Special

"Where's the wacky quote, you know – the one that doesn't make sense until the end?"
A picture is worth a thousand words, friend.
"Well, guess that's better than reading three pages."
Ah, gentle reader. That is a good starting point.

Recently, whilst looking sideways at our topsy-turvy world of curricula, standards and rubrics, I found myself wandering in a HMV shop in sunny Staines. It could have been anywhere in the UK or possibly in the world. "How long will all of this last?", I thought to myself. I wandered the aisles through bins and racks labelled R & B, Urban, Metal, Classical, Feature Films, Televison Series, Box Sets and looking aimlessly at the row upon row of shiny and colourful compact discs and DVDs when my eye was caught by the bin labelled "Specialist Music".

I was struck by the irony. Each of the genres listed above could easily be thought of as specialist music. As soon as we divide music we create a speciality category don't we? Think of some of the the grand divisions; vocal-instrumental, orchestra-band, brass-woodwind. Each has its own sets of standards, techniques and qualities that are create the unique sound and appeal of that music. Compositional techniques differ. Ranges and articulations differ. As a composer and arranger I always try to look for tips from the music I perform - how did that composer or arranger solve their problems? I also get some great chuckles from editors (I hope) who persist in putting a crescendo over a whole note chord in a piano staff. I dutifully press harder as I hold the keys down, but it never gets any louder.

It was the Ps that got to me. The juxtaposition of Charlie Parker and Dolly Parton piqued my notoriously quirky sense of humour. It comes from the same place as the chuckle over the crescendo. In a world that categorises and subdivides music into ever smaller niches, who would have ever thought to look for Dolly and Bird in the same grouping? I didn't take the photo, but the sight in the Ds was also amusing - Miles Davis Kind of Blue next to John Denver's Greatest Hits - if only it had been his Christmas With The Muppets it would have been the perfect picture.

But as I sit writing, something troubles me about this. It could be argued that there was a more subtle grouping going on that would be worthy of a Dan Brown book. In the words of the immortal Rolf Harris, "Can you tell what it is yet?"

Of course you can. Our specialists were all masters of their art who found a way to express through vibrating air, feelings and emotions that were otherwise inexpressible. The common thread that they as well as every other artist in the shop possess is that whatever the style or genre, their music connects to peoples lives and touches them in some ineffable way. The sounds that they make accompany the lives of the listeners and make moments special. We celebrate life at every stage with music. Whether it is a baptism hymn, the music playing during that first kiss or the hymn sung at graveside, music shapes and colours our lives.

As we edge closer to the end of this school year, relish the special moments that will be marking mileposts in the lives of you, your students and their families.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

"We used to fool ourselves. We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find, and as a result of course, consumers won."

Edgar Bronfman, Warner Music
speaking at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress

Happy New Year! Here’s wishing you all the best and the happiest in the next twelve months. Many of you will have received or given holiday presents of portable music devices. A colleague who is a great jazz afficianado commented upon his return to the chalkface after the holidays that he only received one CD for Christmas this year - a record low. He was not sad, however, as in the stead of physical media he received over $100 in iTunes Gift Cards.

As mentioned previously, this is the age of the cloud. More and more services are available online and the push is on for a greater availability of the ubiquitous connection - 24/7 fast wireless access. The connection styles are multiplying as well: Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are being joined by Wi-Max and other emerging standards. Operating systems are becoming redundant.

One of the hottest selling items in the UK this autumn has been the netbook - a small (7” - 18cm) screen, Linux or Windows XP with Ethernet, Wireless and a small by today’s standards hard drive. They appeared on the market and sales of standard laptops dropped like stones. A few broadband providers saw a market and offered the netbooks free to anyone who took out a contract on the 3G mobile broadband network. Mobile broadband and a netbook for as low as £15 a month, 24 month minimum contract. Fits easily in a briefcase, a complete basic computer for managing E-mail, contacts, the Internet, office applications, photos and more.

Another hot seller has been the Apple iPhone. More expensive than the netbook, but fills a different niche. Unlimited data in the home country, access to Wi-Fi Hotspots, links to iTunes and a new Exchange like system for mail, contacts and calendars. Easy syncing of contacts and mail between computers using the service. Plus it is an iPod - plays back music and video - and has digital camera.. Small enough to fit in a pocket, manages E-mail, contacts, music, video, photos and the Internet.

In these changing economic times, the consumer is still king. If someone sees a market, they move in to fulfil the need. If they judge correctly, they win. The music industry is adapting to the times as well. Amazon now has a download store in most of its markets. They looked at the competition and found that there is a need for a one-click easy ordering system providing non-DRM music at a relatively high quality. Being wise, they decided not to set up their own system of interface to the wide variety of music players available. Instead, they offer a free application that links your computer to the store, then gives you the choice of automatically adding the tracks to your iTunes or Windows Media Player library.

