Photo by Christian Nichols
Drew Raleigh, a senior Music Technology major with minors in Communication and Digital Arts and Media, will give his senior recital this Saturday, Dec. 3 at 7:30 p.m. in Coleman Recital Hall. Raleigh will be showcasing a mix of digital recordings and live performances.
The pieces Raleigh decided to showcase each were chosen with a hint of nostalgia which he explains was “originally subconscious.”
“But towards the end when I added ‘Oh Comely,’ I was like, ‘Okay, well the rest of this is related to events in my life or things that are important to me,'” he said.
Raleigh’s version of “Oh Comely,” which was originally released in 1998 on Neutral Milk Hotel’s album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, is a song he grew up singing with his friends driving through his hometown and played on his second day of his freshman year causing his R.A. to come check if everything was alright.
“I kept telling myself, ‘no you can’t play ‘Oh Comely,’ you are a parody of yourself if you play that song. But then after thinking about it for a few hours I decided I had to play it because of that,” said Raleigh.
Throughout his time at Transylvania, Raleigh has been offered some amazing opportunities. One of the most memorable of these was possible because of his mentor through Transy’s 100 Doors program, Charlie Taylor. Raleigh was able to visit Taylor in Nashville before he moved to Lexington.
“He took me all around the Nashville music scene and we toured studios and I played a piano that a bunch of famous pianists had played. It was the piano on the Johnny Cash show. Ray Charles had played that piano,” said Raleigh.
Raleigh first got involved with recording technology at a young age when he stumbled upon multi-tracks of a few Nine Inch Nails songs when he was 14 or 15 years old (Multi-tracks are the separate layers of songs, like instruments and voice parts, that are combined together digitally in order to blend the sounds and instruments of a song).
Raleigh explained his first encounter with music technology: “I loaded them into Garage Band and when I soloed each of the tracks and looked at the detail in each of them I was really like astonished by how it all came together and the tracks blended to make it sound like fewer tracks than there were.”
Raleigh’s fascination with music technology continued to grow after this pivotal moment.
“When I figured out the basis of how audio production works I was just really, really fascinated. I don’t really think that after that there was ever a time that I was more interested in something else, so it was an easy decision for me to be a music tech major,” said Raleigh.
Raleigh’s knowledge of music spans across genres, instruments, and subjects. Raleigh grew up playing guitar and planned to continue learning and developing his skills and understandings of this instrument, however, he ended up taking piano lessons instead at Transy. Raleigh has seen the diversity of his interests cross planes throughout his different classes for his areas of study. In Scott Whiddon’s WRC class, Taste and Tastemaking, Raleigh created three different covers of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”
Raleigh said he chose this song because he hates it. “So I tried to take it and make it into things I like,” he said.
Come see Raleigh play “Oh Comely” and The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” plus six other pieces that have been memorable for his music career.
For more information about Raleigh’s recital visit the Facebook event page here.
It’s time to move Greek recruitment to the Spring Semester
The recent staffing changes in the Campus and Community Engagement office offer the Greek community a unique chance to implement changes and have suggestions heard by new ears. Though Greek life has a well-established way of operating, there are always improvements to be made and better ways of doing things. One change that would be quite beneficial to this campus, for both Greeks and non-Greeks, is implementing second semester recruitment.
Second semester recruitment would help bridge the gap between Greeks and non-Greeks by giving students a longer time to form friendships before joining a Greek organization. Currently, first year students only have about a month to form friendships, which are promptly strained when the recruitment period begins. Many students make a strong effort to try to remain friends with those that did not join their Greek organization, but the amount of time that new member programs require and that organizations want to spend with their new members is quite demanding and often splinters outside friendships. By delaying recruitment, students would be encouraged to form friendship outside the lines of Greek life. Relationships with other students would not be as easily strained and should help decrease the tension between Greek students and non-Greek students by sustaining those relationships.
Furthermore, the first couple weeks of Fall Semester often feel even more overwhelming than finals week— new students are still acclimating to campus, students join many more clubs than they should, and, of course, recruitment begins. Moving recruitment to second semester would ease the pressure on freshman students and allow them to adjust to college life before having to make such a large commitment. Though recruitment is inherently stressful, and would still be stressful during the second semester, letting freshmen adjust to college life would help potential new members feel more comfortable during recruitment, and allow students who previously felt too overwhelmed by school to participate in recruitment.
Non-Greek organizations would benefit heavily from a delayed recruitment as well. Without having to worry about the commitments of Greek life, other clubs and organizations would see a surge in membership during freshmen’s first semester when they crave involvement. Some of this involvement may drop off when the students later join Greek life, but some of those students would surely stay and remain contributing members in clubs they otherwise would not have joined. This in turn would help build relationships not bound to Greek life and strengthen the membership of other clubs.
Though it would be a massive change, Greeks too would benefit from second semester recruitment. Delaying recruitment would give Greek members a chance to get to know the freshman class better, and avoid having people put on false fronts during recruitment. It would allow chapters to set GPA requirements since fall grades would be in, as well as develop a more effective recruitment strategy tailored to the freshman class. Such a time delay would eliminate the need for unaffiliation and the incredible set of rules pertaining to silence, interactions with potential new members, and wearing letters. Overall, it would allow Greek chapters to interact more with the freshmen rather than having freshmen make surface-level judgments about each chapter.
Even though the transition would be difficult and inevitably met with resistance, second semester recruitment could help the entire campus with issues like student stress, campus involvement, and cliques. The resistance is understandable- Transy has always participated in fall recruitment and it would be a strange adjustment for chapters that would require large amounts of work for the transition. But, the benefits of second semester recruitment outweigh the challenges; it would give students time to learn about whether Greek life is right for them to confidently make a decision that will change their college experience regardless of whether they choose to participate in Greek life or not.