I wanted to impart some knowledge I gained from my experiences in Larry Scripp’s Graduate Seminar class this week. After having time to reflect and create a descriptive review of the videos posted last week, we (as a class) watched the videos, and came up with some pretty interesting discoveries.

In live performance, it was agreed upon by the class that Shanshan’s clarinet playing was much too quiet to balance Vito’s voice. However, the balance was the opposite in the video; we could barely hear Vito’s recitation. This brought in the question, “How were we measuring balance to begin with in the live performance?” I believe that we could take in the whole picture when it was live, meaning that we were determining balance between not only the sounds and their volumes, but by the actions/gestures as well. Vito was simply more animated in person, which contributed to him sounding louder. In viewing the video, however, one is unable to control what or whom they are looking at, so it then falls into the hands of the cinemitographer. This third person now has complete control of how the live performance is being presented whether he/she knows it or not!

These elements came up in class, because after watching the videos, we were all left with a hollowed feeling of what we experienced live. So, we wanted to understand why that happened.

Here’s a challenge: View the first two videos. Try to imagine, if you can, seeing this performance live and then seeing the video. What are your observations? Also, since you probably did not see the performance live, try to describe how a live performance might take away from your first experience… Enjoy.

-Brynn

Brynn Rector is a graduate trumpet performance major at New England Conservatory, and Research Assistant for the Center for Music-in-Education.

From the Journal for Music-in-Education:

This first section of the Journal for Music-in-Education tells the stories of several musical artists at different points in their careers: a promising young composer, a celebrated concert pianist, an extensively recorded improvisation artist, and a recent conservatory graduate embarking on a career in world music.

These portraits are not intended to foreground the impressive trajectory of their musical accomplishments, but rather to draw out a clearer understanding of how a life in music can be defined by the deep yearning to learn, teach, serve, and connect with others. These portraits show—in the words of the artists themselves and in commentary from their mentors and peers—that musical endeavors take on greater depth through a broad range of social encounters, role modeling, reflective thinking, and community involvement, all of which are becoming better understood as essential to the successful education of the performing artist in society today.

Thus, the enterprise of learning music for the highly trained artist, as represented in these chapters, takes on a particular significance as a “transformative”model for public school education. Time-lapse documentation of Julia Carey’s childhood notations presents an intriguing mosaic of how children’s understanding of music evolves over time. Yet her simultaneously expanding interests in academic excellence and role modeling through community engagement provide the larger picture of a musician preparing herself for rich and mutually satisfying connections to people and thus for meaningful contributions to society itself. Lorin Hollander’s precocious sense of music’s interdisciplinary association with physics,literature,and psychology and his depiction of personal transformation through mentorship can help educators appreciate the potential contributions of musical understanding to young children’s cognitive, aesthetic, and social-emotional wellness and to the solution of systemic social problems, such as the disillusionment ofour youth,cultural intolerance, or violence in our schools and among nations.

The divergent roles musicians play in society is also emphasized in the reflections by Michael Cain and Randy Wong. Both provide extensive detail of their experiences sidestepping their early classical training and choosing to “take delight”in exploring other forms of musical genre and culture. Here again, the evolving models of musicians and music in education are seen from the perspective of how engagement in ensemble improvisation and world music outside the conventions of classical traditions can support our youth, who yearn to connect contemporary modes and media of self-expression to our changing society,as Mr.Cainputs it,“around the world and around the block.”

• Download JMIE 2007, Part I. Yearning to Connect: The Enterprise of Music and Learning [2 MB, .pdf]

“What are the purposes for having artifacts in portfolios? What is the purpose of the portfolio itself?”

Sometimes the obvious answer to a question isn’t the most open-ended response. These questions are just two of many ‘questions of purpose’ raised yesterday in conversation from yesterday’s session of “Music as a Fundamental Medium and Model for Arts and Arts Integrated Teaching and Learning: A Portfolio-based Professional Development Seminar,” which is being taught by Larry Scripp at the Harvard Graduate School of Education this Spring.

The response that I think is most fitting to these questions is one that Larry posed: that ‘we’ (the portfolio’s audience) don’t know what those purposes are yet; at least, not until the portfolio’s author has developed his/her persona and inquiry questions.

Larry’s answer soundly resonated with me, not only because of its open-endedness, but also because it reminded me how much the portfolio process helps to initiate personal growth, in tandem with professional growth. In my article, “Portfolio Documentation in Context” (which will be published in the Journal for Music-in-Education 2007, I write that

Portfolios . . . cannot exist in a vacuum. There must be a community of like-minded individuals who can appreciate the work of the student or professional. Without a supportive environment of peers, mentors, and teachers, the reasons behind portfolio documentation and assessment would be lost on our students.

