College Entrance Essay

I've got to write a college entrance paper.



I was hoping someone could help me organize my ideas first into an outline.



It's supposed to be about why I would like to get my Master's degree at Kyaemyeong University in Korea but I should also include what excites me, get them to like me and how I would help make their campus more diverse yada yada.



Here's what I have so far;



Art is a reflection of one's self-identity in the most transparent manner. Although artistic expression can take many forms it's the gong cultures of Southeast Asia that have been a crucial part of my life ever since I went to Northern Arizona University's library and found books on Indonesian music. I was studying music at Northern Arizona University in 1999 and scouring the library for interesting books of all kinds. I looked in every section but I gravitated towards topics such as the classical music of India and especially ethnomusicology.



I came across two very thick books.

One on Balinese and another on Javanese gamelan music. Within their rough, old and dusty pages were reams of descriptions and transcriptions of performance practices that I made copies of and studied.



I had enjoyed what little I had seen of the Southeast Asian aesthetic in watered down movie presentations such as The King and I.

I also watched videos, listened to cds and read books about the cultures of S.E. Asia. I felt a strong desire to encounter these cultures, musics and spiritualities directly.



One of my favorite C.D.'s was the soundtrack to the movie Siamese Twins by Bangkok Blue. I have never seen that movie but the music was the best that I had ever heard. It combined traditional Thai music with jazz including marimba.



On my first trip to Thailand I went to Bangkok and then to Ayuthaya, the ancient capital of Siam. While I was there I bought cds of traditional Thai music that I just loved.

I also went to a music store that sold Thai instruments. I wanted to buy everything.



When I returned to Korea, I met a musician who had been a guitarist for Frank Sinatra (but he's not Tony Mottola who I have also met) and claims to have been the inventor of the first optical reader which is the basis of cd technology.

He invited me to come stay at his home in the souther Thai city of Hua Hin. I thought I would apply for some jobs while I was there as an experiment to see what I could get.



When I went to a junior high school, I discovered they had a music room with Thai instruments.Again, I got to see up close the circular pot gongs and the wooden xylophones that look like boats. One day, by chance, I went to the larger temple downtown and there was a traditional ensemble rehearsing.



The director was an elderly man standing in front facing them playing cymbals the size of an average pair of hands.

I had my Lonely Planet Thai Phrasebook and when they stopped playing I said to the director in Thai that I had taught music in America to junior high school students. He was very happy to meet me.



He invited me to play each of the instruments in his orchestra. They seemed to be impressed with my mallet work and shawm playing.

He invited me to come back the next day for a concert.



I came the next day and there were a lot of people. Chairs were placed in a roofed pavilion.

I sat about 3/4 of the way back.



Everyone wore their best clothes and some men were wearing what looked like white Naval uniforms. There were younger orange robed monks wearing long mala beads talking to people and making preparations, mostly offerings on the altar.

An old man got up to speak wearing one of the white uniforms.



He spoke for a long time and everyone sat quietly listening. When he stopped speaking, the buildings very loud fire alarm bell rang that surprised me a great deal and the musicians began playing simultaneously.

At some point people started to go up onto the altar.



Some bowed with hands placed together in a "Wai. which is the gesture of hands folded as if in prayer used as a respectful greeting in Southeast Asia as well as India." Some placed flowers and other offerings such as incense or fruit.



What finally became aparent to me was a long rectangular white box with gold trim in the middle of all the flowers and that it might be a casket. An older woman who had been at the rehearsal the day before motioned for me to go up to the stage but I didn't want to break the solemnity of the mood by distracting people with the presence of a blond haired, blue eyed foreigner. It was the same woman who began to cry as people slowly filtered out.



No one was comforting her so I put my hand on her shoulder and she eagerly put her arms around me to be held as she cried. She must have been his wife.
I went back to the temple again over the next two weeks but I never saw the musicians again.


All of these experiences prepared me mentally for the tasks which still lay ahead of me. After several miserable _______experiences which had left me drained and disenchanted???, I felt certain that, at last, ......


Engaging me deeply was my eagerness to recreate the aural environment of Southeast Asia. But not the real aural environment of Southeast Asia, the one which was the way I thought it SHOULD sound. I was so completely absorbed in my extracurricular studies that the lengthy periods to my favorite books seemed short.


