On Scale

Read this a few nights ago and it stuck with me:
"Then the king and all Israel with him offered a sacrifice of fellowship offerings to the Lord: twenty-two thousand cattle and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep and goats. So the king and all the Israelite dedicated the temple of the Lord."
-1 Kings 8-62-63

This is as king Solomon completes the Lord's temple, and is dedicating it with an enormous offering to God.
Imagine the scale of 120,000 sheep being sacrificed.
Imagine what it took just to get them all in one place.
Imagine how huge of an undertaking that would have to be. Where do you keep 120,000 sheep before you kill them? Not to mention 22,000 cows.
And imagine having to be the guy that cuts them open!
And imagine having to be the guy that keeps the fire going on that altar for hours and hours and hours.
Ridiculous.
Also it sounds like all of Israel was there to see this.
That's like 6 million people.
That's a lot of people.
This thing going on here, it's a big deal.
I mean, a cow weighs about 1200 pounds, right?
That's 132,000 TONS of beef.
Imagine how many meals that is!
That's 1,056,000,000 quarter pounders.
A billion hamburgers.
That's a lot of food.
But God was important enough for that.
Solomon made a big deal out of opening the Temple of the Lord because it was BIG deal! Before this point, God had literally been living in a tent.
He goes from a crummy tent that moves around into a massive, awesome, beautiful temple, and the inauguration ceremony consists of hundreds of thousands of animals being sacrificed.

Imagine if we made as big a deal about every new church plant as Solomon made about the temple? Imagine if everything we did for God had the same sort of scale that Solomon threw this ceremony on. That would be pretty cool.

Memories

I saw an XKCD comic that reeeeally got me thinking, because it brings up a fundamental issue with our minds:
http://www.xkcd.com/647/
click the link, read the comic, and then read the mouse-over text.

8 year old kids are old enough to have intelligent conversations about an event that they never witnessed. An event that happened when I was 10, that I remember very clearly.
And then you realize that 8 years is a pretty long time- it's long enough for a human being to grow from a newborn into a fully cognitive child.

I'd like to suggest something:
Thinking about our memories is one of the closest things we can get to understanding God's eternalness.

As humans, we can't get our minds around that concept.
God is forever. He is the beginning and the end.
He completely transcends time.
And so do our memories.

In our minds, we mark time based on our memories.
But very vivid memories often seem to be more recent than they actually are.
For example, 9/11. Or watching your favorite childhood cartoon on saturday mornings.
Those memories feel recent. They're vivid, you remember the "like it was yesterday".
And so time doesn't seem to matter that much.

My family went to the same church from before I was born until I was in 8th grade.
I have fuzzy memories of being a baby and my mom carrying me into the nursery during the worship service.
I can also remember being a little kid and one of the pastors giving us pez every morning.
That's pretty much all i remember until i was in 7th grade and started going to youth group.
Within that time frame, my family got pretty involved on the worship team and i played bass on sunday mornings for at least a year's time. I don't really remember much from that. All i remember are those really early times and then later.
It's significant events that we keep clear in our minds.
When you think about something, you tend to retain it much better.
We think about significant events => we remember them.

The result is like a timeline of events comprised of what we think about most, with no datestamps.
The time itself is not important to our minds. What's important is the content.

I like to think about time as a "container" that the physical world happens to be inside of. Our memories aren't physical- they transcend time.
So I think that's as close as we can ever get to understanding timelessness.

Quick Metaphore

me and my suitemate both use acne treatments before we go to bed at night.
Mine is one of those creams that you put on.
His is a pill.
I never knew that they made swallowable acne medicine.

But here's the deal.
Acne cream works by drying out your skin.
It draws the junk out of zits and makes them go away temporarily.
The pill medicine actually modifies your body's immune function so that you don't get zits to begin with. It works to eliminate the problem rather than dealing with it after it exists.
That's really cool.
For something as superficial as acne, the treatment method isn't particularly important. They both get the same results. But does the comparison sound familiar?

Here's a more significant example:
"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell." -Matthew 5:21-22

Oh hello there, Jesus. What is this strange new thing you have to say?
In the sermon on the mount, Jesus outlined a bunch of "new laws" for the people-
He went over a bunch of common jewish laws and turned them around.

