One of the activities that has given me the greatest satisfaction in this busy few months are the weekly classes and sing-alongs at Susan Bailis Assisted Living.  I am working with them as part of my Schweitzer Fellowship, which has spanned the last academic year. I entered the project a bit blind, having had to find a new site and reconfigure my project after the initial site fell through. I had not had experience working with seniors before and I was a little nervous about it. I soon realized that my original project plan– chorus work and individual music lessons– weren’t a good fit for the population. The choral singing was difficult because of the wide disparity in musical ability and training–people who could read music got bored, people who could barely match pitch were frustrated.  Music lessons were difficult to organize because the few interested individuals tended to cancel or forget. I came up with another plan to offer more passive activities including a weekly music appreciation discussion and a weekly “sing along.” Once a week I bring in a CD or music with some kind of theme; for example, we did a month of opera history and each week focused on one or two composers or a certain style. As a group we listen and discuss interesting characteristics of the music including form and style. On another day I bring in old songs ranging from the 20′s to the 60′s and peck away at the piano while participants read from song sheets. Some sing, some just listen, but it usually ends up to be a fun and relaxed hour.

After some setbacks I feel we finally settled into a routine with these two activities around mid-February. The same clients tend to come to each respective activity and I feel I have developed a rapport with several of them. I think one big lesson I have learned so far, and this may seem obvious, is the value of just showing up. I admit I was discouraged at one point when the project wasn’t going as planned, but I’m glad I continued to try new activities until we found something that was good for the residents. I also am constantly reminded of the value of preparation and organization. In discussions that have not gone as well I always feel that I could have prepared more thoroughly beforehand. Finally, I think I’ve realized how much I can learn as a musician in any kind of educational setting. I’ve been able to explore musical works more in depth this semester as a result of offering these classes, and in the discussions themselves clients often have an unexpected question or insight that I can learn from.

In my next post I will share some video and anecdotes about the residents with whom I’ve worked and some thoughts about my experience with the Schweitzer Fellowship.

Greetings MIE community! Much progressed has occurred since my first blog post. One month ago, the Music-In-Education department hosted our first ever concert, which featured my composition, Lucena Position for Six Musicians and Two Chess Players. The name is a bit of a misnomer, actually—we only had one chess player, playing both sides of the board for this performance. Still, the piece was a tremendous success!

Everyone who participated in it ended up learning about the Lucena Position, an important type of rook-and-pawn endgame that every great chess player needs to know about. By crafting the piece around this “textbook endgame study,” anyone who learned the piece had to first absorb the key concepts of the Lucena position: how to build a bridge with the rook to block a barrage of enemy checks and allow an otherwise blocked pawn to promote. Then, after the rooks are traded off, the pawn promotes to a queen and the remainder of the game is a classic king-and-queen checkmating pattern.

Moreover, the audience got a new experience with the game, and hopefully learned something too! By adding a sonic element, audience members who might not know the rules of chess got a better picture of when something interesting happened—e.g. a check, a piece being threatened, or a queen promoting. Still, my “artist persona” was only partially satisfied: the music still seems a bit heavy-handed, perhaps programmatic. This came to light more prominently when, just a few days ago, I was informed that I would not be asked to perform a second version of the piece on Jordan Hall stage for the “Beckett Play” concert.

Part of that was my bad planning (I didn’t get a rehearsal together so the curator of the show could see the idea in time), but there’s a more deeply rooted issue: Sam Beckett would not agree with the core musical structure! As a playwright, Beckett spent much of his career attempting to destroy narrative, to systematically remove conventional plot devices from his works and achieve a new aesthetic. My current system is inherently programmatic and narrative, which makes it a poor fit for the Beckett concert.

Consequently, my attention now turns to preparing for my recital. I have effectively “doubled down” with this project: not only does it require success as a teacher and chess player in order to pull off each concert, but additionally it requires that I compose a great piece of music! As I write this I have just three weeks to put the last piece together for my recital. I will have to drastically reduce the scale of my compositional ambitions in order to accommodate the realities of my timeline: I want a piece on my recital that sounds good, in addition to the educational content and lesson plans that go into making the piece happen.

One technique I intend to explore further as I extend this interdisciplinary teaching concept after graduation (not sure how or where yet, but I’ll find a way) is the idea of group composition through guided inquiry. By asking students (in this case, members of the NEC Chess Club) to explore core concepts in chess, I can make use of the bi-literacy and start asking questions. For example: “what is the effect of capturing a piece during a game? How might that be represented musically?” This format of question can be reused for each and every lesson plan: piece movement, the squares of the board, pawn promotion, check, checkmate, castling, elementary checkmates (Q+R vs. K, K + Q vs. K, K + R vs. K, etc.), opening theory, elementary tactics (forks, pins, skewers, discovered attacks, etc.), endgame studies like the Lucena Position, and so on.

