Evaluating Our 70s Performance

When performing our song ‘Burn’ we all sang together.  This piece was very successful vocally as we all sang creating a three part harmony which added depth to the song. The backing track had a saxophone, piano and we later added a drum as we felt it was needed to make the piece feel more like soul. ‘The musical composition of soul music was initially comprised of vocals accompanied by the sounds of the guitar, bass, piano, organ, drum, horn, or even a full orchestra. Soul music was characterised by a distinctive bass melody and a strong percussion beat’ (Soul Decision n.d.). I feel the performance would have been better if the instruments were played live, but as we only had a small group we decided that it would sound more like soul if we sang in harmony and were able to just focus on singing.

As we found in our research when creating the song most soul music from the 70s is about love, the heartbreak, the happiness, so the intention for our 70s piece was to find a song that demonstrated this. When we chose the song ‘Burn’ we found it was about love but in a more metaphorical way, the song is equating love to light and the fire that burns inside us all, it is about the passion that keeps us all going. We sang the song in soft tones, for example when I sang the chorus, rather than belting the high note I sang it in my head voice to give the piece a more loving feeling. This helped push our intention as if we’d sang harshly to the words ‘fire fire fire’ the audience may have got the wrong idea of what we were trying to portray.

Our 70s song ‘Burn’ had good timing with both the choreography and vocals. It could have been improved by changing the vocal pattern to the solo parts in the vocals, especially when I sang the final chorus with no backing vocals, this would have giving the piece a more soul feeling to it. I feel we also needed to have rehearsed the piece more in front of a small audience as this would have given the group confidence, this would have added to the piece for it would have meant we all had our heads up smiling, which would have created a nicer sound while singing.