The law back then didn't actually solve any problems.
It just treated the surface.
Jesus came along and showed people that it's the root of the problem- the heart, the attitude, the thoughts- that lead to the actions that the law attempted to fix.

I thought that was neat.

Unity of Purpose

Enclosed in red on the image below is the 275-acre RPI main campus.
The building in blue is Troy High School, which happens to be adjacent to the eastern side of campus.
Go ahead and click on the picture to get a better look.
Troy High School is a pretty impressive building. Actually, it's massive.
It houses about 1200 students during the day.
















RPI has 6,000 students on our almost 300 acre campus.
Take your finger and pinch troy highschool.
Fit 6 of those buildings within RPI's boundaries.
You'll notice that you could probably fit a dozen more.

A student at Troy High School spends the exact same amount of time in that building that an RPI student spends on campus. 4 years of study. Same amount of life.

Think about the drastic difference between what gets accomplished from one 4 year period to another.
High School students spend much of their time not wanting to be there.
College students spend much of their time wanting to graduate.
But year in and year out, a highschool doesn't accomplish anything material.
It educates teenagers and that's it.

Research universities, on the other hand, teach students and then develop new ideas, grow industries, and file patents.
RPI owns a 1200 acre industrial park a few miles down the river.
There are 70 corporate tenants and about 2400 employees in that industrial park.
It has absolutely nothing to do with undergraduate education.
But RPI, as a college, is able to support it.
Because it has a unity of purpose.

Every RPI student has a personal objective: to complete the degree that they are working towards. But in the process, they fulfill a secondary objective: to grow the university and spread its reputation.
Universities are entirely self-perpetuating. Successful graduates donate money to the institution, growing it and causing more students to invest their careers into it.

Look back at that map.
That's 275 acres you're looking at.
I walked around about half of the campus tonight. It took me about an hour.
It really gave a sense of how enormous the place is. Many of the buildings are incredibly impressive. EMPAC is that funny looking white blob in the very lower left of the map. That's 7 stories tall. It's a pretty big building.
Its entire purpose is for audio research and performance.
In order for an organization to spend so much money and resources on something of that nature, there needs to be an intense unity of purpose.

But walking around the campus, this thought came to my mind: Its all such a waste.
Here we have the cutting edge of mankind's splendor. 6,000 students and hundreds of professors saying that they are a part of this body and this is what they have to show for it. It's incredible.
But that purpose that we're all unified in is pretty lame.
RPI exists for RPI, and to a lesser extent, for the furthering of mankind through technological innovation and whatnot.

That's a lame purpose.

Imagine if those same people with the same resources could be unified for the purpose of nothing more than to bring glory to God.
What would the academic campus look like?

Research Paper

I just wrote a 5 page paper for one of my classes, and am about to go to bed for 3 hours.
I figured i might as well put it on the internet in case somebody feels like reading it.

"Recordings don't compare"

