
In musical terms, a melody is a group of notes grouped together in such a way as to represent the push and pull of a rhythm. A melody is often accompanied by an accompaniment, such as a lead singer and a band or a piano and guitar.
If a composer wants to write music without a beat hierarchy or regular pulse, he can simply omit the time signature. This is what composers like Olivier Messiaen and Charles Ives did with their works.
However, some composers use time signatures merely to make it easier for musicians to read the music. They might use a shortened version of the standard time signature, such as 4/8, where the bottom number indicates how many quarter notes (crotchets) make up a bar and the top number indicates that the beat is 1/5 of a reference whole note.
Integrity
Integrity is the capacity to take one’s life seriously. It involves having and pursuing principles that guide one’s actions, and it requires the ability to resist temptation. It is the antithesis of spinelessness, the single-minded pursuit of pleasure, and the ruthless quest for wealth.
A variety of philosophical approaches to integrity have been developed. Some, like Calhoun’s, conceive it as a virtue in terms of people’s deliberation about how to live. Others, such as Halfon, conceive it in more moral terms and argue that integrity depends on people’s willingness to face all relevant moral considerations.
Still other approaches conceive of it as a cluster concept that binds together different overlapping traits of character into one term. This approach allows that people may fail to act with integrity, and it also implies that profound moral failures (like hypocrisy or fanaticism) are independent defeaters of integrity. For example, it would be inappropriate to judge a Nazi as having integrity.