A Real Human Kind of Way

Early this year I collaborated in a project with the folks at HigherMind MediaWorks to produce a video supporting Bill McKibben and his work with 350.org.

I am pleased to have had yet another opportunity to compose and produce some more music for HigherMind.  This time it was for a promotional video launching Champlain College’s new $25 million campaign.    The great thing about HigherMind is that they really approach this kind of work with a whole new mindset.  They actually use an ethnographic approach using their clients’ communities to promote their vision and story.  As a result their production style is authentic, creative and personable; helping their clients to reach their target audiences and goals while doing so in a creative and energetic real-human-kind-of-way.  The kind-of-way that makes it feel good to live in Vermont.

Anyway, as always it was an honor and fun.

 

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One Day: The Global Citizen Project

I am pleased to announce the world premiere of One Day: The Global Citizen Project. This video represents 9 months of work by my Cabot School middle school students during the 2010-2011 school year.  Featuring over 300 Vermont student musicians and singers (grades 1 – 12), the goal of the Global Citizen Project was to empower young people to make a difference in the world and affect change in their communities through the arts.

This video was produced with the intention of raising money for the Playing For Change Foundation, an organization that not only inspired our work but also supports music education projects in impoverished communities throughout the world.  After viewing the video please consider a donation to the Playing For Change Foundation in our name, The Global Citizen Project.

Be a Global Citizen!

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Moving People

Over the summer I had the opportunity to work with the folks at Higher Mind Media Productions to compose a soundtrack to a speech by climate change guru, Bill McKibben.

The Higher Mind Media crew was so moved by Bill’s speech at the 2011 Power Shift conference in DC, that they decided to follow his call to action for Moving People Day. They choreographed an original dance that worked with my score and the edited version of Bill’s speech.

Big thanks to engineer Colin McCaffrey, and tabla and cajon player Gabe Halberg, as well as my fellow Movement of the People (Fela Kuti Project) crew: Zach Tonnissen, Max Bronstein-Paritz and Dillon Zahner for helping out on the track.

Here’s a video of the dance using my score and Bill’s speech.

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Infusing Performing Arts In Project Based Learning

After 12 months (and 15 years), I am done with my MA.

Distilled down to its essence the work deals with ways to facilitate a progressive and rigorous applied performing arts learning experience for secondary students that is relevant, meaningful and empowering to young artists in the global landscape of the 21st century.  In other words its time to move on from the traditional archaic mode of school band.

If this sparks your interest, you can check out the whole thesis here: Infusing Performing Arts in Project Based Learning to Transform Secondary Education.

Or you can just read a bit of the introduction:

“Given a chance – given space – band students may break out of roles that are defined for them, and create opportunities (that extend beyond the traditional band experience).”

Randall Everett Allsup 2003

“The study must be filled with the action of discovery.”

Lenore Pogonowski 1979

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It has been over twenty years, but I still distinctly remember the moment in high school when several of my musician friends and I had our aspirations squashed by the school administration.  We were in our junior year and very interested in creating an independent study jazz combo that would meet each day for credit.  We were very serious about jazz and improving our fluency in the music.  It made complete sense to us that this would be a better use of our time in school than sitting in a study hall or the cafeteria during a “free period.”

We requested a meeting with the principal of the school and met with him in the band room during lunch.  We described our vision for an independent jazz combo:  we would listen to music, transcribe solos, compose and arrange music and work on improvisation and ensemble skills.  At the end of the meeting the principal said, “Sorry we can’t make this happen for you.”  I can’t remember if any reason was given or not.  Perhaps it was the confusion of arranging this anomaly into the schedule, or they didn’t like the idea of it being unsupervised.   Whatever the actual motivation was for the principal to dismiss our request, the message was certainly clear:  Students can’t be left to tend to their own learning.  What expertise or skills did we have to stay on track?   Incidentally, in the same year, my high school was identified as one of the top 10 public high schools in the nation.  Even at age 16, the irony wasn’t lost on us.

Luckily we were all motivated to pursue our study of jazz outside of school and had supportive parents interested in our musical development.  The following year, our  combo professionally recorded a CD of original jazz and was awarded the distinction of best high school jazz combo by DownBeat magazine.  Ironically, in order to enter the competition we had to get our band teacher’s signature saying that we were a school sponsored group!  Every detail of that accomplishment came from a group four high school kids.  Except for the fact that the bass player’s mom drove us to the recording studio in Philly (and the band teacher’s signature).

I am happy to say that three out of four of us have gone on to receive degrees in music and work as professional musicians still.   But what if this was someone else who didn’t have the same supports or self confidence necessary to persevere?

The recipe for our success was fairly simple and unfortunately had very little to do with school.  We were motivated by our musical passions and interests.  We were in love with the music and wanted to immerse ourselves in it.  We wanted to do everything possible to get better.   Because the music was extremely relevant to us, our study of the music was extremely rigorous.  Additionally, the nature of being four teenage musicians in a combo was also a very social experience for us.

All of these elements – relevance, rigor, social relationships – are the essential hallmarks of successful project based learning.  What we intuitively were seeking out for ourselves in the late 1980’s is just now being considered by traditional schools as a potentially better learning path.  Luckily, more progressive organizations such as San Diego’s High Tech High and the Expeditionary Learning Schools network have been paving the way for Project Based Learning for over a decade now.

