Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts

Tuesday, 11 June 2013

Eyes On the Conductor

Oops! Alexandra started before the conductor gave the signal. He looked at my granddaughter and she immediately stopped. Not a good beginning, but she is learning. Timing is important and beginning too soon was not ideal. The rest of the concert went well, no more glitches. I must say that the seventh and eighth graders played extremely well and the music was beautiful. I am an extremely proud grandma. 

I began to reflect on the fact that Alex began on a wrong note, even though her violin playing had improved. These reflections allowed God to teach me some new lessons and to relearn forgotten ones.

Practice is important. We don’t play our notes well or at the right moment if we don’t practice. Alex’s playing had improved with practice. The first time you share the gospel may not work so well. Keep at it, keep practicing. We all need to practice kindness, faithfulness, prayer, and witnessing. The list can go on and on. Watch a small child or a new believer pray. Often they don’t know how to begin or what to even pray for. 

Sunday, 26 May 2013

The Power of Silence

"Be still, and know that I am God" (Ps. 46:10).

Is there any note of music in all the chorus as mighty as the emphatic pause? Is there any word in all the Psalter more eloquent than that one word, Selah (Pause)? Is there anything more thrilling and awful than the hush that comes before the bursting of the tempest and the strange quiet that seems to fall upon all nature before some preternatural phenomenon or convulsion? Is there anything that can touch our hearts as the power of stillness?

There is for the heart that will cease from itself, "the peace of God that passeth all understanding," a "quietness and confidence" which is the source of all strength, a sweet peace "which nothing can offend," a deep rest which the world can neither give nor take away. There is in the deepest center of the soul a chamber of peace where God dwells, and where, if we will only enter in and hush every other sound, we can hear His still, small voice.

Tuesday, 23 April 2013

The Touch of the Master's Hand

"Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving; make music to our God on the harp." Psalm 147:7

My favorite classical guitar piece is called "Recuerdos del Alhambra." And nobody plays it like Christopher Parkening, probably the greatest classical guitarist in the world. My husband, Ken, is friends with Christopher. They both like to fish; so whenever we're together, the subject is trout and tuna.

Recently, the three of us were at our home, and Ken left the room to get an fishing rod to show Christopher. I said, "Chris, I'm sorry to sound like such a fan, but one day I would love it if you would play for me 'Recuerdos del Alhambra.'" Then Ken was back in the room, and the subject turned to fish.

Later that night, as Christopher was about to leave, Ken said, "Hey, I want to show you my high school guitar and see what you think of it." Ken brought out that old, beat-up clunker that had never played much more than "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore." It was cracked, and its strings, fossilized.

Tuesday, 2 April 2013

Dancing With Faith

Dear Reader: Happy Passover! For the next eight days, we celebrate Pesach (Passover), offering you devotional reflection tied to this very special observance as well as Torah readings for each day. Since no work is done on the holiest of these days, these devotions were prepared in advance for you.

"Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women followed her, with timbrels and dancing." —Exodus 15:20
Today is Day 8 of the eight-day celebration of Passover. The Torah reading for today is Deuteronomy 15:19–16:17 and the Haftorah is Isaiah 10:32–12:6.

One of the most joyous moments in the story of the Exodus – and perhaps in the entire Bible – is the singing and rejoicing that occurred just after the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea. This was the climactic moment of what had begun as a wayward prince demanding the freedom of an oppressed people and ended with the most spectacular miracles that the world had ever seen on behalf of the downtrodden Israelites. God's hand was never so apparent, and the people rejoiced for the good that He had done for them.

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Ex-Porn Star Crissy Moran on the Influence of Music and Christian Marriage

Part II of A 2-Part Interview

By Vincent Funaro , Christian Post Reporter

Ex-Porn Star Crissy Moran
Ex-Porn Star and Treasures X Girl Crissy Moran

Pornography tops the list of controversial topics among Christians. Churchgoing fathers, pastors and young adults frequent websites filled with explicit sexual content to see the beautiful women involved in these acts. One of these women, Crissy Moran, made a more than comfortable living as adult actress- her website earned over $15,000 a month. However, Moran left the industry in 2006 to rededicate her life to Jesus Christ and never looked back.


