Welcome Back To School…

Welcome back to those of you recently returning to teaching after a hopefully relaxing summer, and those of you who have been in school for the past few weeks, I hope your year is off to a great start. I’ve been extremely busy with classes, reading, research etc., but in celebration of evening temperatures creeping below 100 degrees and a wonderful short burst of rain a couple of minutes ago  I figured I’d write a quick post.

I was excited to learn about a new web-based music collaboration site called MixMatchmusic. Upon first look it looks like many other similar sites such as Splice or CCMixter but as I was reading a Wired article about the site I started to think about how the accumulation of these sites might eventually  lead to an expectation among young people that all music released will include  tracks and parts formatted for easy manipulation. I touched on this idea during my presentation at ISME this summer in terms of people in general participating with various multimedia texts beyond the role of consumption. The monetary system built into the structure of the MixMatchmusic site, for people to receive royalties based on their contributions, has interesting implication as well. It might be interesting to have students work with these sites (of course keeping in mind issues of privacy and inability to filter content), or the premise behind them, by collaboratively working on a piece, releasing it in an open format to another student group and then seeing/hearing/discussing what happens when the other group begins to rework their piece.

Besides the varied musical directions this might take, it could also lead to new ways of framing issues of copyright, artistic control over material, and the very notion of reworking someone else’s music.

On a completely different topic……

Thanks to Jonathan Savage for his Sept. 9th post pointing out and commenting on a provocative Times article. His point regarding music literacy and fluency is well taken. I wonder how we conceptualize music literacy in terms of the various curricula in our music programs and how that perspective (including its fluidity) impacts and/or informs our practice. In a similar vein, the other night I asked students in my Psychology of Music class for their definition of “musician”.  In thinking about the start of the year and the coming months it might be healthy to consider how our conceptions of music literacy and what it means to be a musician live out in our classrooms and possibly consider if they might benefit from some modifications and/or expansion.

Again, welcome back to school and have a great year!