Ever since ancient times, perhaps since the “beginning”, music has been seen as a substance in the spiritual and emotional realms. It cannot be touched, yet is felt on a deep level within our minds and souls. Music has been performed for millennia for varieties of purpose: religious worship, the entertainment of kings and royalty, the enjoyment of the elite class, and most recently for the recreation of common people. Over the past few centuries, the culture of music has changed dramatically as not only ideas and styles have evolved but also as technology has been developed. The introduction of recording technology changed the primary mode of listening to music from a performance of the wealthy into an inexpensive pastime for the common man, yet as recorded medium becomes irrelevant there has been a marked upturn in the importance of live performances.
Two hundred years ago, Beethoven was actively composing works during the Classical movement in Vienna. He wrote his pieces, often commissioned by aristocracy, in music manuscripts that could be printed for the members of an orchestra to play to an audience. This was the way that music was listened to in the 19^th century: it had to be played. If someone knew how to play an instrument, the one could entertain himself or others. But otherwise, in order to hear music, one had to be a patron of a theater, a luxury that lower-class members of society couldn’t afford to begin with.
With Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, and more so with the advent of more practical 78rpm record discs, came a paradigm shift in the concept of “recorded music”. No longer was music recorded merely with notation, but now the actual sounds of the instruments could be preserved, separated from the musician and the stage. With the industrialization of every aspect of society under way, by the end of the Second World War most Americans could feasibly own their own record players and a personal music collection. The burgeoning recording industry exploded as music became a defining force in the lives of young people. Musicians enjoyed the results of this widespread media as now a band with relatively little experience could sign a record contract and make a livelihood off of their music through the private listening in consumers’ homes.
Momentum built up and the recording industry grew to become enormous. By the middle of the 20^th century, concerts were no longer a significant force in experiencing music: “A mutation of musical communication has occurred in which live performance has become a mere adjunct to most people’s musical experience, which now comes to them overwhelmingly through loudspeakers and even earphones. (Chanan, Repeated Takes 18)” As the market for music expanded, it became capable of supporting more and more musicians. Styles changed and evolved as popular music became a driving force in modern life. From swing to blues, jazz to rock, music became increasingly diverse in its offerings. But with everything good that the recorded album had to bring to the world, it was still an imperfect way to experience the music that it stood for.
In the most obvious sense, recordings are imperfect through their mediums. Early phonographs were limited by their mechanical reproduction systems, and even after electrical amplification, the materials could not fully capture all the nuance that the Human ear is capable of. This physical imperfection has been mostly rendered a moot point in recent years with digital reproduction and high quality components, but a more pressing limitation is highlighted with recorded media: in a word, distance.
When music is performed live for an audience, that audience is there with the musicians, experiencing the emotion as it unfolds, surrounded by the atmosphere of a hall and enjoying the company of others. When a person puts on a pair of headphones and listens to a recorded album, there is none of that. There is no personal connection with the performers, no excitement of ‘being there’. This effectively takes the music out of context, save for electronic music that could not be performed any other way. An advantage to this, though, is in its portability. Music means different things based on its surroundings, and we can experience it in new ways never before possible: “…we can listen to opera while riding the underground, Mahler while driving along the motorway, or Spanish monks singing Gregorian chant while flying high above the ocean…”(Chanan 8) People are able to use music as a ‘soundtrack’ to their day, making their lives much more enjoyable.
Despite all the business that the recording industry has amassed, in recent years it has been struggling. When recording technology advanced to digital, the industry had no way of knowing the implications of such a move. The combination of inexpensive personal computers and the internet allowed the file sharing craze of the early 21^st century. Digital formats have reduced the physical media to nearly irrelevant. CD sales dropped about 25% from 1999 to 2005 due to the distribution of music over the internet. Luckily for the record companies, music is now often purchased digitally rather than simply shared; from 2005 to the first half of 2006, legal music downloading increased by 457%. Yet even with the success of digital purchasing, the internet has nevertheless produced an age where merely listening to music is no longer enough to satisfy the consumer appetite.
Digital media has produced an age where anyone can listen to virtually any music at no direct cost. The newest generation of listeners have no sense of novelty in recorded music the way there was at the turn of the last century, it is just expected to be that way. What results is a desire for even more, a further dimension to the recorded experience. In a world used to multiple camera angles, the visual experience has come to be depended upon just as much as the auditory one.
What may be observed is a renaissance of the performing venue. Not that live music went on any sort of hiatus while the recording industry took off, but it became a sort of secondary experience. Now that recorded music has become such an integral part of society, from commercials to video games, a person must do more to actually feel a part of the music. A significant contributor to this idea is the evolution of the “rock concert” over the past few decades. Subwoofers in sound reinforcement systems are a relatively new development, and hi-fidelity reproduction at such volumes is a luxury that wasn’t available 30 years ago. The development of intelligent lights and visual effects and video projections over the past two decades or so have dramatically changed the experience of a live contemporary show. With digital technology being implemented in all aspects of a performance, developments are making leaps and bounds every year.
The end result is that a live performance isn’t about simply the music, and it never was. Two centuries ago a venue was the only way to experience that music, and that experience came with the whole bargain. After stripping the music away from its performance, we’ve come to find that there is so much more to be found in a live setting than people may have realized at the advent of recording, and now we’re spending more time trying to experience it.
A step further may be to say that musical performance has become almost a “genre” in itself. Many independent bands have a grassroots promotional campaign involving simply the internet and as many live performances as they can book. Recording and performing have become markedly different in the modern age where recording often takes place in an acoustically deadened room to a click track, one instrument at a time until the final piece is produced until satisfactory. Live performances, meanwhile, are often composed of remarkable on stage energy and showmanship. This is art on more than a purely musical level. It has musical elements but also the factor of visuals, lights and atmosphere coupled with the actual performance on stage of the musicians. These are two completely different ways of producing music with completely different results.
I think that it is reasonable to say that live performance has made a return as a major way that patrons appreciate music after being surpassed so much by recorded media for nearly a century. It has a new place, one not as an exclusive outlet but rather of a more appreciated one where a listener can truly experience everything that the artist has to offer, not just the mere acoustic representation of his or her work.

