“Dear Charlie”: A Collection of Songs for Marimba and Voice
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Abstract
At its core, Music can be described as a form of communication; of what we cannot achieve only through speech. By intertwining melody and the human voice, we are able to attain a level of personal expression that transcends gender, age, race, social class, and more. By contrast, music can also be meaningless; an exercise of learned muscle memory through repetition, void of emotion. The music in the marimba world has strayed dangerously close to the latter by creating a trend of music that is technically demanding, time consuming, and largely unpalatable for the audience, isolating the instrument to chamber halls and jury rooms. I have written a collection of six pieces for marimba and voice, drawing on techniques in the song writing tradition in an attempt to bring the marimba to a new genre. By using the marimba as a singer-songwriter tool, we can introduce the instrument to a mainstream market, helping create more performance and occupational opportunities, and shedding light on this wonderful instrument.
Publication Date
7-1-2018
Campus
Valencia (Spain) Campus
Recommended Citation
Smith, Nathan. ““Dear Charlie”: A Collection of Songs for Marimba and Voice.” Master's thesis, Berklee College of Music, 2018. https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-contemporary-performance/127.
Comments
Project Components: paper (.pdf), presentation (.pdf), scores (.pdf), audio files (ZIP file containing 5 .wav files, 1 .m4a file), videos (ZIP file containing 6 .mp4 files).