Graduation snapped me back into reality. Dangling the humble pencil over the music notebook paper, I released my inhibitions and began to compose and jumped into the waters feet first.


And then it hit. I caught literally hundreds of good ideas wizzing by. I couldn't compose fast enough to get them all down. and it doesn't look like a lake that can ever dry up.


In a leadership role I hope to constructively guide others to find their own success and see the frui8tion of their goals.
By serving as director of Preparatory school jazz combo's I and II and as a private instructor, I have enabled others to reach their goals, while finding personal gratification at the same time.



I want to be given the opportunity to optimize the usefulness of my personal virtues in helping otheres. I can only hope to continue heeding my conscience in persuing the bliss of gamelan music. my discovery of it has changed my forever.


It is my right and obligation,
When I started learning about gamelan I never imagined that my interest in it would be so all encompassing. My music composition professor Dr, Kenneth Rummery used to encourage me as I continued to study composition. During this time I was invited to join the Northern Arizona University's Steel Drum Ensemble directed by Dr. Steve Hemphill, president of the Arizona Chapter of the Percussive Arts Society and learned how to play steel drums which are other melodic percussion instruments.



I became better at seeing how the different voices in an ensemble fit together from the composers point of view. The best part of melodic percussion is it's unique sustained tone because it doesn't suffer musically very much when performed by computer in a midi program. It still sounds quite believable unlike midi saxophones or guitars.



Doing melodic percussion means being able to realize my compositions quickly without having to find or rehearse musicians willing to learn the parts. The NAU steel drum ensemble introduced me to great performers such as Andy Narell. For most of my peers engaged in the discipline of music, the goal was to find their own voice compositionally or as a performer within styles such as popular, classical and jazz that don't really give a person much freedom to do that.



Those genres have their own melodic, rhythmic, chordal, instrumentational and compositional vocabularies that you need to maintain in order to still be considered in the style of popular, classical or jazz. But for me, my main objective was to find something which is terminally unique, that not many people are doing. Or if someone is doing it, they're not doing it the same way as I am or as well as I am.



Therefore, I was more interested in world music and alien instrumentations that didn't have to involve guitar, bass, drum kit, synthesizer or classical instruments since everyone is doing those. I'll never forget the time when I discovered the steel drum ensemble doesn't need a contra bass or a bass guitar to have an instrument whose voice is functioning in the role of the bass. This ensemble gave me the opportunity to stand on stage in front of an audience as a member of a professional instrumental ensemble and learn about effective composition, arranging and orchestration, which has benefited me in my gamelan compositions.



In addition to the fun, gamelan has confronted me with many challenges. I was not naturally good at composing the development of a melodic phrase. I was not ______,______ or ______. However, I discovered that in order to excel at melody writing, I needed to do several things.



The first was that the consequent phrase needed to have a greater leap, a wider range, a higher note and/or a greater dynamic than the antecedent phrase. And that each section usually has two or more phrases. The next was to take the original version of any melody I had written then write out it's inversion, retrograde and retrograde inversion and listen to them to decide which one sounds best starting on the downbeat.



In popular music, the melody that starts on the downbeat is often the chorus. It also needs to start on a strong note of the key such as the I, V or III. Another thing I learned is that it needs to end in a position which gives a feeling of finality.



That's different for a two measure phrase than it is for a four measure phrase. In 4/4 time, the strongest position to end a two measure phrase is beat 3 of the second measure. In a four measure phrase the strongest position to end a phrase is on the first beat of the fourth measure.



I also learned that the melody in the other sections of music, for the sake of variety, should start on a different note and end on a different note than the "chorus" uses. And they all should start and end in different rhythmic positions. I also found out that it's often useful to vary phrase lengths either between sections or within a section and that the "verse" section shouldn't rise higher than the "chorus."



As a result, I am known as an eclectic composer but whose musical forms are accessible to a contemporary audience. Each day I become stronger at arranging and composition. I know that I have already built a strong foundation and skills in composition.



My experiences with gamelan have taught me lessons that I can apply beyond Kyaemyeong University and I will always have this knowledge for years to come.