Music Tech Café

October 8: “Creating Original Music Opportunities for Beginning Music Students”

Join us for our annual NAfME Council for Music Composition fall webinar! Join us to hear presentations from Janice Smith and Patrick Blim-Hockberger (Mr. 😎 about working with our youngest and beginning general, choral, and instrumental musicians.

REGISTER NOW:

Creating Original Music Opportunities for Beginning Music Students – NAfME Join us for our annual NAfME Council for Music Composition fall webinar! Join us to hear presentations from Janice Smith and Patrick Blim-Hockberger (Mr. B) about working with our youngest and beginning general, choral, and instrumental musicians. Patrick Blim-Hockberger is a music teacher at Louisv...

Now a coder working to build music education environments for VR, wish I could have done this years ago. My granddaughter took five years of coding. Now she’s a clarinet player and about to start middle school. Thx for the article, Les!

Want Smarter Kids? Teach Music, Not Coding, According to MIT The latest neuroscience shows that learning a musical instrument increases brain power.

We hope you will consider joining us at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA) in 2024!
Applications open! LACHSA is an exciting place to be.

Join us for Music Tech Café, a workshop for music educators interested in integrating creative music making into K-12 classrooms and university coursework.

9:00-3:00 pm, Monday and Tuesday, June 12 and June 13, 2023

Dr. Alexander Koops
Dr. Lisa A. Crawford

For further information and registration, follow this link to APU Website:
https://www.azusaconservatory.org/music-tech-cafe.html

3 Grammy Contenders Share Outrage At All-White Category, Decline Nominations The Okee Dokee Brothers, Alastair Moock and Dog on Fleas — three of five acts nominated in the best children's album category — share their equity-based rationalizations for declining the ballot.

Here is a great idea for your summer reading!

Composition Concepts for Band and Orchestra: Incorporating Creativity in Ensemble Settings

by Alexander Koops (Author), John L. Whitener

Michelle Kashub and Janice Smith's work from 2009 is a good review for me today!

A Principled Approach to Teaching Music Composition to Children
Kaschub, Michele; Smith, Janice P.
Research and Issues in Music Education, v7 n1 Sep 2009

ERIC - EJ894762 - A Principled Approach to Teaching Music Composition to Children, Research and Issues in Music Education, 2009-Sep Building on an apposition of the theories of neurobiologist Antonio Damasio and music theorist Heinrich Schenker, we posit a new model for developing composition instruction based upon the organic connections between humans and music. Parallels are drawn between Damasio's theory of consciousness in....

The Music Stand Foundation supports the work of the music education profession in developing the compositional planning we do for students throughout K-12 and higher education. Please watch for a series of posts including research from the field that may assist you with your developing ideas about composing and children.

The Ultimate List of Scholarships for Women and Girls - The Scholarship System College can be expensive. That’s why scholarships for women are so valuable. Here is the ultimate list of scholarships for women and girls.

$10,000 Scholarships to be Awarded to Students Pursuing Music Industry Careers The nomination period opened Monday for college students pursuing music industry careers to apply for $10,000 scholarships to be awarded by the House of Blues Music Forward Foundation, in partnership with Live Nation Entertainment and the Living Legacy Foundation. “Music Forward, Live Nation and t...

Great commentary.

Commentary: Music education is crucial to students’ development | The Ithacan In a perfect world, every school would have an established music education program, allowing students to express themselves in ways that academics and sports cannot facilitate.

Your Three Feet of Influence To make the world a better place is an intimidating challenge. But what if we focused on our immediate surroundings?

New Approaches to Research on Autism in the Community - Los Angeles Sentinel Autism affects 1 in 59 children in the U.S. Helping children with ASD earlier in life helps them do better throughout their lifespan.

Fundraising - NAfME The National Association for Music Education MENC regards music education as an integral part of the core curriculum in K-12 schools. In 2001 the federal government reauthorized the Elementary and…

France aims to break male domination of classical music 10 July 2018 - 19H23France aims to break male domination of classical music Tweet © AFP/File | French Culture Minister Francoise Nyssen has set a gold of seeing women head up half of France's major cultural institutions within the next five years PARIS (AFP) - France launched a campaign Tuesday .....

