I am often inspired by news items to imagine musical possibilities that could play out in varied teaching and learning contexts. A recent NPR story on pianist Anthony de Mare’s commissioning 36 composers to re-work songs by Steven Sondheim caught…
NPR’s weekend edition recently featured the story Inspiration Or Appropriation? Behind Music Copyright Lawsuits. The story leads with the question: “Where do you draw the line between inspiration and appropriation when it comes to musical compositions?” This is a fabulous generative,…
I’m always interested in the ways that people visualize and represent music. As a field, we can often be very Western standard notation-based. I’m increasingly interested in digitally mediated ways of visualizing sound and music. I discuss some aspects of…
Thanks to a post by Jay Smooth, I just learned of Sofia Ashraf, who uses the power of music to address critical issues facing the people of India such as reinterpreting Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda to address environmental justice in Tamil…
Here’s another example of how professional orchestras are engaging in some of the ideas expressed in my article Toward convergence: Adapting music education to contemporary society and participatory culture: The FUSE@PSO (Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra) initiative currently involves Steve Hackman’s arrangement of…