A Music Education Blog Collective

There is an interesting comment on Melissa’s post regarding sharing student popular music online. Mallory writes “I really wish that all schools had the ability and time to look into children’s music. It was give the children a chance to express themselves individually, and then maybe more students would enjoy music, and the programs in high school would increase.” I found Mallory’s optimism refreshing. I too hope that we can create spaces for students to engage music in a way that creates authentic musical experiences. I agree that attention needs to be paid to creativity. Can we find new ways of engaging music creatively with our students? Evan and I have discussed ways in which technology might play a role in facilitating the creative process. However, each time I work with students in composition projects (I work with 6th graders after-school) I find myself with a lack of viable pedagogies. I’d love to hear of your successes in student composition projects! Has anyone tried incorporating compositional processes into instrumental programs or large ensembles?

I just read an interesting book by Lucy Green titled “How Popular Musicians Learn” in which she describes how Music Education might learn from coming to understand the popular music culture and its “informal” learning practices. Is anyone doing these sort of things in your classrooms? How can we avoid subsuming popular music into the existing structures, but create spaces for these “informal” practices? To fulfill Mallory’s wish I wonder what abilities we should develop as music educators and where those of us involved in these student composition projects find the time.

Do any of your students like hip hop culture? Do any of them like to play instruments? Can they enjoy both at the same time? Some students may experience a disconnect between what they view as “school music” and “their music”. When thinking about hip hop our students might not immediately think of an instrument like a violin. That is until recently with Daniel Bernard Roumain getting mainstream press. (You can also listen to an interview with Roumain from “All Things Considered” on NPR.) Hip Hop culture is all around us and Roumain has taken a natural step in infusing musical elements of hip hop with string performance. Taking a different route in fusing aspects of the hip hop aesthetic with strings, DJ Radar has been working on projects such as a concerto for turntable. Another initiative that took place in Britain, Urban Classic, brought together an orchestra, hip hop and grime artists. Besides fusing elements of hip hop and classical music together some musicians use hip hop almost as a brand name or to sell shoes for that matter. While there will always be what some people view as unsuccessful attempts at fusion with certain groups - the idea of fusing hip hop and classical music should not be dismissed.

String performers aren’t the only people fusing elements from hip hop culture with classical music. Vocalists have started to experiment with the fusion of rap and opera. I’m sure we can expect more Hip H’Operas sprouting up in the future, from the sacred to the secular. Some opera companies have even started initiatives involving students. Most of these initiatives seem to start with traditional opera adding elements of hip hop.

The work, “Domestica”, by Mike Ladd, the final work in a trilogy detailing the lives of the infesticons and majesticons in the future approaches the genre from a hip hop perspective. In “Domestica”, Ladd fuses hip hop with staged performance and a storyline that deals with issues in society, hip hop culture and the future with no spoken text except the occasional spoken narration. Everything else is rapped or sung. With a DJ spinning on stage instead of an opera orchestra, a digital set up on the side of the stage and the occasional piano playing, Ladd created a current opera but in an entirely new context.

While some music programs already have students creating original operas, the creation of an opera in a hip hop context or a fusion of the two different genres provides endless opportunities for collaboration between instrumental and general music students in our schools. Whether freestyling (improvising), creating electronic accompaniments (aka beats) for the performers to spit (rap) to, working the decks (turntables) or popping and locking (breakdancing) there are many different roles that students can play in creating an original opera in a contemporary context. Even the discussion over whether to call it an opera or a Hip H’Opera and the various issues raised in that discussion can lead to some interesting discoveries. Maybe there’s a school out there that will one day perform an original hip hop opera created by students in place of the traditional broadway musical.

With classical music having hundreds of years to develop and evolve and hip hop only a couple of decades it will be interesting to see how they continue to intertwine and morph into one another. Our students may possibly be the ones in the future pushing the boundaries of both forms and defining a new aesthetic. What is our role as music teachers in dealing with these issues?

A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor looked at some perspectives of how American Idol has impacted music classrooms. It was interesting to read some of the quotes by various music teachers, though it seemed to focus mostly on the performance aspect of music education and the show. I posted my response to some questions posed by the National Association for Music Education about this topic a couple of months ago on my personal blog. I wonder what impact the show will have in music classrooms after a longer period of time?

I enjoyed listening to these three different arrangements of Sabre Dance. (My favorite is a video performance by the exuberant Marimba Ponies–independent young musicians performing as a small ensemble that has no need for a conductor–isn’t that a goal our students should reach?) Thank you to Alex Ross for finding these arrangements. There are many more arrangements of this popular piece.
What a great opportunity for teachers and students to explore the how and why of transforming a piece of music from the classical music “canon”.

Possible questions to encourage discussion:

How are each of the arrangements different from Khachaturian’s original orchestral version? How are they similar? How are the listening experiences of each version different and/or similar?