"New and Meaningful Connections." A Legacy Institution Taps Artists Committed to Social Change Dinosaurs out of step with the times? Maybe not. News out of New York suggests that funders focused on justice-oriented giving are finding a lot to like in established "legacy" arts institutions.

We’ve been talking about this for years. It keeps changing and shifting. I think the music education profession is doing an amazing job, but please read:

Life, Music, and Social Justice for All - NAfME Do you believe that music education is truly for all students? Rachael Fleischaker addresses social justice in the music classroom.

Teaching whiteness in music class
Posted on May 8, 2018 by Ethan Hein

Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer 2009, 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades. Budget cuts alone can not explain this decline (Kratus, 2007). School music teaches the competencies of European-descended classical music: performing acoustic instruments in ensembles, reading notation, and following a conductor. Youth culture, meanwhile, values recorded music descending from the vernacular traditions of the African diaspora, substantially produced using computers. Hip-hop is the most popular genre of music in the United States (Nielsen 2018), and by some measures, in the world (Hooton 2015). Yet it is vanishingly unusual for hip-hop to be addressed in an American music classroom. Even when educators want to do so, they rarely have the necessary experience or knowledge. Meanwhile, musicians with a hip-hop background find their skills and knowledge to be of little value to institutional gatekeepers. Kendrick Lamar is a good enough musician to merit a Pulitzer Prize, but he would not be accepted into most undergraduate music education programs (Kruse 2018).
Article link: http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2018/teaching-whiteness-in-music-class/
http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/author/ethan/

Teaching whiteness in music class Update: evidence that racism is an urgent problem. Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer 2009, 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades…

Come work with me in my new studio, Cadence Academy, an offering of The Music Stand Foundation. Located in San Pedro very near Palos Verdes and Long Beach. Composition, piano, music theory, AP prep, and music tech and production. Group classes available. Private lessons affordable. Message Lisa Crawford.

A Tool For Change: The Women Composers Database Over the years, there have been a great many calls for diversification within the concert music community, and one of the most prevalent responses from decision-makers is that they don’t know where to find under-represented composers. Rob Deemer has led the development of a database to help, and n...

Music Tech Cafe Come make music and compose during the Azusa Conservatory Collaborative Arts Camp at Azusa Pacific University where you will learn about integrating composition into your approach to teaching using technology and acoustic instruments. This summer, Music Tech Cafe is a week-long experience (June 11-1...

Artists Who Work
by keithsawyer

Do you imagine artists working alone, in a basement somewhere, detached from society? Do you imagine them being poor, bad with money, unable to function well in the everyday world of work?

This image is mostly false. Artists are embedded in the world, just like the rest of us, according to a recent article by Katy Waldman in the New York Times. She points out that this idea of a lone genius artist is "a recent phenomenon, a product of our fetishization of genius." We like to think that our artists are geniuses, and that if they spend too much time in the real world, "their talent can start to feel corruptible."

But most painters live in the world and work in the world. Even the most famous painters that we know from the past, almost all "had to hustle at one point." For most artists, "The act of producing art can be anything but romantic." It's hard work, and artists need to get away and take a break from it, just like everyone else needs a vacation every now and then.

Our idea that artists live apart from the world "supposes that aesthetic experience is categorically different from everyday experience, and that muse-fueled invention floats apart from earthier forms of productivity." But this isn't what artists themselves would say. Every artist that I know emphasizes how much hard work it is, how much of it isn't romantic, and doesn't have much to do with romantic ideas like inspiration or genius.

Katy Waldman, "Working, artist." March 22, 2018. The New York Times Sunday style magazine.

There's more arts education in LA than you might expect, but not for everyone While more arts ed is being offered to more students than many assumed, there's still work to be done to make sure access to that instruction is equitable.

Wishing you the best 2018!

The Top Ten Arts Stories of the DECADE From economics to technology, what impacts the world impacts the arts.

Auditory Processing in Noise: A Preschool Biomarker for Literacy The neural coding of consonants in noise predicts early literacy skills in pre-reading children, providing a biological marker that may help to target early intervention.

Analysis | Yes, there are high-poverty public schools that operate at a high level. Here’s how they succeed. "Educating all children, no matter what their background, is complex and difficult work. But it can be done."

Received this in my email last week. Thank you, Dr. Carl Schafer! Contact him for more information.

Fight for arts education in California The California Education Code mandates that the public schools provide arts education. But hundreds of thousands of California students have been denied arts education because school governing boar…

Congratulations Keith Hancock!

