I've never really got the hang of it, but for those of you who are open, raving fans of Minecraft (an indie multiplayer crafting game) have you ever stopped to simply listen to the musical soundtrack that accompanies the game? The music in Minecraft is far more modern than the game's trademark eight bit graphic style, and even non-players can appreciate and relax to it as the music is intended to accompany the game rather than overpower it. If you don't fancy having to search through countless dungeons to find the individual Minecraft music discs for each song, or if you simply enjoy slow paced ambient electronic music read on and find out what the buzz is all about.
MuseScore may very well wind up having a major part in the future of music education. A group of enthusiasts last year adapted the open source program to be able to listen to a performance and sync/scroll through the music notation on screen as it is being played. This year at the Barcelona Music Hack Day they demonstrated an application where they connect MuseScore together with a Google+ Hangout to create a live, interactive practice session. Why is this important? Read on to find out!
Read more: MuseScore Hack Makes Online Lessons More Educational
For those of you that have been wanting to get your hands on a high quality music notation app for the iPad run (don't walk!) to the App Store and snatch up NOTION for iPad while it is on sale for only $6.99 (regular price is $14.99). It's been on sale since Friday and my guess is that it will not be on sale much longer so go!
This one is pretty good. Thanks to Twitter follower @musicgeekchic for bringing it to my attention. Read on to see the incredibly funny, animated misheard English rendition of O Fortuna from Carmina Burana shown. Of course you could always go over to Wikipedia and find the real lyrics but these are a lot more fun to listen to. Video after the break. Read on to see it!
One of the really promising things about MuseScore as a music notation system is its open source nature. They openly ask people to modify the code and make improvements, some of which may eventually be incorporated back into the main program. In June, 2011 at Barcelona's Music Hack Day some of these ingenious coders demonstrated a new score following system that takes audio from a microphone source and automatically follows the score notation on the screen. Notthing new you may say? Stop and think about the applications and possibilities here. If they can do this now then perhaps a free, open source music accompaniment system to compete with SmartMusic is on the horizon. Read on to find out more.
As your students head off to summer vacation why not give them a little extra encouragement to keep practicing? MusicEdMagic has a collection of summer camp and traditional campfire songs available for free for all common concert band instruments. Just follow the links below and download whichever part you need for your growing flute, clarinet, sax, trumpet, horn, trombone, baritone, or tuba player.
Read more: Download Some Free Summer Camp and Patriotic Sheet Music
I was stumbling around Twitter today and happened across a new NPR video of the Canadian Brass playing Bach's Little Fugue in G Minor. I was shocked to see that I didn't recognize any of the members of the group except of Chuck Daellenbach the tuba player. I have a very (VERY) small personal history with the group so I was kind of sad to see Chuck as the only current member that I knew. I know people retire and move on but come on, the Canadian Brass? No matter what I will still have them stuck in my head the way they were back when the school I taught at stuck our necks out and hired them in for a Christmas concert back in the late 2003.
It was both one of the most memorable, scary, frustrating, and emotionally painful events of my teaching career. Learn from my mistakes and read on...
Read more: Lessons Learned- How NOT To Bring In A Guest Performer
I was recently at the Iowa Bandmaste's Conference and sat in on a great presentation by David Law, a past president of the IBA and current president of the Iowa Alliance for Arts Education. One of his duties is travelling around the state providing assistance to schools that find themselves in the face of potential fine arts program cuts. His main point throughout the presentation was that school music programs should be proactive instead of reactive and start advocating for their programs BEFORE the threat of cuts emerges. Here are the top six suggestions that I found to be very useful.
#1- Start a Facebook page for your organization and have parents and other supporters log in. Make sure that interesting things are posted in a timely manner. Have a parent update it for you. Do NOT use school time or resources to update your band's Facebook page.
#2- Talk with your principal and superintendent and volunteer to make a short presentation to your school board on the arts and your program. Bring in a few students to make the presentation and maybe even play for them. Better yet, have your students offer to give the school board members a quick lesson on how to play their instruments. Try to do this early in the fall semester.
#3- Put your standards and benchmarks in your concert programs! List which benchmark or standard is being covered by each selection. Don't want to waste space on the program? Put it in a looping powerpoint and have it playing on the screen behind the band before and after the concert or during intermission. Add in some photos and other good PR stuff for added punch.
#4- List your administration and school board members in your concert programs. Recognize them when they are there. Ask them to read program notes aloud for you. Also try to have your students read the program notes if possible.
#5- If your school district, chamber of commerce, city council, or other group will allow it ask them to put recordings of your bands as the "on hold" music for their phone system.
#6- Make a video of your organization and see if your district or city web site will post it on their home page for a while.
For more great suggestions and advocacy materials be sure to take a closer look at the advocacy resources page over at the Iowa Alliance for Arts Education.
Just because an instrument has MADE IN CHINA stamped on it no longer automatically means that it is of poor quality. It turns out that the thing that matters, usually, is the age of the company and the attention they give to improving their products over time. New manufacturers and manufacturers with low budgets for research and development of their products in order to meet the lowest possible price points will almost certainly have problems. Recently though, some low cost manufacturers actually have figured out how to avoid that problem and create instruments that in most cases are more than acceptable to music teachers and school band directors.
Read more: For Musical Instruments Made In China No Longer Means Poor Quality
For more than a decade now band directors have lamented the influx of ultra low-cost musical instrument brands being made overseas in China and in other countries. The complaints have, for the most part, centered around intonation problems, lack of durability, and difficulty in getting repairs done quickly. To have heard the complaints back in the late 1990's one would have thought that absolutely nothing good in the way of musical instruments ever came out of China in those early years.
Read more: The Myths and Realities of Chinese Made Musical Instruments
If you are a public school band director you have to face the facts. No matter what you say, no matter how you say it, you will still wind up with inferior quality instruments being brought into your band rehearsals. We have complained and argued about the percieved poor quality of these instruments, coming from dozens of different manufacturers and being sold in stores along side the Barbie dolls and NERF guns. For nearly twenty years we have complained about instruments that break at the slightest bit of excess pressure or repair parts that are almost impossible to get. The question is, in the last twenty years have things really changed and in reality, is a $125 trumpet really a bad thing?
You may not be happy with the answers I am going to give you...
Read more: Why Low Cost Musical Instruments May NOT Be Such A Bad Thing
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