Contents
#ImaginingPossibilities for Music Learning & Teaching
2023-7-31
Hello!
I’m Evan Tobias, Associate Professor of Music Learning & Teaching at Arizona State University. You’re receiving this email because you signed up for #ImaginingPossibilities an occasional newsletter on imagining possibilities for music learning and teaching and exploring academic workflows.
I’m happy to connect with you.
If you enjoy the newsletter, please forward it to someone who might find it interesting.
Happy Summer for those of you still summering (and not experiencing the intense heat we’re having in the Southwest) and welcome back to school for those of you getting back or almost getting back to your programs!
Wonderments & Curiosities
- How might community music practices and participatory cultures inform our thinking around emerging socio-technical systems and music education?
I worked through this question while re-reading and reflecting on two decades of Janice Waldron’s scholarship for a panel with Danielle Sirek, Roger Mantie, Gareth Dylan Smith, & Christopher Cayari via video presentation honoring and building on Janice’s work at the Mayday Colloquium this summer. Janice Waldron was a wonderful friend, colleague, and music education scholar who forged new ground in music learning and teaching around communities of musical practice online and offline, participatory culture, social media, and YouTube. She passed away last year but her memory lives on through many of us.
I first met Janice at a New Directions Conference hosted by Michigan State University in 2013 – we were both exploring different aspects of participatory cultures and were in dialogue through our work for years. Her passion for community music, folk music practices, and Irish Traditional music was infectious and she made important contributions to support music educators in expanding what music education could be. I miss her deeply and hope folks who never had the chance to connect with Janice can still get to know her through her work and its possibilities for expanding music education.
You can watch a video of my MayDay presentation “Convergence, Emergence, and Curricular Inquiry: Honoring and Building on the work of Janice Waldron” on YouTube. (Scan the QR codes in the video for a special treat!)
In addition to the presentation itself, I worked to embody concepts important to Janice’s work such as participatory culture, collective and networked learning, gift giving, and paying it forward to explore the idea of opening my process, notes, and resources related to the presentation. I’ll discuss this more deeply in the next newsletter, but if you are curious you can learn more and access an interactive set of summaries and syntheses of Janice’s publications I created here with the Janice Waldron Project.Ideas & Inspirations
Ideas & Inspirations
- What could it be like if instruments that are uncommon in our music programs were more common?
I didn’t realize that there was an Uncommon Instruments Awareness Day! (July 31st).
The idea of an uncommon instruments awareness day could make for a pretty generative unit or project in a music program but how great would it be if music programs reflected much broader worlds of instruments and sonic possibilities?!
Obviously the concept of an instrument being “uncommon” relates to culture, context, and awareness as well as systems that support (or not) particular instruments. Why are some instruments common or uncommon in typical music programs (our ensembles? our general music classrooms?)
What an opportunity to address all of these issues in our music programs!
For years in my bookmarking system raindrop.io since 2020 (after years with Diigo and del.icio.us) I’ve collected inspiring news and info on interesting instruments and controllers with the tags #alt-controllers-interfaces and #instruments with the idea that maybe I would do something with some of it. But the links are just sitting there (Ughh time!), subconsciously filtering into project ideas I’ve worked on over the years and my ongoing puzzlement about why we so greatly limit instruments, sounds, and sonic possibilities in typical music programs. (This is one of the reasons I’ve been working with some fabulous colleagues lately on the Active Shoulder Rest project – but that’s for another time).
So, as I mention in the Tweet above or whatever we’re calling it these days – get inspired to expand on the common instruments in K-12 music programs by checking out the amazing landscape of instruments and controllers. The Guthmann Musical Instrument Competition and the New Musical Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference site are two great starting points to pique your interest on what’s out there. When in Arizona, don’t miss the Musical Instrument Museum to learn about instruments from musical cultures and places across the world.
Consider expanding on the common instruments in your music programs so that those instruments that are currently “uncommon” in our programs can become more common.
If nothing else, check out the work of Onyx Ashanti who has been creating an entirely new system for creating and performing music that combines Afrofuturism with instrument design, programming, and ongoing iteration – I mean imagine if music programs supported this type of engagement?!
What instruments, uncommon in your program, would you want to introduce to students?
Let me know here and I’ll share some in the next newsletter.
Sparks & Springboards
- Composer Roderick Williams explores the question “How do you commemorate something without celebrating it? in discussing his new composition that commemorates Amazing Grace – many of the themes and ideas are worth thinking through and reflecting on related issues for curriculum and pedagogy in music programs.
- I loved this story of La Jolla music teachers working together to save a music store to maintain its focus on serving the community with music lessons — what other types of music education co-ops are there? Let me know or propose your own co-op that you think should exist.
- Check this twitter post by Eric Songer. So great when folks are expanding what takes place in large ensembles!
- OK, a bit of geekiness here but this episode of Mac Power Users featuring David Rosenthal] (Billy Joel’s keyboardist) was one of my favorites of the podcast. Even if you don’t use mac computers, the conversation is full of wisdom on music and technology workflows and stories – worth a listen.
Don’t Miss. . .
The Artisinal Software Summerfest 2023 hosted by a group of independent software developers and very small companies creating fantastic applications – offering a 25% discount on some of my favorite applications for working on things. I personally use the following included applications pretty regularly and recommend them to people all the time:
- Tinderbox
- Scrivener
- Devonthink 3
- Hookmark
and just because. . .
When was the last time you watched the movie E. T.? Hadn’t seen it in years and watched it with my kids the other day. It was funny how differently I experienced it this time around and things I had mis-remembered or saw in a different way. So good! (They loved it too!) and John Williams’s score!!!
Also interesting to watch it with all of the recent news about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and non-human biologics.
Consider looking through our most recent newsletters.
Until next time, keep on #ImaginingPossibilities
Share your perspectives by responding to any of the questions from this newsletter!
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed the email, share with others and tell your friends & colleagues to subscribe.