MUSC 157 – Beginning Ukulele

MUSC 157 is the course that I took to partially satisfy the Aesthetic Expression pillar of the Civitae Core Curriculum. The course was taught by Dr. Jaqueline Secoy. This course was very hands-on as it relied heavily on playing the ukulele as a group during our class time, as well as practicing outside of class. I really enjoyed this class because it was not a class I would typically take. As a computer science major, it is very rare that I get to explore the arts as an outlet to express myself, but I really enjoyed learning the ukulele. As mentioned before, most of this class came from playing and practicing the ukulele. However, for the first half of the semester, we had weekly video assignments where we would watch a video and reflect on our opinions of it, both visually and musically. These assignments helped to expand my musical vocabulary and my knowledge of musical terminology. In addition, I feel that these assignments helped to clarify terms such as rhythm, pitch, and harmony in an effort to promote musical appreciation. For the second half of the semester, every member of the class was to choose a song to learn, create a lead sheet for, present to the class, and lead during our final performance during finals week. However, once we were all sent home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to alter this assignment as well as the way we gathered for classes. To start, in place of meeting every Tuesday and Thursday for class, we were all supposed to film a video every week of us playing any song we chose on the ukulele and submit it for our class participation. I enjoyed the video playing assignments because it kept me accountable and made me want to practice. In terms of our song share project, Dr. Secoy met with all of us one-on-one in order to help arrange our song and give us some first impressions. After about a week or so, we began to meet as a full class so we could hear everybody’s songs and give our feedback regarding the arrangement or how well the sound blended over our Zoom call. Having to perform over Zoom did offer some challenges, mostly in regards to sound mixing and some performances lagging behind, but I feel that our class performed well regardless of these hardships.

Because of this class, I have a new perspective on music’s role in my life. Before taking this course, I had never been invested in playing and performing music. Even though I have been playing guitar for around three years, I never thought that I would enjoy playing in front of anybody, even a small group of my peers. However, after taking this class, I realized how enjoyable and relieving playing for people can be. By playing in front of a group of like-minded peers, we were able to throw ideas out and try them in real-time. It was also refreshing to get feedback from Dr. Secoy and those in the class who had been playing the ukulele for a while because I felt like I was getting feedback from people who were genuinely there to help me progress along my musical journey. Because of the skills I had learned in this class, I have committed myself to improve at both the ukulele and the guitar over our summer break. I even enrolled in MUSC 158 (Beginning Guitar) with Dr. Secoy next semester!

Linked above is the lead sheet I created for our song share assignment. The song I chose for this assignment was “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by Elvis Presley. I feel that this assignment has given me a new appreciation for the process by which music is made. As mentioned above, I have been playing guitar for about three years and have looked at countless lead sheets and tablatures. However, I have never thought about how much effort goes into creating the lead sheets and arranging a performance. To create this lead sheet, I started by typing the lyrics into a word document, with a space between each line. I then had to look up the chords and figure out where the chords changed in the song. After creating the basic lead sheet, I had my one-on-one meeting with Dr. Secoy where we talked more about how this song was going to be arranged. This was a completely new process for me, but Dr. Secoy helped immensely and explained the basics of arrangement. For my song, we decided that we would have a small number of people play in the beginning and have more and more people join in as the song progresses. During the last verse, we were going to have half of the class play the ukulele and the other half just sing. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we did not perform these songs together as intended. Regardless, I still really enjoyed arranging the song because I got to try something that I had never even thought of doing before.