In some respects, this thesis is an answer to the administrators and teachers that questioned our ability to learn and discover rigor through our motivation.   As I just mentioned, progressive institutions have been forging the way for Project Based Learning for some time now.  Unfortunately, most (if not all) of these schools seem to be missing the mark when it comes to the performing arts.  If applied music is an option in a school like High Tech High it tends to be an extra add-on.  Band is still band.  Jazz Band is still Jazz Band.  They are not holistically integrated into the curriculum.  Moreover, a motivated young musician would not have ample supports for performing arts education in a project based learning school.   If such a student had any choice of where she could attend (and honestly, most students do not have too much choice when it comes to where they go to school), she could choose a performing  arts school.  However, many of these performing arts schools utilize a traditional “liberal arts” track  for the “core academics.”  But what if she could choose to attend a project based learning school that fully embraced and integrated the performing arts into the high school?  What if the school was accessible to the advanced high school musician as well as the novice or even non-musician interested in learning more about music?

If my friends and I had been given the opportunity to pursue our musical interests I wonder what kind of opportunities  and growth I may have missed as a result? Had I had the chance to study jazz and improvise every day in school, rather than solely practicing to play-a-long records at home, would I have been a stronger jazz musician today?  And what if I could have done this in a project based learning school where the teachers supported this kind of interest and coached us to strive for even greater aspirations?  Perhaps it would mean that in addition to the daily combo work, we were also studying history and how it related to the African diaspora and African-American music.  Perhaps it would mean that we were using Algebra to develop business plans and market our CD.  Maybe we could have actually studied acoustical physics as it applies to the instruments we were playing day in and day out so that we could make concrete connections that were relevant and meaningful to us.

It is this kind of dream that this thesis attempts to realize.  In the following pages I begin by outlining what project based learning is and how that relates to the pressing needs of young people today and the world that they will be leading tomorrow.  I then move on to look at the disconnect  between standardized testing and 21st century learning.  From there the thesis begins to synthesize several pedagogical and curriculum development approaches (both non-arts-specific and arts-specific) as a means to developing a significant place for rigorous general and applied music learning in a progressive 21st century project based learning setting. Finally the thesis presents two such models, one which is a proposal  (Arabic Music Expedition) and one that has been developed and implemented over the past year in the Cabot Middle School, The Global Citizen Project.

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ellington, strayhorn, m.i.a., iyer, palmieri, me & the kids

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Galang(ss): Gateway dr*g to World 2.0 Music Edu?

For a while now I have been trying to wrap my mind around on the education implications of Wayne Marshall’s “world 2.0.”   As I understand it,  Wayne’s definition (of his own coined term) focuses on the digital landscape:   in part, the rapid exchange/inspiration/cross pollination of musical ideas across the globe via the interwebs and the like.   As a result the music is mostly in the electronic music format (as opposed to creative acoustic music – for example).   This peer to peer model of musical inspiration and composition holds great potential and value for the high school music classroom.  The problem of course, is that most music classrooms/band rooms are still stuck in 1987.  1995 if they a little bit more hip.

I was initially drawn to the world 2.0 descriptor in my search for a meaningful term to describe my own musical and teaching  interests.  As many have recognized there are some problems with the terms  ”world music” and “global music.”    In the music education realm,  ”world music” is packed with even more trouble. In a recent paper for my grad studies I was working out what my thoughts were on this very issue and sort of arrived at the idea of translocal music education and the need for  bi-musicality in the school music classroom (if not poly-musicality).   Somehow though, I felt like I was grasping a bit at the straws.

In August of 2010 Wayne posted a compelling mashup of M.I.A.’s “Galang” (mia original + a cover arrangement of  Galang by Vijay Iyer’s Trio Riot).    Pretty soon after hearing it I thought that  it would be cool to hear this as a live band arrangement.    Flash forward 6 months and I found myself putting an arrangement together for a high school district jazz ensemble that I was guest conducting.

Although there is still some straw-grasping at play, what I hear in this performance is a bit closer to . . . .  the idea of bringing music edu into a contemporary relevance – a musical opportunity that is not wholly defined by genre, spinning off the global and coming from the glocal, while offering up something new to the world:

high school jazz students in vermont playing a big band arrangement of a cambridge-born mashup of a tune that was originally written by a sri lankan-english artist/musician that was covered by an indian-american creative music pianist/composer.    Either way it was a bunch of fun to play.   [ disclaimer:  be kind.  these are high school students playing the tune and the balance on the sound board wasn't so great, meaning that we missed out on some of the critical melody lines played by guitar, piano and vibes ]

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Another tune from the same performance.  An original of mine called “green grey”

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Clapping Music on Javanese Gamelan

My advanced music ensemble worked on some Steve Reich music this past fall and had  wonderful time exploring the many dimensions of his work.  While working on Clapping Music we somehow organically migrated the piece onto our Javanese Gamelan.  An arrangement quickly emerged.  We acknowledge that this piece definitely diverges from Reich’s original intent, but we still like it anyway!

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