The Christian Post recently had the opportunity to interview Moran. In the first part of that interview, which can be found here, Moran spoke about her upbringing, her decision to pursue a career in pornography, and what events led her to leaving the industry for Christ. Now she will discuss financial hardship, the influence of music and culture on her early life, and her upcoming Christian marriage.

Friday, 25 January 2013

The Power of Song

“On that day Deborah and Barak son of Abinoam sang this song…” — Judges 5:1

This Torah portion for this week, Beshalach, is from Exodus 13:7–17:16 and Judges 4:4–5:31.
The Haftorah for the Torah portion of Beshalach is taken from the book of Judges and tells us the memorable story about two biblical heroines — Deborah and Jael. Deborah was a prophetess and the leader of Israel. She was commanded by God to defeat the armies of Jabin and their General Sisera through her own second-in-command, Barak.

After Barak insisted that Deborah accompany him on the battlefield, the two defeated the enemy armies and only the enemy general, Sisera, escaped on foot. Sisera took refuge in the home of someone he considered an ally and friend, Jael. But instead, Jael chose to help Israel and killed Sisera in his sleep. The war was won, the enemy completely vanquished, and Deborah celebrated victory.

Saturday, 19 January 2013

Our Daily Bread -- A Song To Remember

Play MP3
Our Daily Bread is hosted by Les Lamborn



Ascribe greatness to our God. He is the Rock, His work is perfect. —Deuteronomy 32:3-4

I was delighted when I received a free gift in the mail—a CD of Scripture set to music. After listening to it several times, some of the melodies took root in my mind. Before long, I could sing the words to a couple of verses in the book of Psalms without the help of the recording.

Saturday, 10 November 2012

How To Win Him Back From The Other Woman

This is for my friend, I am charm, whose husband has left her and their child and is off having his affair with the other woman.

The statistics for an affair actually working out are very low, I think it is less than 2% of affairs actually turn into marriages, it is most likely not going to work out between him and the other woman, and it probably won’t even last past a year. This is good news for a wife who wants her husband to return to their family. However, you have many disadvantages on your side right now to work through.

Thursday, 24 May 2012

Music for the Dance


 by Max Lucado

Let's imagine that you want to learn to dance. Being the rational, cerebral person you are, you go to a bookstore and buy a book on dancing.

You take the book home and get to work. You do everything it says. The book says sway; you sway. The book says shuffle; you shuffle. The book says spin; you spin.

Finally, you think you've got it, and you invite your wife to come in and watch. You hold the book open and follow the instructions step by step.

You continue to read, then dance, read, then dance, until the dance is completed. You plop exhausted on the couch, look at your wife, and proclaim, "I executed it perfectly."

"You executed it, all right," she sighs. "You killed it."

"What?"

Friday, 18 May 2012

Does the smell of bacon affect the meaning of a word?


A new study is so fascinating that we immediately wondered how it would apply to words. You, of course, are our greatest resource for insight. After you read about the experiment, help us think about how word meanings change depending on what else is going on around you.

Researchers at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory are investigating how our different senses impact each other, and they recently conducted a trial to learn how sound affects taste.

(What is this sensory confusion technically called? Synesthesia. Read more about the peculiar sensations here.)

The test subjects were given pieces of toffee. First, when they ate the toffee, low-pitched music played in headphones. Then, they ate another piece of the same toffee while high-pitched tones played. The first bite tasted more savory to the participants, and the second bite tasted sweeter.

Wednesday, 16 May 2012

How to Pick Up The Pieces Of Your Life


Every so often, whether it’s after a long hard spate of work, finishing a big project, ending a relationship or recovering from a crisis (big or small) I find myself repeating the same rituals of recovery. If at any point in the process I feel lost or unbound and ungrounded, I just have to get back into the order of this list and all becomes well again. Last week I took some time off from work to recover from a busy few months and it worked again. Maybe it will work for you, too?

