Much has been written about the shortening of attention spans. Everything from films, news reports, and political speeches to advertisements, music videos and popular fiction are designed to fit within short spans of time. All of these must grab a listener's or reader's attention within the first few seconds, or that listener will move on … Continue reading The Nature of Students’ Listening Habits
Music Education
A practical guide to planning, teaching, and assessing music instruction.
What Is Classical Music?
To many, maybe even most in the Western hemisphere, the term "classical music" refers to a select repertoire of music composed exclusively by European or European trained composers. Some restrict the term to refer to music composed only in the mid seventeenth to early nineteenth century, while others use it to mean a broader repertoire … Continue reading What Is Classical Music?
The Endangered Species of Musicianship: Listening
As you might expect, listening is very important to me. As a musician, a purveyor of artistic sound, I am highly invested in listening myself, and in others listening to what I and other musicians release into the air in the form of sound. In an environment ever more reliant on visual technology such as … Continue reading The Endangered Species of Musicianship: Listening
Before the Lesson Plan
Teachers know that quality instruction doesn't just happen by chance in the classroom, and trying to improvise lessons just doesn't work. Quality instruction has to be planned. Certainly flexibility will be needed, and everything will not always go as planned, but teaching without planning will not result in significant learning. What many teachers do not … Continue reading Before the Lesson Plan
Moving Music
Let me just say straight out that I don't think it is possible to understand, appreciate, or be "moved" by a musical work unless one moves. The physical body is expert in understanding the beats, rhythms, and spatial placements that make up music. Because I believe this, I find it interesting that so few symphony … Continue reading Moving Music
What Goes Into Reading Music Rhythms and Pitches?
One of the things in teaching music that has baffled me for some time is why students seem to have as much trouble as they do reading music. Part of it, I've long thought, is due to trying to teach "sight" before "sound." If nothing else, Gordon's research taught us that children learn to read … Continue reading What Goes Into Reading Music Rhythms and Pitches?
Classical Music and Contemporary Culture
Elsewhere on this site, I wrote about the top 25 classical music works, and key words that help explain why they are as popular as they are. After writing that post, I decided to take the results to my eighth grade students and see if the key words in the survey resonated with these adolescents. … Continue reading Classical Music and Contemporary Culture
Teaching Music Interpretation
Interpretation is included in the anchor standards for both performing and responding to music found in the national core arts standards. Interpretation is closely tied to expressive intent, which is what the composer intended to express in a particular musical work. This aspect of interpretation is important, because it gives the interpreter a starting place … Continue reading Teaching Music Interpretation
Strong Beat and Driving Rhythm Found in Top Classical Pieces
The popularity of classical music is of interest to those who teach music, and to those who run symphony orchestras. One of the things that attracts audiences to concert halls is favorite repertoire being on the program. Contemporary composers of classical music have at times been at odds with audiences, because their music was not … Continue reading Strong Beat and Driving Rhythm Found in Top Classical Pieces
Teaching the Once A Week Music Class
If there's one thing I don't like about teaching music, it is that I only see each class one time each week. This has at least two disadvantages; music can easily be regarded as less important because it meets less often than math, science, language arts, and social studies, and students struggle to remember what … Continue reading Teaching the Once A Week Music Class
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