"Teaching the Artist Within Every Student"

At the 2011 Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) Conference, Joanne Haroutonian gave a lecture about the ability for students to be artistic. She outlined what she called the "Artistic Ways of Knowing," which describes the artistic process of learning, enhances students' sensory awareness of the artistic process, and explains artistic awareness to people outside of academia. She highlights five basic concepts: 1) Perceptual Awareness and Discrimination, 2) Metaperception, 3) Creative Interpretation, 4) Dynamic of Performance, and 5) Critiquing. She then goes on to explain each of the five concepts in greater detail, and shows how teachers can incorporate each into their lessons. She concluded her lecture with a quote from Picasso: "A painter transforms the sun into a yellow spot. An artist transforms a yellow spot into the sun."

With the popular "An A is not enough" video (also embedded below) being circulated this week, it is clear that the arts demand perfection, and that a 90% clearly isn't enough when it comes to performance. The conductor suggests that other subjects "teach" students to become complacent, and that a "B" is good enough; in fact, "above average". Yet, if each member of an ensemble only performed 8 out of 10 notes in a concert correctly, the result would be horrible. Music and art challenge our students to strive for the best they can be, and teach them life lessons that the regular academic subjects cannot.

We need to really fight to keep music and art programs in our schools, for it gives students an outlet to their imagination and expression, and better prepares them for the real world. Real artistic expression is something that has to be fostered and developed over time, yet when a student realizes the inner potential that they have, the sky becomes the limit.

Claron McFadden on Human Expression

"The human voice: mysterious, spontaneous, primal; the vessel on which all emotions travel, except, perhaps, jealousy. And the breath, the breath is the captain of that vessel. A child is born, takes its first breath, and we behold the wondrous beauty of vocal expression: mysterious, spontaneous, and primal... When you're totally in the moment, the vessel of emotion is open. The emotions can flow...". 

Claron McFadden's message here is a very interesting one in the way to approach human expression. Having studied in Rochester, NY at the Eastman School of Music, McFadden is a world-renown soprano. As someone who knows very little about vocal pedagogy, I found myself captured by her sense of articulation, and her personal expression in her singing. McFadden closes her short lecture with a performance of John Cage's "Aria" for solo soprano, and walks the audience through this very non-traditional score before singing it live. This is a rather captivating performance, and could be used to get students thinking about expression in music, as well as to challenge what their conceptions about music really are. I am not normally a big fan of late 20th-century or early 21st-century music, but McFadden found a way to bring this piece to life for me. The TedTalks video came across my PLN this week, but I have embedded the video from YouTube below:

Florida's Student Success Act Becomes Law

Earlier this morning, Governor Rick Scott signed the Student Success Act, which will greatly improve Florida's quality of education. Scott stated, "I am proud that the first bill I sign [as governor] is this important legislation that will give Florida the best educated workforce to compete in the 21st century economy. We must recruit and retain the best people to make sure every classroom in Florida has a highly effective teacher." To read more about the legislation's policies, click here.

Michelle Rhee, CEO and Founder of StudentsFirst, stated, "This landmark legislation recognizes that teachers are the most important factor in schools when determining a child's success. We applaud Florida for its adoption of bold and comprehensive education measures that put students first."

I posted a link to StudentsFirst.org earlier in my blog with a map depicting how in danger a teacher is to be laid off with budget cuts. Florida should now have changed from orange to green, indicating that the state now takes performance into consideration for firing teachers (ending LIFO), and effective teachers are therefore at a lower risk of losing their jobs. I applaud Governor Scott, and urge more governors to stand up for education in their individual states.

Sheet Music on the Go

Piano Street is an online digital musical database of piano scores. The site now offers a version for mobile devices, giving a user access to over 3,000 study scores (over 23,000 pages of music) from standard classical piano repertoire, and includes all the scores on the regular website. The new mobile website works on devices such as the iPhone, iPad, Android devices, and other smartphones. Access does require a paid subscription, but it does give the user another access point to scores, especially if they are not near a library with a good music collection or away from their personal score collection.

