Music The Mission
Neomi Bensch
Founded on jazz and popular music rooted in the African cultural diaspora, our comprehensive curriculum is distinctly contemporary in its content and approach, and embraces the principal musical movements of our time. Through a course of scholarly and practical learning experiences integrating performance and writing, our curriculum covers the variety of influential styles, relevant technologies, and career opportunities open to today's music professional.
Berklee was founded on two revolutionary ideas: that musicianship could be taught through the music of the time; and that our students need practical, professional skills for successful, sustainable music careers. While our bedrock philosophy has not changed, the music around us has and requires that we evolve with it.
For over half a century, we've demonstrated our commitment to this approach by wholeheartedly embracing change. We update our curriculum and technology to make them more relevant, and attract diverse students who reflect the multiplicity of influences in today's music. We prepare our students for a lifetime of professional and personal growth through the study of the arts, sciences, and humanities. And we are developing new initiatives to reach and influence an ever-widening audience.
Our focus is the distribution of purchased or donated musical instruments to children who do not have access to them. Sometimes this is a direct donation, while other times we will give the instrument to a music teacher or school who can provide it to a child.
Another important part of what we do is providing music lessons to those who are not able to pay for them. We help provide the necessary practice materials, and arrange for a qualified teacher. The music teachers may volunteer, offer discounted rates, or receive tuition from the music mission in the form of a scholarship.
To provide a comprehensive educational environment that develops the abilities of students to become consummate music professionals as performers, educators, scholars, composers, conductors, music therapists, entrepreneurs, commercial musicians, and arts administrators.
To contribute to the culture, vibrancy, diversity, and economy of the university community and the region through outreach that engages students and citizens from different backgrounds and walks of life.
Music In World Cultures is a great organization doing ethnomusicology in various countries. They have curriculum through Liberty University. Start searching and you will find added resources and contacts.
It was German short-term missionaries who noticed the people used a similar tune but with different words to greet them each time they visited a village. The musicians in the German group quickly learned the tune. Host interpreters explained that the words were an oral history of that village and people group.
Take the Liberty courses and try a field experience with your missions agency. Many more with this calling are needed in South Asia, which is the least reached and most unengaged part of the world. Why not engage them with music that speaks to their hearts?
2. Music can bless your ministry. Many mission teams rely on members with such abilities to help them worship together, assist and encourage the local Christian community, and lend their skills to local outreach efforts.
3. Music can make you friends. With or without a music degree or specialized training, simply being able to play an instrument or carry a tune may also help you make friends not only with other musicians but also with those who want to learn or who just enjoy being around the music. Ask God to make you a blessing and use your skills for his purposes!
When Ennio Morricone died in July, I hesitated to dedicate this next Music in Film piece to him. Aside from wondering what I could add to the flood of tributes and memorials to one of film music's most prolific and loved composers, three editions into the series, I was keen to move into more underrepresented territory.
Above even this is a growing acceptance of the idea, which has worked its way from feminist and postcolonial theory into mainstream parlance, that the "masters" or "greats," in other words the artistic canons, have always been chosen by a powerful minority of gatekeepers, in their own image. It's this that feels uncomfortable seeing the word "master" pop up again and again in these memorials. It is universally acknowledged that Morricone is one of "the great" film composers, but at the expense of who (or what)? This was the source of my hesitation, but it's also what warrants yet another Morricone piece: Because he was made canonical almost in spite of himself, and while some of his scores regularly top "best-of" lists, many more were deliberately anti-establishment, anti-individualistic, and by some standards even anti-musical.
We'll start, though, with a score considered by many to be his "masterpiece." Roland Joff's The Mission is a film about masters, set in the 18th century in Guarani lands around the Iguazu Falls, which lie between modern-day Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. Roger Ebert wrote upon the film's release in 1986: "Two great colonial forces are competing for the hearts and minds of the native Indians. On the one hand, there are the imperialist plunderers, who want to establish a trade in riches and slaves. On the other hand, there are the missionaries, who want to convert the Indians to Christ." All action and moral tension centers around the struggle between these two groups, a struggle which is personified in Robert De Niro's character, Rodrigo Mendoza, a slave-trader who becomes a missionary after killing his brother and suffering a crisis of conscience.
