Blog: Catalysts & Connections

At the New Directions in General Music Conference in October, Bennett Reimer spoke about how according to a recent report, improvisation is one of the least addressed national standards throughout music education. Luckily for our field The International Society for Improvised Music is an organization that can help music educators develop a wide variety of approaches towards improvisation. The 2nd Annual ISIM conference will be taking place at Northwestern University from Dec. 14th -16th. Below is the official press release:… Read More »International Society for Improvised Music Conference!

When I worked on a “Copyrights and Wrongs” project with my 7th grade general music students several years ago, one of the various issues we focused on was how they would choose to treat their own music in terms of rights management. We discussed various positions and potential pros and cons of copyrighting or applying creative commons licenses to their music. Ultimately they had to make their own final decisions of what they might do to their own music. The… Read More »A current copyright choice: To give or not to give up the rights to one's music

I apologize for the lack of posting in over a month. October was a busy month and November is starting off the same! October was also a month of wonderful conferences. I still have a smile on my face from the New Horizons Band performance at the CIC conference which took place at the start of the month. Various ways of thinking about music education beyond schools and considering musical practices in our communities were discussed. The CARMU conference on… Read More »October Conferences!

Today is the last day you can make comments regarding MENC’s Strategic Plan. You can contribute comments via email or on a dedicated bulletin board. As of this post only about 20 people have contributed comments on the bulletin board. The comments range in topic from debate over whether or not there should be high stakes testing in music, to issues of diversity, issues of music teacher certification and issues of partnerships with for profit companies. Do you have an… Read More »MENC Strategic Plan Comments End After Today September 20th