On an explicit level, this language refers to the Music-in-Education community at the Conservatory and in the MIENC. But on an implicit level, what I am implying is that there is a certain amount of personal investment, commitment, and exploration that must take place when undertaking a project like that of portfolios.

Imagine your portfolio as your work, in dialogue: In conversation with people who know you, and people who don’t.
(Larry Scripp, class lecture, 2/26/07)

My response to Larry comes in the form of the ‘obvious’ questions: How does one engage in constructive dialog with unknown others? What forms can that dialog take?

In order to answer these questions, I must first define for myself who I am.

I can already see that I have multiple roles in the seminar: as a co-teacher with Larry, a mentor from the field of Music-in-Education, and as an active participant in class. Each of these roles translates to a slightly more developed persona, from which I will develop my own portfolio.

These personae are as follows:

• HGSE alum as a module participant and mentor (since I did the Arts In Education program at HGSE –and took Larry’s course then– and am now working as a professional in the field of Music-in-Education);
• Higher-Ed administrator, evaluating my own college’s curriculum (which happens to be a MIE program), and re-imagining the workforce
  (both as music professionals and professional teachers) with Artist-Teacher-Scholars being developed by my MIE program;
• A professional Artist-Teacher-Scholar, crafting my own professional development workshop with themes from this module, and experiences as program evaluator and Information Architect for the MIE National Consortium

A portfolio crafted for each persona could have remarkably different artifacts. I could choose which readings I do for the course based on which articles are more relevant towards my work. For example, Arnie Aprill’s article “Rules for Arts Ed Radicals” might be more applicable to the Higher-Ed or Professional A-T-S profiles, while Gail Burnaford’s “Crossing Boundaries: The Role of Higher Education in Professional Development with Arts Partnerships” might apply to all three. Presumably, more useful readings for the A-T-S persona would be found in the first issue of the Journal for Learning Through Music, because that Journal’s focus has very specific examples of music integrated curricula, whereas the second issue is more philosophical. (Although, it would depend on what sort of professional development seminar I’d be thinking of creating).

Thinking about my portfolio as a conversational view of emergent practices is helpful, not only because of the fluidity it lends towards the collection of documentation, but also because it forces me to always be mindful of the role that context plays in displaying and communicating information. Merriam-Webster defines conversation as “an exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas,” and I think that definition assumes that the parties involved have some sort of mutual understanding of those sentiments. So, in terms of the creation of my portfolio, this means to me that any artifact that I include should only be included if it helps to satisfy the way that I can help others to mutually understand what it is that I’m trying to convey. Melody Marchman, a student in Scripp’s “Graduate Seminar in Music-in-Education” (taught at NEC as the Conservatory’s parallel to the HGSE module), said it best when she paraphrased minimalist composer Phillip Glass:

You don’t truly know yourself until you can see yourself objectively.

Regardless of which persona I choose to focus my efforts toward, I believe that by contributing to the HGSE module (in the aforementioned roles/personae), and by creating portfolios to showcase various aspects of my work at New England Conservatory and the MIENC, I will be exploring an emergent world: that of professional development geared towards Artist-Teacher-Scholars.

-Randy

Randy Wong is Program Coordinator for the Center for Music-in-Education and Information Architect for the Music-in-Education National Consortium.

In the world of education, there are numerous methods and styles of teaching. Those involved with the Music-in-Education department here at New England Conservatory believe that music can be used to heighten a student’s learning of other subjects, such as mathematics and language arts. We call this method integration.

In Larry Scripp’s Graduate Music in Education Seminar last week, one student presented her idea of a lesson plan combining music and literature. Shanshan’s lesson plan involved reading a children’s story along with music, while recording the students’ reactions. Then, reading the same story without music, and comparing those reactions to reactions from the first. Keep in mind that the narrator had never seen the story before.

The first time through, Shanshan played clarinet in duet with Vito’s narration. As music students, it was obvious to us that some, if not all, of the music was taken from preexistent sources. Professor Scripp then introduced the class to an amazing method of observation called “Descriptive Review.” The first step in “descriptive review” is to only take note of what you see, without attaching a judgment to it. This step was very difficult for the class, since we were not allowed to follow one train of thought through to the end. However, it did provide us with unbiased observations, which in the end can prove to be of more use.

The next step is to ask all of the questions of which you would like to know the answers. In the same vein as the first step, we were only allowed to ask questions and were not given the answers to them. This initially left us frustrated, but eventually led us to more creative questions once we got past the obvious ones.

The Descriptive Review experience was such an eye-opening one that I wanted to share it with you. Check out the video. . . Perhaps attempt your own Descriptive Review?