Tesoro teacher and Grammy winner Keith Hancock up for global teaching award with $1 million prize RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA — Keith Hancock thought his life would slow down and return to normal after he celebrated being named the Grammy Foundation’s 2017 Educator of the Year. It did, b…

...added six hours of music each week for every child...

Derelict school becomes national leader by making a surprising subject compulsory “We were in special measures. We had low staff morale, parents not happy with the school, results were poor and nobody wanted to come here, we had budget issues. It’s a downward spiral when you’re there.” This is what Feversham headteacher, Naveed Idrees, told The Guardian. He continued: “...

The Music Stand Foundation...beyond the stand The Music Stand Foundation is a nonprofit organization that supports Music Tech Caf

This has little to do with The People...and will be a part of history for all the wrong reasons.

Read here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/02/us/politics/document-Read-the-G-O-P-Tax-Bill.html

G.O.P. Tax Bill Takes a Big Step Forward With Committee Vote Republican leaders passed the tax bill out of the Senate Budget Committee, clearing the way for it to come to the Senate floor later this week.

"How much longer before our Arts companies are no longer run by artists?” Nick Schlieper delivers a sobering assessment in the 2017 Philip Parsons Lecture.

We missed the bus Nick Schlieper delivers a sobering assessment of the state of play in the performing arts in the 2017 Philip Parsons Lecture. This is his speech in its entirety.

Data: U.S. School Buildings: Age, Condition, and Spending How well are America's public school buildings and other facilities holding up? Here’s some data gleaned from a variety of sources to fuel that discussion.

Music Education Policy Roundup – November 7, 2017 Read here for brief updates on policy developments affecting music education around the United States. These news items include federal, state, and local items that may be of interest to music educators, and are compiled periodically by Lynn Tuttle, NAfME Director of Content and...

"Under this new proposal, only about 5 percent of people will itemize their taxes," he says. "What that means is effectively millions of Americans that currently claim the charitable deduction will lose it."

Nonprofits Fear House Republican Tax Bill Would Hurt Charitable Giving Even though Republicans promise to preserve the deduction for charitable donations, nonprofits say other proposed changes in the bill could discourage as much as $13 billion in annual giving.

How will the House tax proposal affect nonprofits? We’ve analyzed the House tax proposal as introduced last week and are tracking the actions that are reshaping it every day. The Senate will soon release its competing version. We’ve identified four questions nonprofit leaders can ask about the impact on nonprofits to help your nonprofit look ahead a...

Could your music program use funds to support your delivery of composing with technology?

Yes!

‘Take Two Songs and Call Me in the Morning': How Music Might Be Your Next Prescription Drug Scientists are discovering that certain playlists can boost brain activity and treat anxiety and depression.

Happy 4th of July, everyone!

August 7 – 11, 2017, Dr. Lisa Crawford, our CMEA Creating and Composition Representative, will present a week-long workshop during the Azusa Conservatory Summer Music Camp. Music Tech Café-Young Composers EnsembleTM will present opportunities to work with music students to practice providing opportunities to compose in K-12 classrooms. You will learn about integrating composition into your approach to teaching music using technology and acoustic instruments. This summer, Music Tech Café is for any grade level music educator, K-16. Each day will focus toward a different aspect of composing, song-writing, and sound design. You will be able to choose from collaboration with digital apps, keyboards, acoustic rhythm instruments, a variety of genres such as popular music, jazz, and blues, and develop lesson plans for the coming school year. This is the first year this program is being presented through CMEA and APU. We hope you'll join our inaugural year! $100.00/five days—$75.00 if registered by July 15 9:00 am—3:00 pm

Registration: https://goo.gl/forms/E6w31yuumgco3MNf1

Music Tech Cafe-Young Composers Ensemble Come make music and compose during the Azusa Conservatory Summer Music Camp at Azusa Pacific University where you will learn about integrating composition into your approach to teaching using technology and acoustic instruments. This summer, Music Tech Cafe is for any grade level music educator. Eac...

All the children sing (and play): Todd Rundgren's Spirit of Harmony Foundation brings the power of music to kids For five decades, Todd Rundgren has synthesized his seemingly limitless artistic abilities into a wondrous web of creative achievements. As a songwriter,...