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.

Hello,

Last week in the Brain class, Professor Davidson did some ‘show and tell’ about what he had discovered about the brain through reading. He brought in almost 30 books that discussed different elements of the brain. We are currently working on developing our own projects that will be completed by the end of the semester. So, Professor Davidson wanted to give us the opportunity to see all the different topics we could explore further. And that many people are just as fascinated by the brain as we are. Here is the list of the books:

• Transforming Stress – Doc Childre, Deborah Rozman
• A Celebration of Neurons – Robert Sylwester
• The Scientific American Book of the Brain – Antonio Damasio
• Introduction to the Musical Brain – Don G. Campbell
• Change Your Brain Change Your Life – Daniel G. Amen
• Music and Memory – Bob Snyder
• The Feeling of What Happens – Antonio Damasio
• Descartes’ Error – Antonio Damasio
• The Emotional Brain – Joseph LeDoux
• Searching for Memory - Daniel L. Schacter
• Magic Trees of the Mind – Marian Diamond, Janet Hobson
• A Mind at a Time – Mel Levine
• Memory Slips – Linda Katherine Cutting
• The 3-Pound Universe – Judith Hooper, Dick Teresi
• The Biology of Transcendence – Joseph Chilton Pearce
• Minds, Brains, and Learning – James Byrnes
• Teaching with the Brain in Mind – Eric Jensen
• The Right Mind – Robert Ornstein
• Inside the Brain – Ronald Kotulak
• Brain-Based Strategies to Reach Every Learner – Diane Connell
• Learning and Memory: The Brain in Action – Marilee Sprenger
• The Mind and the Brain – Schwartz, Begley
• Brain Lock – Schwartz, Beyette
• Music, Mind, & Brain – Clynes
• Neuroscience: Fundamentals for Rehabilitation – Laurie Lundy-Ekman
• Left Brain Right Brain – Springer, Deutsch
• The High-Performance Mind - Wise
• The Seven Sins of Memory – Daniel L. Schacter

~Brynn

Brynn Rector is a first year graduate student studying trumpet performance. She is currently the Teaching Assistant for Larry Scripp’s “Graduate Seminar for Music-in-Education,” and is conducting a Guided Internship in the MIE Research Center on music and brain development.

It became apparent to me the first day of class here at NEC that everything I have learned up until now is directly linked to what lies ahead in my career. I was sitting in Lyle Davidson’s class on the brain, and I realized that my life path is completely up to me. I came to understand that the only boundaries are the ones I set, myself. Therefore, anything is possible! Now that I have been in the brain class for a number of weeks, I really see the connection between what I strive to accomplish everyday, and what parts of my brain are helping me to do so. There is a very real correlation between mind, body, and spirit that I feel has become a bit cliche in the media. When one looks deep within themselves, they can honestly realize that it is essential to keep these three elements of life healthy.

As a performer and music maker, I feel that certain parts of my brain are working harder than they might in an accountant, or a lawyer. This got me thinking about what makes people happy. I know that a large part of my mental power goes to the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, since making music is a very emotional experience for me. But my question is, does the lawyer also receive emotional stimulation through his work? Does the accountant? It is hard for me to see the same emotional pleasure in these fields. So, then the question becomes, what do the accountant and the lawyer have in their lives to stimulate their emotional centers?

~Brynn

Brynn Rector is a first year graduate student studying trumpet performance. She is currently the Teaching Assistant for Larry Scripp’s “Graduate Seminar for Music-in-Education,” and is conducting a Guided Internship in the MIE Research Center on music and brain development.

Lyle Davidson has done something really remarkable this semester in structuring his “Music, Learning and the Brain” class (informally referred to around here as “the brain class”). For the first part of our class, we’ve been studying John Ratey’s lucid book “A User’s Guide to the Brain” (2001).

We took the first five class meetings to engage with this text in an in-depth way. Our class discussions focused on outlining and clairifying our understanding of this material, everything from flow charts about brain functions to creating clay models of the brain to build fluency with its contituant parts. The text is a terrific and engaging book which communicates the new picture we’re developing about the brain and how it works in non-jargon terms and with very approachable stories and metaphors. The most profound thing that I can state simply from our study is that viewing the brain in the old way, like a machine that simply works correctly or doesn’t, is very outdated and we would be more effective to look at the brain like a colony of organisms (neurons) that is growing, evolving, and reshaping itself in response to stimulus every single day of our lives, from conception to death. Therefore, in a very physical way, education is “changing our brains” and there are much fewer limits on what we can do with our brain than we usually imagine.