This post is intended to solicit some feedback for a thought that has been occurring to me while participating in Paul Burdick’s MIE course, “Performing Artists in Community Outreach.” Throughout the first three weeks of class I have become familiar with various definitions of what a ‘community’ is, but couldn’t help but notice that when one uses the term ‘outreach,’ it often only refers to select/few types of communities. These are primarily for schools and assisted living centers.

To me there are many reasons for this. For example, I can see these two types of communities as gaining the most enrichment from an outreach program, especially that of music. There is no doubt that lives are enhanced by what a performing artist can do in these venues. Beyond that I also see a need for outreach within these institutions. Schools need people to come in from the outside world to display an infinite amount of things that prove invaluable to students. Assisted living centers need our performances to among many other things provide an escape from the everyday. This is by no means an exhaustive list of what we as performing artists can and of course actually do at these facilities, but what about the other communities?

Most of the people on this planet are not in grade schools nor are they in assisted living centers? Do these people in the long mid-roads of their life not need enrichment and outreach the same way as our young and our elderly? Can they not benefit all the same or perhaps even more? Is there some way we can bring outreach to other communities, more regular communities, communities we have yet to think of? Yet to penetrate?

What do you think?

-Andy

Andy Stetson is an undergraduate trumpet performance major in his senior year at NEC. As an MIE Concentration student, Andy was the lead organizer for the 2006 Music-in-Education National Consortium conference held at NEC, and has written an article titled “Hands Across The Americas: Experiencing the Transformative Power of Music in Venezuela,” which will be published in the Inaugural Issue of the Journal for Music-in-Education, 2007.

Laura Umbro’s portfolio exhibits are excerpts from her Music-in-Education Cumulative Portfolio required for earning the MIE Concentration from New England Conservatory as a Performance major. Her portfolio was given exemplary portfolio status because of its thorough documenation of her work and its relevance to the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards of portfolio content coded into NEC’s digital portfolio assessment system.

These portfolio excerpts will be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal for Music-In-Education, and are being featured here in our first installment of the MIE Portfolio Showcase.

–Randy Wong,
MIE Program Coordinator

During these past few weeks I’ve noticed an underlying theme in my MIE experiences. I didn’t recognize its significance at first, but I really think this might be a thread worth exploring. My first introduction to the idea came when I brought a piece from my repertoire to Larry’s Solfege for Singers class. The piece, Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Sea Eagle” for solo horn, is truly intimidating. Take a look at this excerpt from the first movement. How am I supposed to tackle this thing? Larry suggested all the standards; practice the syllables with no rhythm, practice the syllables in rhythm, and the like. Then he suggested that I practice singing it and then playing it with no accidentals. At first, I thought that was pretty pointless. Of course I could do it without accidentals! It’s the accidentals that make it so hard. Wouldn’t that eliminate the whole context, the point of the piece?

But then, Larry went on a related tangent in our MIE Intro class of 11/7. Paraphrasing, he said that if you can improvise in the context or style of a piece of music you will have a greater knowledge of that piece. If not, perhaps you have only a didactic understanding, such that any performance is either right or wrong, follows the rules or doesn’t. But instead, consider other pathways of inquiry that can give dimension to a performance. And indeed, in Solfege we recently improvised in the style of Palestrina, finding that it actually made singing Palestrina easier. How fascinating, that changing something and intentionally performing it wrong, altering the decisions the composer made, could make the written piece easier!

And in fact, we spent the entirety of today’s Intro to MIE class proving that point. One of our recent assignments was to learn Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music.” (Score excerpted here.) We were charged with recording it twice, once as written and once with a different technique. Some people played the piece on pitched water glasses, other people sang the parts with two voices sounding a third apart, and so on. These multiple representations of the same piece colored our understanding of the piece. Today we broke it down even farther, performing it with two drum circles and solo gong. One circle played only beat 1 of each grouping, the other circle played beat 2, and the gong player intoned the only beat 3 in the measure. It was really difficult to stay together, especially then when one group or the other moved to the second measure and the parts were no longer in sync. But this greater understanding of the piece made it easier then when the drum circles played the parts as written, moving forward measure by measure and switching parts within each measure on command. Each new representation of the piece, each variation gave the class a greater understanding of the piece, such that our performance and our interpretation were much more convincing and informed.

I asked Larry after class about how this all relates to my Peter Maxwell Davies piece, and his comment was that we need to make our unplayable pieces playable quickly to begin working on them. Whatever route takes you to that point is a good one. So whether it be an exercise to make an unplayable piece easier so that some day I might perform it as written, or to make a tricky piece harder in practice so the performance is improved, consider this path of education in your own music. What we do can have so much more life than right or wrong.

-Kristen

Kristen Dirmeier is a graduate horn performance major. She has served as a  Teaching Assistant for Larry Scripp’s “Introduction to Music-in-Education” course, and currently works in the MIE Research Center as a Documentation Specialist and Portfolio Archivst-Analyst.