For access from mobile devices, visit the website at m.pianostreet.com.
To follow their blog, click here.

Intro to Noteflight

http://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/2a4bcfb2a960fafcea067531ac067d78ccd8ebc6

As part of this week's assignment, we had to become familiar with the free online notation software program Noteflight. After exploring another freeware notation program (MuseScore) last week, I find myself preferring Noteflight. As a person who is quite familiar with the ins and outs of Finale, Noteflight offers its users more options than MuseScore. I really like how users can create scores and share them over the net with other Noteflight users, and how a person can email a URL to their score or embed it to a blog (which I have done later) to share music with others. This would be a great tool to have students use as they learn to compose their own music; they can input it quite easily, edit it, share it in whatever way they want, and get feedback from other users or instructors anywhere they have access to an internet-connected computer. Noteflight's interface is quite user friendly, and offers quick access to articulations, dynamics, and other more advanced features that freeware notation software normally does not give the user access to. Overall I was quite impressed, and will consider using this software with future students of my own.

Part of the week's assignment was to replicate an arrangement of "A Bicycle Built for Two" by Harry Dacre. Below, find my score, embedded into the blog, which should allow you to play the file. It should automatically scroll for you as the music progresses.

Breakthrough Education Reform in Florida

The Florida House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed landmark legislation yesterday, recognizing how important they view education in Florida. Among the achievements, there is an end to LIFO, and requires parents to be notified if their children are being placed in a classroom with an underperforming teacher. The tenure process has also been overhauled, and teachers that have tenure could get fired due to unsatisfactory performance. There is also no automatic renewal of contracts, regardless of performance. While the fight over tenure could be a negative point among teachers, it challenges teachers to perform to their very best, and ensures that Florida is trying to make sure the best teachers are the ones in front of their students. These are just a handful of the items passed. To view the full article, click here.

Putting Students First

Tony Pedriana is a former principal from Milwaukee's city school district, and author of "Leaving Johnny Behind: Overcoming Barriers to Literacy." He notes how the mantra "Children First" was a central topic during his career as a teacher and principal. This article, entitled "What it really means to put students first," highlights the actual trends that he saw develop out of an effort to put children first, and how we fell far short of that goal. In the end, he concludes that putting children first has never been our real goal with the choices that we have continued to make over the past several decades. "No Child Left Behind" is a joke, and only leaves more children behind each year. If we really are going to uphold the vision of putting children first, we have a long way to go, and a lot of people to hold accountable for the choices they make. Michelle Rhee at StudentsFirst is a good stepping stone in current advocacy, and she's willing to fight the fight. The real question is, what are you willing to do to help the cause of children and learning in this country?

StudentsFirst launches Save Great Teachers Map

This interactive map allows a user to click on an individual state to view how that state handles teacher layoffs, and also empowers them to take a stand to fight for teachers' rights by giving links to email governors and legislators, encouraging them to put an end to LIFO.


To make some sense of the color coding, states in red represent states where teachers have the greatest chance of being cut this year, and also are states that enact LIFO. States in orange are at a slightly-less high risk, and leave it up to individual districts to decide what teachers get laid off (although most are still by seniority). States in green are the lowest risk, and have performance factors included in layoff decisions.


The full article can be found here.

An End to LIFO in NY?!

New York State currently enacts a policy called LIFO (Last In, First Out), where the last teachers to be hired must be the first to be fired should districts cut back, regardless of an individual's performance in the classroom. This has been a major point of contention among educators, and a popular topic in NY schools. Finally, it appears that the policy may be reversed... every movement requires an initial courageous volunteer to take the first leap of faith...

Michelle Rhee's latest Wall Street Journal Op-Ed

MARCH 11, 2011

In today's Wall Street Journal, Michelle Rhee published an op-ed about New York state's refusal to overturn the policy of "last in, first out" (LIFO). It mandates that the last teachers hired must be the first teachers fired, regardless of how good they are.

