Browsing: Music

Instead of the routine approach of writing letters to family and friends asking for financial support for missions, a soon-to-be Baylor student decided to raise the money by releasing an original song.

After months of preparation and two weeks of performances, this year’s All-University Sing wrapped up Saturday night and declared Kappa Omega Tau’s “The Battle Within” the top act of the night. This honor moves the group on to Pigskin in the fall.

After months of preparation and two weeks of performances, this year’s All-University Sing wrapped up Saturday night and declared Kappa Omega Tau’s “The Battle Within” the top act of the night. This honor moves the group on to Pigskin in the fall.

Uproar Records’ singer-songwriter artist Trannie Stevens, a McGregor junior, has a lot of musical experience. She’s performed with big names like Toby Keith and Jack Ingram. She has been a headlining performer, recorded in Nashville and has big hopes for her musical future. However, performing with Sigma Alpha Epsilon during this year’s All-University Sing is a first for Stevens and an experience she calls incomparable.

This morning, more than 300 high school choir students will arrive at Baylor without any music. By 5 p.m. they will perform together for the first time, singing pieces they have been taught in one day.

This combination of intensity, teamwork and talent is the core of the 10th annual Women’s Choir Festival.

As a newbie to the tradition hype that is All-University Sing, it certainly has been interesting to observe the Baylor culture in this way: guys in eyeliner studying in the library, girls complaining about late nights and the overarching sense of competition in the fresh February air.

What makes a good All-University Sing act great?

Judges look at five main elements — entertainment value, musical quality, choreography, theme development and creativity. While most top acts have a solid combination of all five, there is often one that dominates the others — an exceptional soloist, a never-before-seen dance trick or maybe a tear-jerking theme.

Every year as the All-University Sing competition draws near, the Baylor campus readies itself for a festival of music, culture and memorable performances. The nights are filled with wonder as performances crafted over six weeks of intense preparation are realized on stage.

NEW YORK — iTunes is putting its stamp on South by Southwest, piggybacking on the annual event with its own music festival.

The company said Wednesday it will debut its popular iTunes Festival, a free concert series held in London for the past seven years. While the London version is a 30-day event, the U.S. festival will feature five nights of rock, country, pop and hip-hop at South by Southwest, an international showcase for music, film and interactive projects to be held next month in Austin.

WASHINGTON — Jazz musicians are famous for their musical conversations — one improvises a few bars and another plays an answer. Now research shows some of the brain’s language regions enable that musical back-and-forth much like a spoken conversation.

Eight times a day, a group of nuns files into a chapel in their rural northwest Missouri monastery to chant and worship.
Quite unexpectedly, this private, prayerful pursuit has made the Benedictines of Mary a chart-topping recording industry curiosity.

The smell of wet paint crawls through the air in the Mabee Theater in the Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center. Colors blur and blend into one another on the backdrop, so there is uncertainty as to where horizontal begins and vertical ends.
The stage seems to be a character itself.

On Saturday some of the best high school piano talent will perform on campus.

The Baylor/Waco Piano Competition will be held from 8 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. in the Glennis McCrary Music Building and Waco Hall. This year’s event will be the 34th annual competition, and it is sponsored by the School of Music.

LOS ANGELES _ “All bad things must come to an end.” That’s how Motley Crue broke the news it was calling it quits.

The influential, and infamous, L.A. rock band turned Beacher’s Madhouse in Hollywood into a circus Tuesday morning as more than 100 media outlets packed the hot spot to hear the band’s announcement of a 72-date farewell tour.

For one Baylor student, validation as an artist is starting to feel like reality.

Guitar in hand, Jasper senior Savion Wright was awarded his ticket to Hollywood last week after his audition on season 13 of the hit reality singing competition “American Idol,” a dream Wright said has been a lifetime in the making.

“My whole experience so far now is completely surreal,” Wright said. “It’s been a rollercoaster ride.”