Hello and welcome to Morganchem, the home of all things NErDy at Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School and the official web presence of Michael Morgan.
I take your child's education very seriously. It is with that intention that I have provided this webpage for you and your child to help get a better understanding of what goes on in their Chemistry class. Here you will find our weekly and semester long schedules, copies of all the homework assignments and laboratories, daily announcements, and important information to help parents keep their children on track.
To learn more about my academic activities and the success of my students view my biography under the "about" menu. For those interested in the many different academic activities that my students are involved in on a daily basis outside normal class hours look at the Chem Club page on the "about" menu.
Over the past twenty years music education has disappeared from our schools. This becomes obvious when listening to new music on the radio only to hear music that is unoriginal or even bad. Most of today's so called artists do not write their own music or even play their own instruments.
So in the spirit of teaching you everything we can, this page features an Album of the Week. These are not ordinary albums in the history of music. These are the groundbreaking pieces of music that truly shaped how music was presented, recorded, and how it influenced other musicians and the public.
A few notes about the choices. They are albums and not collections of single songs thrown together willy-nilly. They were meant to be played in order. They often told a story or set a mood. Some of them defined a genre and some defined a generation. I strongly recommend that you ask your Parents/Grandparents to dig through their record collections and find their old copies of these and put them on the turntable and experience them the way they were meant to be experienced.
Steve has been my best friend since 1980 and was best man at my wedding. He has had a great deal of influence on my musical taste and helped me take my love of progressive bands like Yes and Jethro Tull into the world of much more cutting edge bands like King Crimson. With that being said I have asked him to contribute the narrative for this week’s selection.
British band King Crimson released Discipline in 1981. It was their eighth studio album, but it was their first album after a seven year hiatus, and it was a dramatic departure from their previous work. In fact, it is a pretty dramatic departure from ANYONE's previous work.
The band had a new lineup for this album. Band guitarist Robert Fripp (who founded the band in 1968) was still around, as was former Yes drummer Bill Bruford, who had joined the band in 1972. New for this album were two Americans: Adrian Belew (guitar and lead vocals) and legendary low-end maestro Tony Levin on bass guitar, Chapman Stick and backing vocals.
The 1980s had begun, and this album showed some influences from the...(continued)
Steve has been my best friend since 1980 and was best man at my wedding. He has had a great deal of influence on my musical taste and helped me take my love of progressive bands like Yes and Jethro Tull into the world of much more cutting edge bands like King Crimson. With that being said I have asked him to contribute the narrative for this week’s selection.
British band King Crimson released Discipline in 1981. It was their eighth studio album, but it was their first album after a seven year hiatus, and it was a dramatic departure from their previous work. In fact, it is a pretty dramatic departure from ANYONE's previous work.
The band had a new lineup for this album. Band guitarist Robert Fripp (who founded the band in 1968) was still around, as was former Yes drummer Bill Bruford, who had joined the band in 1972. New for this album were two Americans: Adrian Belew (guitar and lead vocals) and legendary low-end maestro Tony Levin on bass guitar, Chapman Stick and backing vocals.
The 1980s had begun, and this album showed some influences from the new wave and early techno sounds that were becoming popular. The seven songs ranged in length from 3:47 to 8:22, which was generally shorter than the longer pieces on earlier Crimson albums (and early progressive rock in general).
There were also only two instrumentals, while the powerful vocals of Adrian Belew were prominent on the other tunes. One might think the shorter and more vocal songs represented a more "pop" orientation for the band. They may indeed have made the songs more accessible to many listeners. However, the rhythms and harmonies underlying these shorter tunes were still, as was the Crimson tradition, deceptively complex and rich.
All of the songs are credited to all four musicians, which indicates how much this band relied on collaboration, despite the fact that Robert Fripp was clearly the leader of the band.
King Crimson, and Discipline in particular, are widely cited as inspirations by many musicians, notably including Les Claypool from Primus. Despite the fact that Discipline has influenced many musicians, there are few, if any, other bands that actually SOUND like King Crimson. This is in part because it requires a considerable degree of skill to perform such music, and in part because many listeners and audiences don't immediately warm up to such complexity upon first listening. Like much complex and subtle music, the listening experience becomes more rewarding with repeated listening.