LO1

LO1

1 Be able to interpret ideas for performance material

Sources: themes eg social, cultural, historical, ethical, spiritual and/or moral issues; textual eg autobiographical material, literary and non-literary text, poems, stories, dance notation, music scores, sheet music; visual eg painting, postcards, photographs, artefacts; aural eg music, audio recordings, live sound; media eg films, videos, newspaper and magazine extracts Exploration: eg exercises, improvisation, research, discussions, idea and thought mapping, try-outs

Themes

Social

Social background is something we have looked into. Most of the themes are very much related to each other. Sometimes peoples civil rights are knocked back and get singled out and treated differently and there then becomes lack of equality. 
Someone can be mistreated when: 

• Their race 
• Believe in a different religion
• Have a disability 
• Whether they are a boy or a girl
• What their sexuality is 
• There is many more too 

We looked at when someone is discriminated by their race, we used this strongly in our Peace song (Rosa Parks story-see heading 'Stories'). It doesn't happen so much now, but sometimes someone's rights can be ignored due to their colour of skin, causing them not to be treated correctly. For example, white people used to have priority of seats on the bus, this is ignoring someone's civil rights. We have used this specific story as an inspiration to our Peace song and written about the story. Someone's social background, how they were brought up, what they believe in, their colour of skin, nationality or anything which makes people different from one other should not cause discrimination and lead to taking away someone's rights to have freedom and equality. 

Religion is another one we have looked into and used as a topic for our Conflict song. Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, abused peoples rights and people. If you were Jewish, homosexual, a communist, mentally and physically disabled people, intellectuals, Romani people, the opposite side of politics to him, religious opponent (and more) you were frowned upon and targeted by Hitler and not treated fairly, made to be a slave, tortured and killed. We wanted to use this in our song as it is definitely related to the issue of Conflict. Our lyrics 'A simple shower, click the lock' relates back to when Nazi Germany used them to kill people. Gas chambers are rooms which are used to killing humans and animals, the sealed chamber is filled with poisonous gas. These rooms were used as a way of execution for the people held in prison in the 1920's. These chambers sometimes killed up to 2,000 people at once. 

Cultural

Culture is something that is included within our songs, it may not directly be about it but it is involved within it. The way that people choose to live and what decisions they make shouldn't change the way someone is treated. The topic racism that we look at and the way people used to be viewed, and still happens today, is definitely to do with culture and what people believe in. What we are trying to get across is basically that all these kinds of things, racism, neglect, being left out, and all the things that come under that is completely wrong.

In our song Peace we have used the topic of racism and people not being equal, we thought this was a good topic as we have chosen to base it on a girl called Rosa Parks (see heading 'Stories') and we explain her story but bring it back to how it has been dealt with and racism today isn't seen as much and has been calmed down since the past, we think this fits in really well with the theme of Peace, although it is a very sensitive subject and can be seen as a more 'conflict' topic we have changed it into how we see it. In our Conflict song we have spoken about war times, and how over the years it has changed, we speak about how people were treated in war times.  For example in our conflict song, some of the lyrics are 'bring the struggle, bring the pain, we fight each other, we're all the same', this reflects on this as we are saying that everyone is the same as one another, no one should be treated wrong.

Ethical

I looked at what the definition of Ethical as I wanted to see what is specifically meant and into more detail. 
Definition: Pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principles of morality; pertaining to right and wrong in conduct.
Synonyms: Moral, upright, honest, righteous, virtuous, honorable.
I think this is definitely included in our songs. Looking at 'right and wrong', this is something that's used, talking about what is right and wrong, and if it is wrong we have defined it and spoken about what is wrong and put that into the emotion of our songs. 

Historical

We feel like they are very strong points and something that you can do a lot with. What people believe in, feelings and peoples views are something we felt we could really include in our songs. Sometimes it can be hard talking about topics like this due to everything having different beliefs, values and morals but in some ways this actually made it even better. 

These things are all very much involved under 'historical' as they are things that happened a long time ago which are still remembered today and talked about.

Spiritual

We haven't used this a topic, this is because it is a very general thing to look at. I think it is more of a matter of an opinion, where as the issues we have looked at are facts, but you can still have your thoughts about them, I think we felt you can talk about things more to the point. Things like religion and spiritual topics are quite strong subjects. We are happy with the themes we have looked into as there is a lot to say about them and we felt really inspired by them all. 