However, unlike most science-based course which I’ve participated in, we’re not going to continue in this detailed text-based course of study, and the semester’s learning will not be assessed by either in-line or end-of-semester examinations on the material. Instead, both the remainder of the class and the methods by which we are assessed will be something very different. We spent yesterday’s class brainstorming how we could create a new direction or new modality for the class. In this new mode we break off as individuals and small groups to do our own research, readings, projects, documentation, and learning in “applied topics” which connect what we have been studying to areas that we are excited about. These applied topics — which range from how the brain reacts to our diet to how to use a new understanding of our brains to re-think pedagogical topics to how we can understand the brain’s role in the social aspects of music — are chosen based on the direct personal interest and connection that each classmember has with them.

In structuring the course in this way — 1) An initial burst of intensive study and more traditional academic study with a common text and fast assimilation of new material, 2) a pivot node where the established learning strands come together in a brainstorming session, 3) and explosion of new, individualized veins of application and discussion which are based on our common reference of the text we’ve studied, and 4) a final culmination of our explorations in which our research, work, and portfolios are presented — Mr. Davidson has created at way to present a science-based topic in an engaging manner through it’s direct personal application.

I am thoroughly enjoying the course and I find the topic to be of immense interest. I’m excited to see how our brainstorming session results in a multi-threaded discussion in which topics that we are passionate about related to the material are explored and discussed.

This experience begs a natural inquiry question: We are familiar with some of the most standard academic classroom study/assessment arcs from having experienced them over and over. If this is an innovative model for structuring a class, what other innovative structures are there out there?

–Fred

Fred Sienkiewicz
(fred at sienkiewicz.org)

Larry Scripp’s Intro to Music-in-Education class is an obvious forum for exposing students to the various aspects of teaching, but a closer look shows that not only do we hear about these methods through Larry’s teaching, we also experience them in the way he teaches us, and we experiment with them by teaching our own lessons in front of the class.

In these past two weeks we have been using different colored plastic cups to represent either rhythm or pitch, and creating impromptu performances led by members of the class. Follow the link at the bottom of the article to see Alex Powell directing the class in a pitch exercise. He assigned a pitch to the first cup, and assigned the second scale degree to the second cup. When he pointed to the third, we deduced that it would mean to sing the third scale degree. The confusion came when he assigned scale degree 5 to the fourth cup, and then directed us to sing back down the row. We mistakenly sang scale degree 4 instead of 3 for the third cup. Alex made us aware of our mistake, and we corrected ourselves. In a later discussion, Larry showed how Alex might have corrected our confusion by starting from the first cup and ascending to verify the correct scale degree on the third cup. I think this was a most valuable lesson – that it’s better to allow students to correct their mistake by verification, rather than simply telling them they’re wrong or correcting the mistake for them.

-Kristen

This semester, I am fortunate enough to be taking Lyle Davidson’s class about the brain, and how we as individuals (and musicians) learn. In class, we are able to carry on great class discussions about individual interests in the brain. I have found that in my day to day life, I’ve been able to apply almost everything I learn to my music. For example, a few weeks ago we discussed the value of rewards in daily life. I find that as a musician, not to mention a perfectionist, I tend to cut myself short of rewards. This is because I never think I’ve met my goals. Of course this is far from true. I simply move my goals further away (many times subconsciously), so I feel that I always have more to do. Now that I’ve realized this, I feel that I can properly reward myself after accomplishing a daily goal. In fact, I really enjoyed a comment that a student made in class. She said that when she was practicing a difficult passage, she would line up a row of M&M’s. Whenever she would correctly play the section, she would allow herself to eat one M&M. I think I will have to try that next time.

-Brynn

We have currently had 6 classes and in these classes we have discussed everything from poetry to the average attention span of a 3rd grader. I found that I have the attention span of a 5th grader at times, especially when this class meets at thursday between 4 and 6. This past week we took a field trip to the South End Settlements, it is an old building that houses a pre-school program, before and after school program and a community arts center. In December our class will be performing for the after school program and we went to check out the performance space and the types of activities that occur there. While there we had to oppurtunity to watch an African Dance Class, where the emphasis was not perfection but movement and enjoyment. It gave the kids time to figure out what they were doing with gental instruction. We then walked through two classrooms where math and reading were being taught. Each group was no more than 10 students with 2 teachers/tutors. We learned the basics of how an after-school program is run, and was given time to look around the all purpose room. The last stop on our tour was the art center located next door. Inside we found the youngest group that the afterschool program has. They were finishing their pumpkin patch mural by cutting out silver stars and rocket ships. Our trip ended with some time of reflection where the class talked about the size of the program and how it was run. This trip was interesting and I am looking to discuss it further in class on thursday.

-Maggie