Why are there a variety of versions of Sabre Dance, some in non-classical styles or genres? What is it about the piece that has caused a broad spectrum of musicians to arrange it in several different styles or genres?

What piece of music would you choose to arrange and how would you do it?

The recent International Association for the Study of Popular Music conference gave me a lot to think about. I will discuss some specific issues that were addressed at the conference in the next few days. The overarching feeling I had leaving the conference was that our field really does need to make more connections with scholars in the various fields of music. Right now it seems that the majority of information available to music educators about popular music comes from the music industry and the various magazines, websites and lesson plans it provides our field with. There is some really interesting work being done by popular music specialists and as music educators we can connect with these specialists and figure out what information to include in our classrooms and how to work it into our programs. Topics discussed at the conference ranging from “hybridity” to “liveness” may now seem foreign to us as music educators but once understood in a way that we understand other concepts we have been working with throughout our careers can lead to some very interesting results in our classrooms. We can rely on popular music specialists to help us understand these concepts while we as music educators can focus on the pedagogy and context to provide our students with new ways to think about and experience music.

The issue of young people and concert attendance was recently raised again by Greg Sandow on his blog. Coming at it from a music ed perspective, Jen previously posted on this topic and I posted on the other blog I write. The voices of young people, especially much younger people, are unfortunately left out in most conversations about the topic. Conversations over at the band, orchestra, chorus and general music MENC bulletin boards can possibly offer some insight. Conversations, like this one and this one, with younger people and their families should probably happen more often!

While discussing what might interest students in attending concerts why not also hold a discussion about what influences their tastes in music? Results of an interesting research study conducted by students at Columbia University are circulating around the web. The results show that there is more to the popularity of a piece of music than the sum of its parts, though that hasn’t stopped Pandora from recommending music based on those parts. Melissa recently posted about places online where students can share their own original music and listen to the creations of others. Students may enjoy sharing their perspectives on how the web has or has not played a role in what they listen to and enjoy. I’ll make a post soon on a project some of my students are currently working on that looks at how the music industry plays a role in these issues as well.

For those of us who work with student rock bands or provide opportunities for students to create popular music in school, the traditional school music program provides little opportunity to showcase such student work. � I am often looking to create spaces for students other than those in the concert band, orchestra and choir, to share their work and musical creations. � If you are looking to go beyond school performances or local performance venues, there are several sites that provide space for students in rock bands to share their music and receive feedback.� Garagespin.com provides “audio recording and music promotion techonology for unsigned bands�? and gives information on the range of internet options for young artists.

My students often use myspace.com to provide samples of their music, and interestingly myspace.com has just created their own record label in conjunction with Interscope records.� American Idol just launched American Idol Undergound, a place (capitalizing on the American Idol brand name) for young artists to promote their music, although not without a pricey fee of $25 per song.� Check out garagespin.com for more opportunities (some free of brand names and fees, and some not) for students to showcase and promote their popular music creations, outside the limits of the spaces traditionally provided in the school music curriculum.�

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The screenshot of the new software on a recent post at Create Digital Music looks somewhat similar to the Hyperscore software developed at MIT. Both seem like interesting types of software to use with younger students and both use some non-traditional ways of creating music. They both also remind me somewhat of software I used to use with fifth graders called Making Music and Making More Music that composer Morton Subotnick helped create.

Lately I have been using the piano roll function on various types of sequencing software, most recently FLstudio, with some great results with my fifth, sixth and seventh graders. It’s been very easy to discuss melody, contour, harmony and rhythm with the way the piano roll displays the music they are creating. It is fascinating to walk around and observe the way they create and manipulate their music. It might be interesting to compare the music they create using the piano roll on the software to the music they create using an actual keyboard.

While some school music programs include fiddle music as part of their curriculum, I wonder how many string students know the history of African American string bands or the roots of the instruments used in this musical style such as the banjo or fiddle?

On November of 2005, the radio program “Talk Back”, on non-commercial community radio station WBAI 99.5FM in New York City, interviewed the Ebony Hillbillies a group that is keeping the African American string band tradition alive. A recording of the program can be listened to here and includes some live performances and some interesting discussion regarding this style of music.

Why not give your students a new perspective on the fiddle music tradition and string music in America.

Music and the way people interact with music has constantly evolved. As we look forward to 2006, not only do we have our digital music files (i.e. MP3) but there seems to be a shift in how people are sharing their digital music files. While the RIAA may have Apple’s I-Tunes complying with the industry’s profit-making licensing scheme that leaves little of the profit in the artist’s hands, the blogging world and the independent music worlds collide at The Hype Machine - an audio blog aggregator. Between the world of blogging and the iPod the digital music landscape has shifted once again. Heck, you can even get Stanford on iTunes, check out the mash-ups recently saved on del.icio.us (check out my recent post regarding del.icio.us), or check out other people’s playlists at Webjay. Not surprisingly, both the latter sites I mentioned have recently ben purchased by Yahoo!