Moral issues

Racism is a big issue which we looked at for both of the songs. If you look at the section where I have spoken about the stories which we have looked at this will explain this a lot. The reason we wanted to look into racism as it was something that really stuck out to us, we all have very strong opinions on this topic and we thought we could write about this in depth and create some really good and well written songs about it. Having all of us having views on this it also enabled us to all be very much involved. The two main stories which included racism which we have used was the story about Rosa Parks and the problems that Hitler created, these two stories influenced us a lot. Looking at these two stories we haven't made it completely obvious in our songs that this is exactly what we are trying to get across, this is because we want the audience to interpret it how they see it.

Pictures/paintings/photographs that have inspired us.
Peace-


This picture inspired us for the beginning lyrics which are 'The chains are gone, the shackles aren't here'. We thought of talking about this as the theme being peace we wanted to talk about how people are now free, and during the times where things like racism and slavery were bad, chains were used to tie people up so these lyrics really relate to this and this picture influenced us to do this.


This picture inspired us because we knew that we wanted to talk about Rosa Parks but I saw this picture of her being on the bus and it enabled us to really research into her story so we could know exactly what went on and this image made us really re live what happened and made us feel more confident when coming to write the lyrics for it as we had this clear image of it and could see exactly what the situation may have looked like. 

This painting gave us a really clear image of what some kinds of slavery actually looked like. Seeing all of these getting pulled about, tied to each other and obeying orders made us think of ideas about how we could write about this. The metaphorical line 'break your back, to earn no pay' relates to this. 

Conflict

This picture relates to our lyrics 'bring the order, line them up' we're talking about bringing the slaves being lined up to be punished and relates back to our theme about war.

This picture is the gas chambers and our lyrics 'a simple shower click the lock' is talking about this how when they got told to 'have a shower' when really that wasn't what was going to happen at all. We wanted to talk about this as it relates to conflict a lot and relates to our theme about war. Our lyrics then go on to say 'hard to breathe close your eyes' which is relating to them being in the gas chambers and how they couldn't escape. 

This specific picture didn't inspire us, but the stories about Hitler, what he did, what he caused, and how he treated people did. Due to it being such an emotional and talked about topic we felt that we could do a lot with it, and could put these emotions into our song. 

When we say the line 'run, crawl, jump fall, quick, hurt, hit the floor, shoot, stab, shatter life, conscripted in a world of strife', we was looking back to the army and having a sentence with a lot of singular words, we found it felt really powerful and straight to the point, this is the only part during the song really where we say exactly what we mean, otherwise we tend to use metaphors. This picture/and many other pictures to do with the army really inspired us to talk about the army and physical fighting, whether it be the army today or the times where people were forced to fight. 

Stories

Peace

A story that we have looked at is Rosa Parks. She was a girl from America, and was referred to as 'the first lady of civil rights' and 'the mother of the freedom movement'. She was born on February 4th, which has now known as 'Rosa Parks day' as has the date that she was arrested which was December 1st. Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move from her seat on the bus for a white person. During the times that Rosa Parks 'committed this crime' it was the law to move seats, give way, and put white people first. Rosa Parks objected against this and is still today praised and remembered for this. It happened December 1st 1995 in Montgomery, Alabama, she refused to listen to the bus driver James Blake. Rosa was not the first person to disobey this rule and many other people had previously been arrested for it. The exact bus that she was on when she refused to move seats is in a Museum.
The way that we have included this into our song is with the second verse, we have harmonies singing 'Rosa' quietly over Archie speaking/singing over talking about her story as if he were her. We thought this was a really nice touch, and makes the audience wonder what we are trying to get across  this is something we were after, we wanted metaphorical meanings which I personally think is the best way to write a song.
Nelson Mandella was a story which we all wanted to look into aswell, this is what influenced to start off thinking about the issue of racism and singling people out. We thought that this was quite an obvious topic so in the end we didn't use it as a story line for the song but it has most definitely helped us to start thinking of ideas. 

