Exploring Music as a Cellist

As you can no doubt tell, I am a lover of anything that includes cello and the soundtrack to this game is no exception. I also love slow, mournful tracks that pull at your heartstrings with every note. The Long Dark has both of these and much more! It is one of my most favorite games and I can play it for hours on end without getting bored.  For a little backstory, in this game, you play as a survivor who crashlands in the northern Canadian wilderness after a geomagnetic storm. There is both a survivor and story mode but my personal favorite is the survival mode because of the open-world map and the ability to roam as you please. It is the main theme of the game that is my favorite of all. The game was released by Hinterland Games in 2014 but the soundtrack was released in 2017 around the time of the first story mode episode. The soft piano at the beginning really plays into the idea of this game which is the quiet apocalypse. A cello then joins the piano playing a very mournful melody

 "I'll Make a Man Out of You" has been running laps around my head for weeks and I just can't get it to stop! It is one of my go-to work out songs and it always gets me excited to do whatever task I have at hand. This is the song in the movie sung by Li Shang, the commander of the group of soldiers Mulan is a part of, while he is training his troops for war. Of course, every movie with any kind of fighting has to have a training montage and this is up there with the best of them partly because of this song. Though mildly insulting to women, this song shows us the transformation of Mulan from a simple girl to a strong woman ready for battle and it is meant to empower not only her but her fellow soldier as well. Mulan also during the song has a line saying "Hope he doesn't see right through me" which is referring to her not wanting Li Shang to find out she is a woman. This song is the embodiment of hard work pays off no matter who you are. Just a little bi

     The duo that is 2 Cellos has been an absolute inspiration to me since I picked up a cello. It is one of my many dreams to be able to perform with them and learn from them because of their incredible talent. I have spent countless hours listening to and practicing their unique style. I even started writing my own sheet music for songs I love and composing my own pieces because of these two musicians. My grandma has even my ringtone set to their cover of  'Thunderstruck' by AC/DC! It's all I would listen to for months because I was trying to dissect the song to write my own sheet music. Of course, that did not pan out the way I intended it to but it still remains to torture my grandfather when I call at random hours of the day.     The Croatian cellists, Luka Sulic and Stjepan Hauser, first rose to fame in 2011 when their cover of 'Smooth Criminal' was posted to Youtube and was a massive hit. This lead to them getting a record deal with Portrait/Sony Music Master

 My first introduction to Mongolian music was The Hu, a Mongolian folk metal band. Their song, 'Wolf Totem' is my favorite song to listen to before hard workouts and competitions!       However, this is not the true glory that is the traditional music of Mongolia. If you haven't had the pleasure of hearing about the history of  Mongolia, it is deeply intertwined with horses. An entire empire was created from the back of a horse. Even the most popular instrument is a two-stringed instrument topped by a horse head! Sounds cool right? This instrument is called a Morin Khuur  and though it resembles a cello in the way it is played, it is firmly and completely rooted in Mongolia. Legend has it that the first of this magnificent instrument was made from one of the fastest horses. It could travel great distances in an instant but one day the man who rode it found the horse dead and in his grief made an instrument out of its tendons, bones, hair, and head. He started playing this m

     I first heard the Theremin in 2015 in my Advanced Orchestra class. Clara Rockmore performed The Swan  from "The Carnival of the Animals" and it not only inspired me to learn the song on my own instrument, but led me to fall in love with this quirky instrument. Leon Theremin created his masterpiece completely by accident! The Russian scientist was originally supposed to be creating a machine to monitor the densities of gasses but quickly realized he had created something else. This is how, in the middle of the Russian civil war, a revolutionary instrument was born!      The instrument is played by moving your hands between two antenna. One to control Pitch and one to control volume. It is also monophonic because it can only produce one clear sound at a time. It has a wide range to it as well because of the users ability to manipulate the sound. On the modern version of the instrument there are many nobs that can adjust the pitch, brightness, and wave form of the instrumen

 No that is not a typo in the title, the song is indeed called Undertale.  It was released, along with the game, in 2015 by the developer and composer Toby Fox. Undertale and its music took the gaming world by storm and people till, to this day make covers and create masterpieces with the music.  The Games and Symphonies orchestra even performed some of the music! This is the song that I used to teach myself piano and it has gotten me through many hard times in my life Even if you do not play the game I highly recommend listening to the soundtrack! It has some of the most iconic and noteworthy songs in gaming culture.     The song starts out homophonic with a lovely guitar melody but changes to polyphonic when the piano melody joins in. Though these two melodies do not fight, they are each clear, crisp and stand out in the complexity of the song. The dynamic of the song start out at a soft mezzo piano and, when the piano plays a descending scale, increases to a solid forte for the end

     Intro III was released in 2017, in the U.S., by the rapper NF from his album Perception. Ironically the song starts with an intro of a melancholy cello melody that fades into the lone piano that accompanies the rest of the song. At the start of the piano we are introduced to the main antagonist of the song, Fear. Fear is a major character in this song and makes up a good majority of the lyrics. Fear starts off the song by taunting Nate about his inability to rid himself of his unwanted emotion. Fear continues to tell Nate that he is nothing without fear even saying that Nate without fear is like having blood with no veins. The music crescendos and the accompaniment grows more complex as Nate's anger rises to a peak. Nate was quiet for most of the song while Fear berated him until this peak when he finally tells Fear to keep his mouth shut but Fear continues. The dynamics of the song then change and the fortissimo changes to a surprisingly calm mezzo forte as Fear realizes tha