Wednesday, 9 May 2012

5 Secrets to Aging Well


How to be happier and healthier for the rest of your life


By , Caring.com senior editor

Portrait Of Senior Couple In Park
We'd all like to make it to 100 -- but let's face it, some people age a lot more gracefully than others. What's the difference between someone who looks and feels vibrant in midlife and beyond -- and someone who's sick, sad, and already old?
Scientists are turning up some surprising key factors: approaches to attitude and lifestyle that not only add years to your life but add a better quality of life to your years.
"Studies on successful aging have shown that only one third of what predicts how well we age is controlled by genetics. About two thirds is based on our personal lifestyle choices -- and is therefore under our control," says psychiatrist Gary Small, director of the UCLA Center on Agingand author of The Longevity Bible (Hyperion).
Here are five longevity factors you can do something about.

Friday, 20 April 2012

Beloved hymns carried King through troubled times

At 87, the Rev. C.T. Vivian can still recall the moment, decades after the height of the civil rights movement.

As he stood to conclude a meeting in his Atlanta home, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. joined his activist colleagues in song, his eyes closed, rocking back and forth on his heels.

“There is a balm in Gilead,” they sang, “to make the wounded whole.”

As the nation pauses Monday (Jan. 16) to mark King’s birthday, those who knew him say hymns, spirituals and other religious songs helped carry him through troubled times.

The spiritual fit King’s unique circumstances, said Vivian, who recently was named vice president of the SouthernChristian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization co-founded by King.

“The average Christian doesn’t have to pick up his phone when it rings and think about somebody killing him or his children,” said Vivian. “The average Christian didn’t have any of that.”

Tuesday, 17 April 2012

Romancing Your Man

It comes down to one simple principle—love your neighbor as you would want to be loved.


by Barbara Rainey

I've noticed that most romantic novels and movies contain a common theme. It goes like this: A handsome, intelligent, adventurous, single man on a mission unexpectedly meets a beautiful, equally intelligent single woman under improbable circumstances—often in an exotic foreign location or in a lavish historical setting. Though their personalities may clash at first, and though they may even be on opposing “teams,” eventually they fall madly in love. And while this love is often impulsive and always new—never mature—in most cases the story ends with the unspoken assumption that they will live happily ever after.


How many romance novels or all-star chick flicks feature a faithful husband and wife with two, four, six, or eight children, living a normal life (whatever that is!) going to work and school and church, and enjoying passionate romance on a regular basis? Not many that I know of.


How many couples really live like people in the movies and novels? Who can maintain that level of intensity? Or adventure, intrigue, and surprise? Does that sound like your marriage relationship? I’m guessing it doesn’t.

Tuesday, 10 April 2012

We Still March to His Tune : Oliver Holden (1765-1844)


On June 17, 1775, the Battle of Bunker Hill raged as the British Redcoats sought to take Breed’s Hill from the entrenched American Rebels. At the bottom of the hill and just across the water from Boston, the four hundred houses of Charlestown roared in flame. In response to sniper fire from the town, the British had bombarded it with red-hot cannon balls.[1] By the end of the day, the British would have control of the hill, but their loss of 1,150 soldiers compared to only 411 colonists[2] will give the moral victory to the Americans.

In 1786, only five years after the surrender of the British at Yorktown and a year before the U.S. Constitution will be drawn up, the town of Charlestown is still recovering from its personal tragedy. Workers are needed to restore the destroyed city. One man who found his way to the city is a 21-year-old carpenter named Oliver Holden.[3] Holden, a fifth generation American who traced his descent from a Richard Holden, a 1634 emigrant from England, moved to Charlestown from Shirley, Massachusetts in that year.[4]

But Oliver Holden was not a simple working man. He had interests other than carpentry. In time, he opened a general store and later dealt broadly in real estate. As his wealth grew, he became involved in politics and served several terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

Neither was Holden just a man of the world. He knew and loved the Lord and earnestly lived as a Christian and a Baptist. He joined the First Baptist Church of Boston in 1791, but the evidence shows him to have been a Baptist before this date. Another known interest during these years was his love for music. He admitted that his only musical instruction consisted of two month’s instruction in a Singing School in 1783, but this did not stop him from being one of the premier early American hymnists.