Last week, the New York Senate passed a bill that would make a teacher's performance a key factor when layoffs are required. Following that, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo introduced a bill that would address the issue of how we define performance, but was entirely silent on the subject of how layoffs are conducted. And with 5,000 teacher layoffs headed toward New York City alone, the harmful policy of LIFO remains firmly in place. 

Michelle wrote: 

According to a recent Quinnipiac University survey, 85 percent of New Yorkers support ending the last in, first out policy. Four major editorial boards in New York City have called for ending the practice. We need Gov. Cuomo to do more than just say he's for reforming it. We need him to actually put forth a bill that eliminates it immediately.

Click here to read Michelle's Wall Street Journal editorial.

How to Listen

I am a big advocator of getting my students to listen to as much live music as possible, offering extra credit if they attend any live music concert (provided they bring me a program or ticket stub). I believe that there can be good lessons in any musical performance, and that basic tools learned in the classroom can be used to stimulate conversation around a particular listening experience. It also gets the students participating in their local cultural life, and doesn't require that they listen to music that they find no aesthetic value in. To me, it didn't matter if it was a Queen concert (or a cover such as this ukelele rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody") or someone playing a series of Beethoven piano sonatas; the overall lesson was in listening to someone playing music.

Recently, one of my friends who is a teacher in the Bronx shared with me an interesting piece of information: the letters in the word LISTEN are the same as the letters in the word SILENT. I think this is a great piece of information to share with students: to really listen effectively, we have to be as silent as possible in order for the true performance to shine through. If we aren't quiet, we might miss something that could in turn be the part of a piece of music we like the best...

Yet, to challenge the common thought that listening can only be done with the ears, I want to draw your attention to another video on TED.com. In this roughly half-hour long video, the deaf Scottish percussionist, Evelyn Glennie, challenges the audience to think about what it means to really listen. Glennie, not wanting to believe that a deaf person couldn't rise to the same musical accomplishments of a hearing person, fought the odds against the British educational system, and changed the way that they admit candidates to their degree programs. As an accomplished percussionist, Glennie's lecture-demonstration clearly shows us that listening can be accomplished in more ways than just with our ears.

The Budget Crisis and our Schools

DEFICIT. That one word has so many lasting implications on today's society, and impacts everyone directly. As costs rise and money and jobs dwindle, even the most cautious of budgets can get challenged. Our schools receive funding from three sources: 1) the federal government, 2) the state government, and 3) local taxes and private donations. As money gets short, the amount of assistance provided to our schools by each of these areas deteriorates. Programs like music and arts, deemed "unessential education," often are the first victims of the budget ax.

Today, the City of Rochester school district is voting to completely cut music and art from the city school curriculum in the fall. Hundreds of teachers are outside city hall protesting the cuts. Rhode Island recently made the news with thousands of teachers getting pink slips. New York, California, Wisconsin... the list goes on and on. New York is also proposing capping administrator's salaries at around $125,000/year. There are a few administrators around Rochester that are currently making close to a quarter million a year, including the Superintendent of the Rochester City Schools.

Recently on TED.com, Bill Gates gave a short (roughly ten minute) speech entitled "How State Budgets are breaking US schools". While his focus was primarily on the state of California, he gave some underlying facts that are applicable to each of the 50 states. As individual states' budgets slash support to education, one option districts have is to cut teachers. This raises an interesting question: "Should it be the young or 'less good' teachers that get cut?" My response: how do we define what it is to be 'less good'? Clearly all teachers are not created equally, and some teachers are more productive than others. Yet who sets the standards that would label a teacher as 'less good' than any other teacher? That's a fine line...

Gates goes on to briefly highlight three things that states need to do to solidify a future for our schools: 1) establish more tools to educate ourselves with, 2) maintain clear and honest accounting practices, and 3) have courageous politicians that will go against the grain and fight for education, not having to worry about "shooting the messenger". This is a good start, but we need to hold our officials accountable for the decisions they make. 

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog. I have to say that this is completely new to me, and is being done in connection with my MMME program requirements at Kent State University. I hope to provide some interesting topics here to stimulate discussion about current trends and issues in the field of music education.