Choose another video or ask the site administrator to add captions.
Recently Watched
Open something you watched recently.
You May Also Like
More lessons selected from your Library.
Transcript excerpt · English
(Piano music)
I see trees
Of green
Red roses too
I see them bloom
For me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
All the colors of the rainbow
So pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands saying,
Saying, "How do you do?"
They're really saying
I love you
I hear babies crying
I watch them grow
They'll know much more than I'll ever know
And I think to myself
What a wonderful
World
(Music ends)
(Applause and cheers)
Thank you very much, everybody.
Isn't that a beautiful song?
I just love it.
You know, music is a language you already know.
And there's something deeply powerful that happens
when we come together to make it.
Something connective,
something transformative, something vibrational.
It's a feeling that moves us.
Now I have a name for this feeling.
I call it the wiggle.
(Laughter)
Now what’s the difference between a wiggle and a straight line?
Well we all know how a straight line feels, right?
Rigid, unyielding,
inflexible, linear.
Like a Roman road or the hand of a clock.
It's set, it's certain.
But the wiggle, on the other hand, is soft and flexible and fluid.
The wiggle is smooth and constantly in motion, right?
So where the straight line is firm and brittle,
the wiggle is supple and resilient --
like water -- constantly changing shape,
but stronger than almost anything.
As the great Alan Watts used to say, there are no straight lines in nature.
Now I've learned many of the principles of wiggledom
through the process of making music
because music is inherently wiggly.
Music is made out of a bunch of those things, there.
Essentially, music is just wiggling air.
That's what's going on with music.
And as musicians,
we are constantly oscillating between different states, right?
So high to low
Or loud to quiet.
Thick to thin.
Music is constantly in motion.
And everything in music is learned through play.
Now there are three essential types of wiggle in music
that I'd like to talk to you about today.
The first is called melody, what we call melody.
Now a melody draws a line from one place to another
and tells a story as it goes.
So Louis Armstrong walks down the street, looks around and he goes,
"I see trees of green."
Yeah?
Not, "I see trees of green."
Not that.
"I see trees of green."
It's a tree.
"I see skies are blue."
It's the sky, right?
"Clouds are white," there's a little cloud up there.
"The bright blessed day,
The dark sacred night."
Is that not the sun going down?
It is.
A good melody arc tells a story and draws a line that moves us.
That's the first kind of wiggle.
Now the second kind of wiggle is what they call rhythm.
Now rhythm is about time, but it's also about the body.
So Louis does not sing this:
"I see trees of green.
Red roses too, I see --"
No, sir.
Instead he goes, "I see trees green."
(Vocalizing)
Right?
I just saw a bunch of you do this.
Rhythm physically moves the body.
And with that motion and play,
the melody has something to be in conversation with.
And suddenly we have space,
and we have form, and we have proportion and dynamics
and that kind of storytelling.
It's beautiful.
So rhythm moves us and our melody through time.
That's the second kind of wiggle.
Now the third kind of wiggle is my personal favorite,
and it's what they call harmony.
Now harmony is about relationships.
It's the wiggles between the wiggles.
And by adding these chords, little combinations of notes,
like clusters of notes,
we get to take our melody and our rhythm
and decide how we want these things to feel.
OK, so with this song, we start home.
We begin home, right?
Begin to move.
Somewhere close by, quite warm.
A bit of darkness there.
Lightening.
Saddening.
And then something extraordinary happens.
Our melody note stays the same.
"And I think to myself," right, one melody note.
But the chord, which could happily stay here,