Group Assignment about Jamaica Inn | Hannah

Aim

“We want to make one awesome, catchy and creative song, in which we can all express ourselves and our look on one particular scene or feeling from the book. We want to show other teachers-to-be that you can use music in the classroom to make pupils understand what they are reading better.  As teachers-to-be, we think that we can really motivate our pupils by using music in the classroom. Therefore we wanted to practice with this, by making this assignment work to our best ability.” 

Our assignment is to write a song about an important passage from Jamaica InnMake a musical version of an important scene or chapter from the book. This may be in any genre you like. (The difference with Assignment A is that in this case you make your own music.)

An outline

·         We are going to plan a meeting to think about what kind of music we want to play, what our talents are on this field and how we can put our talents into use for this assignment.

·         We decided in class to brainstorm via whatsapp about lyrics and the feel of the lyrics and the message we want to come across in our song

·         Another meeting will be planned to write a song and hopefully come up with a melody and to practice

·         And at the end we might have to plan another meeting to actually record the song

A look back on what we did and the motivation behind our choices

Meeting #1:

·         After the third lesson of British arts and context we sat down and shared our ideas of what music we wanted to make and where our talents lie. At first it looked like it was going to be quite hard, because our tastes in music were almost worlds apart. But okay, we put that to one side for now and decided we could probably work with that.

·         We decided that for the end product or performance (we hadn’t decided yet) we would all sing at least. Jeremy and Hannah wanted to write the lyrics. Straight away it was clear that Hannah and Jeremy wanted to play guitar. Christiaan wanted to use pots and pans to drum, Julia would play the piano and Martijn was fine with just singing.

·         Then we talked about what sense or what vibe from the book we wanted to be the base of our song. It was tough at first. Some thought we would have to write an actual song, some thought we had to create an instrumental piece. We did decide there and then to write a song with music and lyrics. We talked about ‘just’ writing a love song, but we steered away from that quite quickly, because we thought it would be way to easy and to obvious. We played with the thought of something dark and obscure, because of the Moors and the dark and gloomy feeling we got from the book. We didn’t decide on a fine theme or scene just then.

·         When we got comfortable with each other and with the idea of writing a song about the book, we even toyed with the idea of doing a music video! Accept when we tried to work out the details it turned out to be just a little more than what we thought and so we left that idea.

Meeting #2:

·         Martijn took it on himself to be the manager, if you will. In no time he scheduled the music room in his old middle school. We had limited options for the room usage and there were a lot of days not everyone could come. Finally we decided that Monday would be the day to go to our next step. After the one lesson we had that day got cancelled, we met at 11:00u at Nhl to talk through our day and furthermore see what we could come up with for the lyrics. The music room was booked at 12:10u, so around 12:00 we headed towards Martijns old middle school.

·         After some detouring, because of the construction work, we arrived at the school. We tried to get right to it, but it proved rather difficult. Hannah managed to write some lyrics that morning and also thought of a melody, but it was definitely very raw and we didn’t really know what to do with it.

·         We started with the chorus, because we thought that would be easiest, as that would be the back bone of the song. Julia and Hannah mostly worked on trying to get the lyrics right. Jeremy and Martijn where helping. Meanwhile, Christiaan declared himself to be no use with the lyrics so started working on his rhythm and trying to get used to playing the drums.

·         After that we started working on the verses. First we had to get the melody right and then we worked on fitting the lyrics on the melody.

·         Within an 1,5 we already had 3 verses and the chorus. But we still wanted more verses and a bridge.

·         We thought about letting only Julia and Hannah sing, but at the same time we wanted the boys to sing too. So we thought they would only sing during the chorus.

·         Then someone came with the wonderful idea of creating a few verses from the perspective of Jem. We song that we were writing was mainly from the perspective of Mary, but we concluded that the chorus easily could have been said or sung by Jem. So we tried creating a verse for Jem, but it turned out to be hard. Jeremy and Martijn tried to figure out what Jem was feeling from a man’s perspective and Hannah and Julia worked on the rest on the lyrics.

·         While trying to get the lyrics right, we got together ever so often to practice to chorus and to teach the others the melody of the verses.

·         Jeremy came up with some brilliant lyrics from Jems perspective, which we all agreed on fitted his character and the song perfectly.

·         We were on a high when we reached the bridge part of the song. The lyrics were there, but we felt kind of creatively drained, so we couldn’t think of a melody to fit the lyrics. We decided to just sing it like the verse

·         Then came the fabulous idea to make it a ‘real’ ballade and let ‘Jem’ and ‘Mary’ sing to each other in the bridge part of the song. Turned out it would work out great like that

·         After that it was practically finished, some tweaks here and there and then we started recording the song

·         Christiaan mainly took care of the setup and the filming equipment. He made sure it was a nice shot.

·         This was the time we talked about putting feeling into the lyrics and music, about expressions during ‘performing’ as best as we could, learning as much of the song by heart as possible and we tweaked the rhythm to fit properly and worked out the clapping in the next to last chorus.

·         Also, somewhere in the process we got really enthusiastic and decided it would be really cool and we were confident enough to perform our song live, so that is what we hope to do.

 Our song is called 'When you came along' and our group is called: Mary and the Gems