The antagonists in the movie are the Spanish and Portugese colonists, who are frustrated at losing potential slaves to the Jesuit missions, where the indigenous converts are protected from enslavement, and the story revolves around a visit from a papal emissary who arrives under the pretense of auditing the missions to decide whether to keep them open, but already carrying orders to close them, due to pressure on the Vatican in Europe from the Spanish and Portugese governments. When the Jesuits realize their case for keeping the missions is hopeless, the central question becomes the question of violent versus non-violent resistance, with the priests split between the pacifism of Jeremy Irons' Father Gabriel and Mendoza, who takes up arms once again, this time to fight for the Guarani.
A popular consensus holds that where other aspects of the movie fail, its score succeeds; while its politics feel dated, its music has endured and taken on a life of its own. Indeed, the film's best known theme, the baroque "Gabriel's Oboe," was put to Italian lyrics by Chiara Ferra and released on Sarah Brightman's 1998 album Eden, as "Nella Fantasia," becoming a classical crossover standard recorded and performed by the likes of Katherine Jenkins, Russell Watson and Il Divo. Along with another major theme, "Falls," Morricone's original and innumerable other arrangements of "Gabriel's Oboe" have found their way into orchestras' repertoires since the film's release.
However, such a clear separation neglects the centrality of its music to the inner workings of the film, and particularly to the notion of mastery. The movie opens with Father Gabriel climbing the Iguazu Falls to treat with a community of Guarani, who had sent his predecessor over the waterfall tied to a cross, with an oboe strapped to his back like a musket. After walking tentatively through the jungle, he sits, sensing he has reached the Guarani's territory, and begins to play the "Gabriel's Oboe" theme.
Elizabeth F. Barklay, professor of music history at Foothill College, notes that "the nasal, focused timbre of the European oboe is used to contrast with the diffused, airier timbre of the 'Indian flute,' and 'the melodic contour is terraced upward, contrasting with indigenous characteristics in which melodies are predominantly terraced downward. The Chief becomes increasingly anxious as the melody ascends, as though in violation of the world order. He steps out of the forest, grabs the oboe, and breaks it as the melody reaches its highest point. When the Chief's musically sensitive son takes the oboe to fix it, Father Gabriel is "accepted" by the Guarani."
Music has been thought to hold some power in many religions and cultures throughout history, not least in Catholicism, but it holds specific powers in The Mission. The first is a power of binding: Although Gabriel's oboe is snapped, it is through the music that he is able to win the hearts of the Guarani and avoid the same end as his predecessor. In a grimly reflective moment, the papal emissary says, "With an orchestra, the Jesuits could have subdued the whole continent."
With the Guarani converted and the mission built, Father Gabriel later attempts to turn the same trick against the Europeans. In a court hearing he has a young Guarani boy sing Morricone's arrangement of "Ave Maria" in an attempt to display the indigenous peoples' humanity. He repeats this attempt as the emissary visits each mission, having choirs perform and showing him around workshops where the Guarani build European classical instruments. Finally, he has a choir sing the hymn as the Spanish and Portuguese soldiers advance on the mission, continuing as the Guarani are gunned down and the mission around them burns. The unsusceptibility of the Europeans to the music shows their lack of humanity. A contradiction arises from the way music is used here. The Guarani's mastery of European music is supposed to symbolize their civilisation, their mastery over primitive nature, but as we have already seen, it is the music that has mastered them.
It's in his work with Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza that this experimental side is most easily accessed. The group's music was based on a rigorous improvisational practice according to a set of rules in which "every member had to be a composer and accomplished performer, but no individual player had priority. No sound produced could be bound to the tonal system. There could be no rhythmic periodicity or repetition, no easily remembered tunes (of which Morricone happened to be genius), no clichs (including avant-garde ones), no wasteful sound, no improviser ego-tripping." The group were influenced by the microtonal sounds of composers like Gyrgy Ligeti (whose piece "Atmosphres" appears in 2001: A Space Odyssey) and Giacinto Scelsi, to whom they paid homage with the 1976 piece "Omaggio A Giacinto Scelsi." They also experimented with electro-acoustic music and field recordings, which had a profound influence on Morricone's film work.
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