the end.

Well, here we are, at the end of another Jan Term.

There were a lot of things that I learned in this class that I found especially interesting. I think the most intriguing thing was what we learned about the Quran singing. I have to say that I am not very familiar with the Islamic culture, but I thought it was just incredible how they recite the Quran through song. Their voices makes some very interesting sounds; in fact, I'm not really sure how exactly that sound was able to come out their mouthes. I really like a lot of the melodies that come from the reading of the Quran, and I think I might actually try to write a piece using parts of the Quran melodies. I think it would be pretty cool.

I realized that our own culture is more of a mixture of all other cultures than I thought. For example, we can clearly hear African drumming in a lot of our own music, and we don't even really realize it. The same thing goes with things like the guitar and the Irish folk sound we have in some of our music today. It was really interesting to me to see how all the cultures are sort of intertwined. America truly is a melting pot of different peoples and their cultures, and this is evident in our music.

I think I would like to know more about the different instruments of the world. The different timbres really fascinate me. I like to sort of collect instruments, and I would love to have several of the instruments we learned about in class. I hope that one day I can travel to many of these different places and buy some of the instruments so that I could learn them and perhaps write music for them.

Overall, I'd say the class was pretty fascinating, and I really did learn a lot.