I always enjoyed having my students create ringtones and discuss the musical ideas they came up with and decisions they made. One of the aspects of the process I focused on was how to compose music for such a short amount of time. Robert Voisey wrote about this topic in an interesting article at New Music Box in 2004 asking, “How short can a composition get?” He mentions composers ranging from Chopin to John Zorn. For those of you who… Read More »Creating Ringtones
Thanks to Jeff Chang for pointing out a recent article in the New York Times that discusses David Henry Hwang’s new musical “Yellow Face.” His new play addresses some of the issues of race, ethnicity and stereotypes that he also dealt with in his musical M. Butterfly in response to Miss Saigon. This reminded me of Julia Eklund Koza’s chapter Unhappy Happy Endings: Cultural Politics in the Broadway Musical Hit Once on This Island (1997; revised 2001) in her book… Read More »Responding to Representations in Musical Theater
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!