The real challenge for me as an artist is sufficiently limiting the scope of each composition! Chess is nearly as rich and imaginative of an art form as music, so any attempt to map concepts from its domain into the world of sound will have inherent limitations. As a composer and fellow student helpfully suggested, “be careful not to put too much heart into each piece… remember you can always write another. Cut excess like a samurai.”

Editor’s Note:  This is the 3nd post in a long series with an inside view of the planning and production for our department’s first-ever intra-departmental MIE Concert!

Hello,

Tomorrow, March 5th from 6-8 we will be rehearsing in SB 300 for the MIE concert. Specifically, we will be looking at Larry’s piece based on the power-song, Pachelbel’s Canon. Please bring your instruments and your voices. We need singers and different instrumentalists, prepared for fun and the unexpected. Please reply and let me know if you are able to make it. Feel free to invite other voices to class as well.

Also, we need ushers! We have a really cool seating plan, but we need two volunteers to do this. Please let me know if this is something that you would like to do. You may be both a performer and an usher at the concert – That is totally okay! We just need someone to stand up and take this important responsibility in order to assure its success.

Thanks!

Over the past two years, I have worked in numerous ways and settings to help bridge the NEC communities, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes deliberately. For this internship, I found a unique way to serve the NEC student population: start a chess club!

What makes this different from other clubs? My chess club has ulterior motives. I’m interested in interdisciplinary connections, drawing inspiration for musical events from other structures. Specifically, I’m setting out to compose music inspired by and informed by the game of chess. As a composer, I want musicians to understand the game, in order to enrich their experience playing the music.

Moreover, having an “army of chess-playing musicians” gives me the ability to write new music that draws its compositional structure directly out of the game: I can use the board as a kind of improvised graphic score! Thus, by teaching musicians the game of chess, I am simultaneously preparing them to play my music.

Over the semester, I hope to put on three performances. The first will be on the Music-In-Education Department Concert (which I am curating), to take place on March 7th. This will be a “small piece,” examining just a small microcosm of the chess universe. The second performance will (hopefully, curator permitting) be on Jordan Hall stage on April 9th, as part of the “Beckett Play” concert (put on by the Contemporary Improvisation Dept.). That piece would be a little bit bigger, and also relate to the writing of Samuel Beckett (especially “Endgame”). Finally, I hope to stage the largest version of the piece—the full-blown game of chess—on my recital: April 28th, in Brown Hall. This would require thirty-two musicians, all of whom play chess relatively well, so I hope people show up to the club!

Right now the club is in “stage one”: building critical mass. So far there’s been a steady crowd of musicians each week, and the cast usually has a mixture of rotating players and steady regulars. On our first day, there were thirteen people! The challenge each week is to find ways to teach each person on an individual basis, while simultaneously introducing concepts that will be relevant in my compositions.

Starting in the next couple weeks or so, I plan to introduce my first piece in the club, teaching about that.

Editor’s Note:  This is the 2nd post in a long series with an inside view of the planning and production for our department’s first-ever intra-departmental MIE Concert!

Planning for the MIE Concert continues. Devin Ulibarri, our MIE Graduate Assistant and also faculty at NEC MusicLaunch, shares the following:

Purpose

To showcase MIE teaching artists in the context of MIE philosophies. Allows MIE
students to connect with an audience in the context of their rationale for MIE- one
can experiment in creating a concert that communicates music to an audience in a
unique way.

I also understand the need for MIE concentration students and the department as a
whole to express themselves through performance. I also hope that the department
can gain more exposure through performances, however it is imperative that this is
within the context of the MIE concepts and values.

Possibilities

• MIE concentration students could collaborate – solo, chamber within their
  discipline, or chamber cross-disciplinary (CI+classical –personally, I think this
  is great, because MIE is the one place where all different backgrounds can come
  together and learn from one another so the process of collaboration itself would be
  a learning process)
• MIE projects performed – A kick-ass version of a cups exercise, Pachelbel’s canon
  etc.
• MIE students perform (with or without teachers) – Students display what they
  have learned from internship
• Between pieces and within the program, MIE students can detail their philosophies
  and their rationale for MIE
• Experiments in audience contributions
• MIE concentration composers may write pieces for event that reflect their
  rationale for MIE

The MIE Department has been kicking around an idea to produce a MIE “concert” this Spring. One of our grad students, violinist Rob Flax, sent us the following (AMAZING!) pitch:

This concert centers around two concepts central to the Music In Education’s core: “Music + Music Integration” and “Artist-Teacher-Scholar.” Music + Music Integration is the belief that education in any subject becomes enriched when injected with music and, conversely, that music is a powerful tool that can be used to create interdisciplinary connections. An Artist-Teacher-Scholar is a complete musician, who uses skills from each arena to enrich the others, e.g. the artistry of teaching, the scholarship of artistry, etc.

