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From Old School to New Schulwerk: Addressing Sound Worlds of Contemporary Popular Music

From Old School to New Schulwerk: Addressing Sound Worlds of Contemporary Popular Music  Evan S. Tobias To Cite or Download the article:  Tobias, E. (2011) From Old School to New Schulwerk: Addressing Sound Worlds of Contemporary Popular Music.The Orff Echo, 43(4), 19-23. This article, written for the Orff Echo, addresses considerations for integrating popular music in elementary music classrooms. In the article I draw on how Doug Goodkin (2001) frames Whitehead’s notions of romance, precision, and generalization in terms of… Read More »From Old School to New Schulwerk: Addressing Sound Worlds of Contemporary Popular Music

Breaking Winds Bassoon Quartet: A model for contemporary musicianship and additional directions for school ensembles

During my presentation at the NAfME Composition Academy this past Music Education Week I mentioned the Breaking Winds Bassoon Quartet, but forgot to include a link to their Kickstarter Project Page in my handout. There was quite a bit of discussion related to arrangement throughout several of the composition academy presentations. Dr. Rob Deemer and Dr. David Stringham in particular provided some excellent strategies for including arrangement processes in music programs and our own music making as educators. The BWBQ… Read More »Breaking Winds Bassoon Quartet: A model for contemporary musicianship and additional directions for school ensembles

Expanding Secondary Music Curricula: A look at students engaging with popular music, technology, and creating original music

Tobias, E. S. (2012). Hybrid spaces and hyphenated musicians: Secondary students’ musical engagement in a songwriting and technology course. Music Education Research, 14(3), 329-346. A research article I wrote entitled Hybrid spaces and hyphenated musicians: Secondary students’ musical engagement in a songwriting and technology course is now available in the journal Music Education Research. Below is the article’s abstract: This case study investigates how secondary students (three individuals and three groups) engaged with music and acted as musicians in a… Read More »Expanding Secondary Music Curricula: A look at students engaging with popular music, technology, and creating original music

Has music education changed since 1970? On students who rock. . .

David Bornstein recently wrote two opinion pieces for the New York times regarding music education. The first “Beyond Baby Mozart, Students Who Rock” focuses on Bornstein’s perspective on the state of music education and the Little Kids Rock organization. The second “Rock is Not the Enemy,” does a nice job of integrating a wide range of reader comments from the first opinion piece. In the first opinion piece Bornstein writes: Music education hasn’t changed fundamentally since the 1970s. Students are… Read More »Has music education changed since 1970? On students who rock. . .

Expanding the voice… From T-Pain to Tuvan Throat Singing

The electronic music foundation is presenting a series of FREE concerts titled “The Human Voice In A New World“. (The New York Times has a review of the first one.) The strand tying the various concerts together is the way the voice can be altered, processed, modified etc. When I first found out about the series I immediately began thinking about the many ways it could serve as a springboard for lessons and forms of musical engagement in both general… Read More »Expanding the voice… From T-Pain to Tuvan Throat Singing