Works Cited

Bernstein, Arthur, Naoki Sekine, and Dick Weissman. The Global Music Industry. New York: Taylor &
Francis Group, 2007. Print.

Chanan, Michael. Repeated Takes. New York : Verso, 1995. Print. 

Barbec, Jeffrey, and Todd Barbec. Music, Money, and Success. New York: Schirmer Books, 1994. Print.



"Music." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Oct. 2009. .

"Art music." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Oct. 2009. .

"Music industry." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Oct. 2009. .

On Worship Music

In my digital media class we've spent the past 6 weeks looking at experimental music from the dawn of the tape recorder and of records and how composers used mediums in ways that they weren't particularly designed for to completely re-write the rules of what music is and can be.
This week the professor played pieces that were created out of words.
For example, there was a piece that was made out of a man saying simply the words "rainbow", "bandit", "bomb", and "chug".
It was really cool, and here's why:
Words are neat because they mean things.
Those 4 words have inherent meanings- they create pictures in your mind that are representative of what they mean, and ideally everyone has a similar mental picture, and that's how we communicate with each other.
Interestingly, those 4 words lose their meanings when they are combined- they don't mean anything together, they don't form a complete thought.
However there are cool things you can do with the rhythm and with multitrack recording that is good for experimental music.

It brings up a really interesting thought.

Music by itself, with no words, evokes emotion. It causes the listener to feel.
Words by themselves convey a complete thought to that listener, with or without emotion.
Together they are a powerful way of conveying a message full of emotion.

In bible times, writing "worship music" was a big deal. Solomon employed musicians constantly in his palace. The middle of the Bible is the book of Psalms, which is a pretty big deal.
Churches around the world have Hymnals in the back of their pews.

Psalms and hymns have something very in common: we don't usually think about them from a contemporary music standpoint.
You can sing hymns with music, but you can also sing them without it, or you can merely speak them. The Psalms were most definitely very poetic and musical in the original hebrew, and there have been english songs made out of quite a few.

But non the less, they are not in the format of a modern low-art "song".

So here's what I got to thinking about.
You can worship God with words.
You can worship God with music.

But here in the modern times, we can pull up 'worship music' at any point of the day and listen to it.
Is listening to worship music the same thing as worshiping?
Not necessarily- you can listen to music without worshiping, but you can also engage in the music and worship God with the ideas presented by the songwriter.

But what happens when you have music with no words?
Can you worship God by listening to music with no lyrics?
Its one thing to play music, and use an instrument to worship God with, they did that in the old testament.
But just by listening?

Music without words presents no specific thought, just moods, emotions.
So an instrumental "worship song" wouldn't be able to help the listener by suggesting words to sing or think.
But that emotion definitely does something.
Any good worship set has periods of instrumentals that give space for people to meditate and bask in God's glory.

I think that a wordless worship song does nothing that we can't do on our own, not in the sense that lyrics give us words to sing.
But music can definitely put us in a mindset, an attitude of worship.
A state of being where we can be more receptive to God, more sensitive to His presence.

Music is a powerful thing.
I would like to write an instrumental album and release it as "worship music".

On gifts

Here's some more John 17 for you.
Jesus is praying to God, and starts to talk about his Disciples:
"I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word. Now they know that everything you have given me comes from you. For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me."
-John 17:6-8

Now there's something really neat to think about. Jesus' disciples were God's the whole time; even while Peter, Andrew, John, and James were lowly fishermen, they were God's possessions that He was planning on giving to his son.

Now i'm no calvinist, but how cool is it that nonchristians all around the world could actually be owned by God, future gifts to His Son that will go on to serve in ministry or leads hundreds to the way.
Being owned by god.
Being gifts to Jesus.

And there's another gift mentioned in those verses: the gift of the word.
John 1:1 opens with: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
And God gave that word to Jesus to tell us.
God's word was in the beginning, just like how Jesus' disciples were God's from the beginning. Both were gifts to his son.

That's some pretty neat gifting going on.
And we're a part of it.
Awesome.