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Do you or your students ever make use of internet “radio” streaming sites? Sites like Pandora or non commercial radio stations affiliated with NPR or Pacifica for example offer wonderful teaching resources, that is if they are able to afford the recent royalty rate changes for digital streaming. While the issues of legality and downloading music are familiar or becoming more familiar to our students and field, the complexities of royalties remain a mystery to most of our students and… Read More »RIAA, Royalties & Radio…..

We often talk about the importance of music’s expressive qualities or how we want our students to be able to expressive themselves with and through music. Sometimes we forget, however the role that censorship plays in people expressing themselves through music across the world. For many students the first thing that comes to mind when discussing censorship is the prevention of a word being sung or rapped on the radio but we often forget about other forms of censorship such… Read More »Music and Censorship

If you haven’t already taken a look at the new MENC Creativity Special Research Interest Group website what are you waiting for? It looks great, is easy to navigate and already contains some excellent resources to get us thinking about ways to encourage creative thinking in our music classes. If you are a member of MENC sign up to receive newsletters and take advantage of the various special research interest groups (SRIGS) to keep up to date on the latest… Read More »MENC Creativity Special Research Interest Group

It is important to speak with students about how music plays a role in community and how it may vary depending on where one might live. While people often think of jazz or dixieland as strong musical elements of the New Orleans community they might not immediately think about the importance of school marching bands. A recent article in the New York Times addressed the issue of schools struggling to rebuild marching band programs since hurricane Katrina. ABC news featured… Read More »Music and the community: Marching bands in New Orleans

Please join me in welcoming Miikka Salavuo, from the Sibelius Academy in Helskinki, to the music education blogosphere! The first blog post and the discussion that follows it in comments, raise some very interesting points on the implications of blogging in higher education, the future of refereed journals and how the internet will shape how we learn and network in the future. To get an idea of some of the excellent work being done in music education in Finland check… Read More »New Finnish Music Education Blog!