International Day Reflection

International Day Reflection

For our international day music performance, I performed in a group in the culture cafe. The group consisted of Asli, Maria, Kian and myself. We sang “Baby one more time” by Britney Spears in 5 different languages (English, French, Spanish, Turkish, and Icelandic) and Kian assisted by playing the acoustic guitar.

Over the course of 2 weeks, we managed to construct our performance. We started off by selecting a popular song, one that would definitely attract and captivate the audiences’ attention- Baby one more time by Britney Spears. This was a good song selection as it was well known and was up beat. Then we decided what all languages we were going to incorporate into our performance. Theoretically, we thought it would be easier if we incorporated the languages that we are learning from MFL anyways. Asli and I learn French and Maria learns Spanish- this is why we included both of these languages. While Asli and I researched and found the translation for the verse in French, Maria did the same for Spanish. Additionally, we thought we could incorporate languages from our cultures, so that’s exactly what we did. Asli translated the lyrics of a verse to Turkish, and Maria translated the lyrics for the bridge into Icelandic. We considered my language (Malayalam), but we faced some difficulties with it. This was because there were certain English words that weren’t present in my language, so it was almost impossible to translate it correctly.

After the incorporation of these various languages, we learnt how to pronounce the lyrics. French was fairly easy to pronounce and memorize, as I take French as one of my subjects anyways. Asli and I taught Maria how to pronounce the words and she grasped onto it quite easily. Then came Spanish, which Maria taught us. This was surprisingly not that challenging for Asli and I because we learnt in a matter of 10 minutes. For the next verse Asli taught us Turkish and then came Icelandic in the bridge taught by Maria. I found Turkish the most challenging language to pronounce and memorize, as they primarily only pronounce the vowel “aa”- this is very different from my language. We started by singing in unison and then broke into harmony, to progressively add on texture. The chords consisted of Cm G Eb Fm G. The strumming of the guitar was thickened during the choruses to add more power and broken chords were played during the bridge to vary the structure of chords. We maintained a constant dynamic of mezzo forte. .  Harmony refers to the combination of notes (or chords) played together and the relationship between a series of chords, it accompanies and supports the melody. We’ve used harmony in our piece to give it musical texture. There’s a 3 part harmony in the song (melody + lower harmony + higher harmony) and we very it and sing in unison. Then comes the key of the song. It’s also known as tonality; a principle in music composition wherein at the end of the piece there is a feeling of completion by going back to the tonic. The key of ‘Baby one more time’ is C minor.

Me- Melody

Asli- Higher harmony

Maria- Lower harmony

Our performance on international day went quite well as we were well rehearsed and memorized all the lyrics. We engaged with the audience by holding up cards of all the languages we were singing. So we changed our cards when the language changed to give the audience an idea of what language we were singing. During the course of these 2 weeks, we have now accomplished learning bits of 4 different languages. This enhances our international mindedness and the culture diversity of our small community. Not only this, but I collaborated with someone I have never worked with before- Kian. It was definitely a fun and interesting experience performing this song of ours and adding our own cultural twists.

This is an audio recording of our last rehearsal and our final performance.

Last rehearsal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvWtxSF3Cu4&feature=youtu.be

Final Performance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX9ip0SueKU

ATL Reflection: 

We developed several skills over the course of the 2 weeks which include our communication/ performance interaction, collaboration, organisation and self management.

Communication and performance interaction: We kept our audience entertained and captivated by being well rehearsed so that our harmonies would be good, as this is what mainly attracts attention of listeners. Additionally, as mentioned earlier before, we used cards with printed names of the languages we were singing in. So we changed the card according to the language we were singing, this let us interact with the audience as it's not something every performer had done. Our stage presence was quite good, as none of were shy and we were all quite excited to showcase what we put together within our short time frame for this project.

Collaboration: This was a big element of our project as there was strong interdependence between all of the members- the absence of one would have affected the whole group. Also, it was interesting for me to work with Kian because it was my first time working with him. We worked quite successfully as a group, as we all contributed ideas for the betterment of the performance and helped each other strengthen our weak points. An example of this could be when Asli helped Maria and I with correctly annunciating our letters in Turkish.

Organisation: We were organised quite well as we all memorised our lyrics and Kian knew all the guitar chords perfectly. Additionally, we also considered interaction methods with the audience like the card idea. Our lesson time really helped us prepare considerably well for our performance as we had the right amount of time each lesson to improve one aspect of our performance and then move on to the other in the next lesson.

Self-management: This was a very significant area of our performance. As I mentioned in the collaboration paragraph, we were all interdependent on each other- so if one person made a mistake, the whole harmonies would sound unbalanced. Sometimes, it would even go to the extremity where we would start laughing and poke fun at it. But as we drew nearer to the performance, this problem was eliminated as we all started to concentrate on the lyrics we sung and focused on our stage appearance. We gave constructive feedback to each other to ensure the best of ourselves.