This song will not be coming to a Top 40 playlist on a radio station near you anytime soon. But the “Rainy Day Breakfast Song,” with its clichéd lyrics and GarageBand percussion tracks, was a fun exercise in songwriting.
The Songwriting with GarageBand workshop was part of a two-day Arts Exchange for the College of Fine and Applied Arts on Oct. 27-28. Many classes throughout the college were canceled and FAA students could enroll in workshops to learn about other disciplines within the college, from hip-hop dance to stage lighting design to sustainable papermaking.
“We tried a new way of approaching education for a couple days that didn’t fit neatly with our campus’s existing models,” said Kevin Hamilton, the senior associate dean for FAA and a member of an FAA steering committee that developed the Arts Exchange. “Where other institutions reserve a week or even several weeks between semesters for this sort of exploration as a credit-bearing component of the educational experience, we had a try at a much briefer interlude and outside existing course schedules.”
In the songwriting workshop, music professors Julie Gunn, Michael Tilley and Stephen Taylor talked about the basic structure of songs – such as meter, verse and chorus – and then demonstrated how to add tracks from GarageBand to create rhythm and melody. As a group, the students came up with lyrics, relating a love interest to breakfast on a rainy day: “You’re the sugar in my coffee, the toaster for my Pop-tart. You are the sun on a rainy day.”
“Let’s explore how we can populate our song without any musical knowledge whatsoever,” Tilley said as the group decided on what GarageBand tracks to use.
Lorna Chavez, a freshman in theater with a concentration in sound design, and Ethan Mayer, a freshman in industrial design, have both used GarageBand before. Both said music is a hobby, and they were looking for tips on understanding GarageBand better.
Even for students who will never compose their own music, the workshop can provide insight into how their favorite music is created, said Taylor and Tilley.
Mayer said the Arts Exchange “is good to get (students’) feet wet (in other areas) and explore new options for possible careers they don’t know about.”
Chavez said the exchange could provide inspiration for new projects for students within their own majors.
Gunn agreed, saying the exchange gives students who are usually busy with music or theater rehearsals an opportunity to be aware of what students are doing in other areas of FAA.
“You never know what seeds it will plant,” she said.
Rebecca Nettl-Fiol and Philip Johnston of the dance department taught a class on the Alexander Technique, which helps people become more aware of how they hold and move their bodies – how they stand, walk or cross their arms, for example – and the ways in which their physical habits can add unnecessary tension or impair movement.
Nettl-Fiol gave up teaching her dance anatomy and kinesiology class and her choreographic process class during the Arts Exchange. She said the exchange was “a nice opportunity to see what everybody’s doing” in the college.
Hamilton said attendance was not as strong for the first try at an Arts Exchange as he’d hoped, but “going forward, we plan to work with faculty to determine the best possible way to afford such opportunities in ways students can take full advantage of them.
“Though we’re still gathering input, those who participated have voiced strong appreciation for the event,” he said. “We see great potential in this approach for providing more arts experiences outside the college as well.”