“It’s important to know that it is not necessary for a musician to be able to read music to make music,” says Ms. Elise, Artist-in-Residence. “Many musicians learn and create music by ear. Written music is just a code, a language for musicians to communicate with each other.”
How do we deal with the many feelings we experience while stuck at home and living through a pandemic? For some GVP students, the answer is through songwriting. A new student-led Songwriters’ Club has flourished at GVP as a unique space for students to explore composing their own songs and remixing others’. Students meet weekly via Zoom to workshop original lyrics and share their latest creations with peers. They swap techniques for using GarageBand, a digital music creation studio available on their iPads. And the finished products are impressive: as STEAM Coordinator Danielle Ereddia says, “It’s not only that students are writing lyrics, they’re writing melodies and using loops, voice filters, and instruments on GarageBand to construct multi-layered songs…with up to 14 different tracks on one song.”
This interview was conducted on May 12, 2021 by Emilie Amrein and André de Quadros, founders of the Choral Commons.
In music, a tuning fork is a classic vibratory instrument providing true pitch, used as a guide to all other tonal relationships. In life, it is Elise Witt.
Born in Switzerland to survivors of Nazi Germany, raised in North Carolina, Elise makes her home in Atlanta, Georgia. Speaking fluent Italian, French, German, Spanish, and English and singing in more than a dozen languages, Elise’s passion for music and language has carried her around the nation and across the seas. “My work and my life are all about sound,” says the multi-instrumentalist and longtime member of the Children’s Music Network.
Published by Alternate ROOTS Online Journal. The first bone to develop in a baby is the Earbone. The last sense we lose before passing from this life is the sense of sound. Babies are born with all sounds, and to learn the language spoken around them, they eliminate the sounds they don’t need. … Read More …