Each piece performed is developed with/around MIE concepts: perhaps the music serves as a teaching tool for learning another subject (e.g. Rob Flax’s “Chess Piece” explores the sounds of chess, and “Autumn Leaves” can be used as a ‘Power Song’ for a unit on harmony), or perhaps the concept for the piece arose from a teaching concept (e.g. the “Cups Piece”).

Basically, [we] want pieces that (a) can be used to teach other things, (b) are examples of teaching influencing artistry, and/or (c) demonstrations of pure artistic prowess by folks otherwise labeled as “teachers.”

We will let you know as this idea develops!

In my final semester at New England Conservatory, I’m interning as a Teaching Assistant for Dr. Scripp’s Teaching Seminar, one of the core courses in the Music-In-Education curriculum. I took the course a full year ago and really enjoyed the exposure to new concepts and the multiple perspectives from which we viewed the art of teaching and learning. Of course, year-to-year this particular course can change significantly; the topics explored are, to a certain degree, based on the interests of current class members as well as the latest literature with implications on teaching and learning.

One of the pieces of literature we’ve been reading as a class is Matthew Syed’s new book Bounce. In the spirit of Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, Syed explores the “science of success” by illuminating the hidden opportunities that have existed to create some of the most accomplished musicians, athletes and intellectuals on the planet. Syed challenges the notion of talent, a concept ingrained in the American psyche and romanticized by many, and points to concepts like the 10,000 hours theory of practice, domain expertise and what he calls a trajectory of development.

What helps to make Syed’s arguments so authentic is that he himself is a former elite athlete, an Olympian who became Britain’s no. 1 ranked table tennis player in 1995. Syed writes candidly about hidden opportunities that existed for him, such as the tournament-specification table tennis table that his parents bought and housed in their garage, on which Syed and his brother would duel for hours on end at a young age, creating for himself a trajectory of development that made it virtually impossible for thousands of other aspiring players to match. Another hidden opportunity existed in the fact that one of the nation’s top table tennis coaches taught at the primary school Syed attended, spotting Syed’s enhanced ability at the game and inviting him to join Omega, one of the elite table tennis clubs in the country. Syed states “… I had powerful advantages not available to hundreds of thousands of youngsters. I was, in effect, the best of a very small bunch. Or, to put it another way, I was the best of a very big bunch, only a tiny fraction of whom had my opportunities.”

Syed also explores the 10,ooo hours theory of practice, a recent theory of cognitive science that asserts it takes about 10,000 hours of purposeful practice for the human brain to assimilate all of the neural traces required for world-class expertise in anything. Syed cites a 1991 study by Florida State University psychologist Anders Ericsson, in which he and two colleagues conducted extensive interviews with violinists at the renowned Music Academy of Berlin. The violinists were categorized into three groups- the most outstanding performers, the very good performers, and the least able players who were studying to become music teachers.

Syed sums up, “By the age of twenty, the best violinists had practiced an average of ten thousand hours, more than two thousand hours more than the good violinists and more than six thousand hours more than the violinists hoping to become music teachers. These differences are not just statistically significant; they are extraordinary. Top performers had devoted thousands of additional hours to the task of becoming master perfomers. But that’s not all. Ericsson also found that there were no exceptions to this pattern: nobody who had reached the elite group without copious amounts of practice, and nobody who had worked their socks off but failed to excel. Purposeful practice was the only factor distinguishing the best from the rest.”

So what are the implications of all of this for music, education and music-in-education? There are several. One implication on music performance is that this knowledge can help to nurture humble top performers. The knowledge that world-class expertise on an instrument is not the result of some innate talent but rather a product of countless hours of purposeful practice, often working in tandem with an early exposure to music that created a trajectory of development, can help to instill pride in top performers rather than a feeling of uniqueness. One of the most inspiring things I experience every so often is being in the presence of truly expert performers who are totally humble and unassuming in their personalities- this has a powerful musical effect as well.

Another implication is that we, as educators, should be able to teach complex skills (such as the learning of an instrument) more effectively now that we’re armed with the knowledge that it takes the brain about 10,000 hours to assimilate all of the necessary neural traces for expertise. It may be effective to explain to students the nature of how their brains create memory traces for the fine motor skills required to play an instrument, and that, with practice these traces become stronger and stronger, essentially becoming “wired” in them. Also, to be able to explain to students that expertise doesn’t happen overnight, and to reference the latest cognitive research on expertise, may help young students to gain a good perspective on things and avoid frustration when they expect to develop expertise more quickly than humanly possible.

Finally, an important implication for education in general is, in the words of Dr. Larry Scripp, “Teach every kid as if they’re talented.” In other words, don’t adjust expectations based on a preconceived notion of what students are and aren’t “talented,” because the latest science of expertise suggests that “talent” has far less to do with expertise than the aforementioned factors. Teach all students with the assumption that they will “get it,” because with enough determination, study and practice, chances are they will.

-Art Felluca