Soon after joining the First Baptist Church of Boston, he became the leader of the church choir. This choir has the distinction of being the first Baptist church choir in America and was in operation as early as 1771. Holden’s interest in music led him to publish a number of collections of sacred hymns, producing at least seven works between 1792 and 1800. Most likely, he wrote much of this music and the music sung by the church choir. Holden also wrote the words to a number of hymns.

Oliver Holden’s dedication to missionary work and holiness can be seen in his church affiliations. In April of 1801, he was one of 14 members of the Boston Church who were given their church letters so that they might start the First Baptist Church of Charlestown. Holden left the musical opportunities of the much larger Boston Church in order to start a new church across the river. In 1802, he further revealed his heart when he became one of the 12 original trustees for the Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Society. This was several years before American Baptists sent out their first foreign missionaries. He was clearly willing to sacrifice the glory of the moment at the head of America’s only Baptist choir in order to take the gospel to new places.

Holden’s stand for holy living can been seen in a later church problem. In 1809, Holden and a few other members split off from the First Baptist of Charlestown and formed the Second Baptist Church. They left the first church because of its laxness in disciplining its members. Holden served as the pastor of the new church which was derogatorily referred to at Holden’s “Puritan Society.” We could use such stands on holiness and biblical church discipline today.

Of all the things Oliver Holden did during his lifetime, his famous work is his composition of the hymn tune called CORONATION. It was composed in 1793 and is used today whenever we sing Edward Perronet’s hymn, “All Hail the Power of Jesus Name.” He called it CORONATION because of the references to the crowning of Jesus in the refrain. Hamilton C. MacDougall, in his Early New England Psalmody , said: “Out of the hundreds of tunes written in New England from 1770 to 1823…, CORONATION is the only one now in general and approved use in the United States.”[5] And this surviving hymn tune from early America was written by the Baptist Oliver Holden.

The following hymn written by Holden was still in use in a number of 19th century hymn books. It first appeared in 1793 and speaks of the importance of secret prayer since God is present everywhere.

All those who seek a throne of grace,
Are sure to find in every place;
To those who love a life of prayer,
Our God is present everywhere.
The shady grove or burning plain,
The blooming field or swelling main,
Alike are sweet in secret prayer,
For God is present everywhere.
In pining sickness, rosy health,
In poverty or growing wealth,
The humble soul delights in prayer,
And God is present everywhere.
When Zion mourns, and comforts fall,
And all her foes do scoff and rail,
‘Tis then a time for secret prayer,
For God is present everywhere.
When some backslide and other fall,
And few are found who strive at all,
The faithful find in secret prayer,
That God is present everywhere.
Come, then, my soul, in every strait,
To Jesus come and on him wait,
He sees and hears each secret sigh,
And brings his own salvation nigh.[6]

[1] Benson Bobrick, Angel in the Whirlwind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 142.

[2] James Trager, The People’s Chronology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992), 321.

[3] Harry Eskew, David W. Music, Paul A. Richardson, Singing Baptists(Nashville, TN: Church Street Press, 1994), 19.

[4] Henry Burrage, Baptist Hymn Writers and Their Hymns (Portland, ME: Brown Thurston & Company, 1888), 235

[5] Eskew, 24.

[6] Burrage, 237.
David Reagan

Sunday, 25 March 2012

Animal psychologists discover the music that pets prefer

Animals prefer music within their frequency range and measured to their particular heart rhythms — meaning human music is usually just loud noise.

By Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries 

Dog listening to music 

Many pet owners leave their home radios playing all day for the listening pleasure of their dogs and cats. Station choices vary. "We have a very human tendency to project onto our pets and assume that they will like what we like," said Charles Snowdon, an authority on the musical preferences of animals. "People assume that if they like Mozart, their dog will like Mozart. If they like rock music, they say their dog prefers rock."

Against the conventional wisdom that music is a uniquely human phenomenon, ongoing research shows that animals actually do have the capacity for music. But rather than liking classical or rock, Snowdon, an animal psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has discovered that animals march to the beat of a different drum altogether. They enjoy what he calls "species-specific music": tunes specially designed using the pitches, tones and tempos that are familiar to their particular species.

With no pun intended, music is all about scale: Humans like music that falls within our acoustic and vocal range, uses tones we understand, and progresses at a tempo similar to that of our heartbeats. A tune pitched too high or low sounds grating or ungraspable, and music too fast or slow is unrecognizable as such.

To animals, human music falls into that grating, unrecognizable category. With vocal ranges and heart rates very different from ours, they simply aren't wired to enjoy songs that are tailored for our ears. Studies show that animals generally respond to human music with a total lack of interest. With this general rule in mind, Snowdon has worked with cellist and composer David Teie to compose music that is tailored to suit them.

Back in 2009, the researchers composed two songs for tamarins — monkeys with vocalizations three octaves higher than our own and heart rates twice as fast. The songs sound shrill and unpleasant to us, but they seem to be music to the monkeys' ears. The song modeled on excited monkey tones and a fast tempo made the tamarins visibly agitated and active. By contrast, they calmed down and became unusually social in response to a "tamarin ballad," which incorporated happy monkey tones and a slower tempo.

Snowdon and Teie have moved on to composing music for cats, and studying how they respond to it.

"We have some work-in-progress where we've transposed music and put it in the frequency range for cat vocalizations, and have used their resting heart rate, which is faster than ours," he told Life's Little Mysteries. "We find that cats prefer to listen to the music composed in their frequency range and tempo rather than human music."

On the basis of their results, Teie has started selling cat songs online (at $1.99 per song) through a company called "Music for Cats."

Dogs are tougher nuts to crack, mostly because breeds vary widely in size, vocal range and heart rate. However, large dogs such as Labradors or mastiffs have vocal ranges that are quite similar to those of adult male humans. "So, it is possible that they might be responsive to music in our frequency range. My prediction is that a big dog might be more responsive to human music than a smaller dog such as a Chihuahua," Snowdon said. [Dogs Play the Piano in New Video]

Indeed, some dogs do appear to respond emotionally to human music. Research led by Deborah Wells, a psychologist at Queen's University Belfast, shows that dogs can discern between human music of different genres. "Our own research has shown that dogs certainly behave differently in response to different types of music, e.g., showing behaviors more suggestive of relaxation in response to classical music and behaviors more suggestive of agitation in response to heavy metal music," Wells wrote in an email.

Considering the great demand for new ways to please our pets, more progress is likely to be made in the field of animal music. But no matter how well composers perfect their dog, cat and monkey songs, the animals will probably never appreciate their species-specific music quite as much as humans appreciate ours. According to Snowdon, they lack an important musical ability that we possess: relative pitch.

"We can recognize that a sequence of notes is the same whether it's in the key of F or A flat," he said. "I have found that animals have very good absolute pitch, but they don't have relative pitch. They can learn to recognize a sequence of notes, but if you transpose the notes to a different key, so that the sequence uses the same relative notes but the key is different, they can't recognize the relationships between the notes anymore."

He added, "To that extent, we understand music in a different way than animals do."

Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.





Saturday, 24 March 2012

Do You Play Music for Your Pet?

World News Wants to Hear from You 

PHOTO: Scientists suggest that animals are akin to something called
World News is working a story about animals and music. One scientist suggests that animals like something called "species specific music," music with pitches, tempos and tones that are familiar to their species.

Many people leave music on for their pets to enjoy while they are alone during the day, do you? If so, we want you to see videos of your pets listening to music. Send us your videos and they could be used on World News next week.
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