Conflict
We looked at the story with Hitler about gas chambers and how slaves were treated, and also what it's like being in the army. We haven't looked at one specific thing for our conflict song where as for our peace song we have. For our conflict song we looked at a lot of different scenarios and stories, there isn't one specific meaning of conflict and is more of a general topic, where as peace we think is more specific, so we thought including many different meanings and thoughts in our conflict song would fit well. The reason we chose to use the topics of war, crime and how people were tortured is because we felt it has a strong part of what the word 'conflict' means. Although we are using very talked about topics and well known events we didn't want to make it completely obvious in our song so we have used metaphorical phrasing. The stories about Hitler and war times really stuck out for us and we all had a lot of views about these topics and felt we could do a lot with it. 

POEMS/SPEECHES 

Martin Luther King Speech - http://boes.org/docs2/mking01.html

The Martin Luther King speech was something that inspired us for the Peace song, as the theme of our song was Racism this was a strong story which stuck out to us which related to the topic we wanted to explore. 

The speech that Martin Luther King gave he used strong and confident phrases such as 'I have a dream' this gets repeated throughout the speech, and he uses sentences which are to the point. The way this inspired us was that, during the second verse of Peace, when Archie speaks/raps/sings over us harmonising 'Rosa' behind him he starts off the verse with 'Today I am an equal, today I will not run'. This is also straight to the point and makes it sound very serious and powerful, just like Martin Luther King's speech.

Exploration 

Thought-mapping

Ideas- 

Speech- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcvjoWOwnn4
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1920779/pg1

The speech above which is by Charlie Chaplin and is called the final dictator, we was going to use for our conflict song. It fit really well in the middle between the 2 songs, but we have decided to change this to news reports instead as it fits better. 

Exploration

Research

Before we decided on using the stories about Nazi Germany and the story about Rosa Parks we researched several things to get ideas and inspiration. We researched what Peace and Conflict actually meant because they are both very general terms so we felt we wanted to find something more specific, we also spoke about what we felt it meant. 


Conflict 
To us we felt that the word Conflict meant war, arguments, tension, division, racism etc. In our eyes Conflict is only ever really a negative term. Definition of Conflict: A battle of war, clash, to engage in warfare.
We researched what Conflict meant as a whole just so we could find something more specific to look into.


Peace 
When we researched the word Peace our thoughts on what it meant were fairly similar to what the definition of it actually was. Definition of Peace: Freedom from disturbance, quiet and tranquility. 
We felt that because the topic was actually Peace, we didn't want to speak specifically about Peace itself so that's when we started to think outside the box of talking about a specific story and talking about it metaphorically, we then came across the Rosa Parks story which Archie told us about, we then researched it and found it would fit really well. Talking about racism and lack of equality we then speak about it as if everyone should be brought together, creating peace. We have reflected this on the mood of our song too, it's much more chilled out than our Conflict song, so I think the term 'Peace' really relates to the actual music itself.




Nazi Germany 
Nazi Germany is when it's government was controlled and lead by Adolf Hitler and his workers, during the period from 1933-1945. Hitler was known for his bad ways and he discriminated to many people. During doing our research we discovered that it was better to look at pictures as we felt they inspired us much more than reading lots of writing, although we did also read some information as it did help us. 

Pictures of Nazi Germany 

Racism 
What is racism? 
Definition of racism: The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others. Discrimination or prejudice based on race. 
This is a very strong topic and we felt that it's something that we could really explore and use in our songs. We have interpreted this in our pieces by looking into the Rosa Parks story, our Conflict song also includes this slightly.




Discrimination 
Discrimination also falls under the category of racism. Discriminating is basically when you single some one out due to their differences. Whether it be their race, their upbringing, their beliefs, what they look like, how they dress, etc. People are discriminated everyday and We wanted to use this topic within our pieces as we also felt we could convey our views on it by expressing it through the songs we create. The Rosa Parks story which we have spoken about covers the topic of Racism and discrimination.
 

Discussions video-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzQ-uHopV7E

(We do have about 10 other videos which need to go on here but unfortunately they won't upload onto YouTube no matter how many times we try and how many computers we try to use)

Feedback discussion-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzQ-uHopV7E

Videos- 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8_agFt-264
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWMMBG58xls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzQ-uHopV7E

Newspaper

Alex brought in a newspaper and we cut out some of the headlines and articles from it that stood out for us, and we thought it would be a good idea to stick them onto the Piano, this could work for both of the songs.