As the year moves forward, you may think more and more about the music industry's journey and think of the journey music education has taken. Have we moved on with the times and are we offering the skills needed in the twenty first century? Already the industry is looking at netbooks as portable twenty four track recording studios and the iPhone as a portable four track recording studio. Our students expect technology to become smaller, have more features and cost less. As they experiment and play with the technology they find ways to use it to make as well as listen to music.

Don’t be afraid to practise using the technology you have as an everyday part of your classroom. Record rehearsals, video your singers, encourage student composition and perhaps have a technology recital that includes a laptop orchestra.

The future’s not ours to see, que será, será...

Rick Hein
rahein@mac.com

Lost In The Clouds

I've looked at clouds from both sides now.
From up and down, and still somehow.
It's cloud illusions I recall;
I really don't know clouds at all.

Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now

The circle is almost complete. Everything old is new again. In our 21st century western society, the network has become almost ubiquitous. Computing power and accessibility has moved so far along the curve propelled by Moore’s Law that we older persons occasionally forget how we lived “BC” - before computers.

The talk these days is of “the cloud”. This is the 21st century term for what we dinosaurs once called the Internet. Web 2.0 has moved services and applications from your desktops into “the cloud”. ThinkFree Office, Open Office, NeoOffice and GoogleTools all offer you the tools to create Microsoft Office compatible documents and the ability to access then over the network wherever you can reach the Internet. eMusic and the iTunes Store are virtual music, software and book stores. This trend points back to the ‘good/bad old days’ of your applications and data living on a server and you connect with a dumb terminal or thin client computer with little or no storage and limited processing power. All the heavy storage and processing is done on the server.

This model fell into disrepute during the development of the personal computer. In the personal computer model, applications and documents were stored locally. You had to buy software and install it on your floppy disk or eventually your hard drive. You can work wherever you are. No one else has control over your access to the processor. That’s right, the processor. In the early days of computing processing time on central mainframe computers was allocated and your job would be scheduled to be run by the administrator - usually a man in a white lab coat carrying a clipboard. Processors were expensive, as was memory and storage space. I recall the joy when I inherited a friend's old 5 MB serial ProFile drive. At last I could run a complete install of HyperCard! Eventually I could afford to bump up the computer’s memory to four MB. Then SCSI hard drives came down in price and I could purchase a fast 10 MB drive...and thus onto the slippery slope.

In a historical perpective, processors, RAM and storage essentially cost nothing today, so computer services are tending to use a variant on the old model. Herewith, three scenarios of the progression in contemporary Internet usage - from server to cloud. 


(Web 1.0) Our AMIS web site lives at a certain web address. Using FTP software on my computer I connect directly to that IP address of that server and modify the files stored on the server, downloading and uploading between the server and my personal computer, my personal computer doing all of the processing for editing and changing the files.

(Web 2.0)My Facebook page is addressed through a web site gateway and as I change it using the application living somewhere on the Facebook server farm appearing in the web browser running on my computer. That data is then updated on my “live page” on Facebook and instantly published.

(Web 2.5) I open my iPhone, snap a picture with my camera. I send it as an E-mail to Evernote and the optical character recognition application in the Evernote server recognises the text and indexes it. I then send the file to either my Flickr gallery, Facebook Gallery or MobileMe service and publish it using the web servers and applications of the respective firm. Or I could go all “old school” and E-mail it to my friends from my phone.

We don’t yet know what Web 3.0 will be. Somewhere, someone is working on it right now. All that we know for certain is that the computers used to access it will be smaller, faster, more powerful and less expensive than they were eighteen months ago.

Only the beginning

Somewhere
Inside something there is a rush of
Greatness
Who knows what stands in front of
Our lives
I fashion my future on films in space
Silence
Tells me secretly
Everything
Everything

James Rado & Gerome Ragni
“The Flesh Failures” from Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical

We start this year as we do every new year at the same place that every piece of music ever written or improvised begins: with an inhalation of breath in silence. All of our journeys lie before us. The ground before us is untrodden. The plough has yet to break the soil. In our ears and in the air around us are the reverberations of the past.

We may have a plan for our journey this year. Concepts, style, manner, repertoire and expectations are some of the things we bring to the door of our classrooms. Our students will return to school refreshed and changed from the students who left at the end of the previous year. Not only because of the transient nature of the international school. Our students are growing and changing daily and they certainly did not stop over the summer. How many times has your best treble boy singer left in June excited about the prospect of Middle School Honor Boy’s Choir and not returned in the autumn because the family has suddenly been transferred to a new city?

You have been changed over the summer as well. You have reflected on your season and made mental (or physical) notes about what to do differently. You may have taken part in a workshop or course that has radically revised your pedagogical approach. You may have explored, if you followed the advice in last year’s finale, new software and played your way into a new appreciation and understanding of technology or even a new instrument. Whilst we expect our rate of growth and change to be somewhat slower than out students, we are all still growing and changing.

One tip from the world of the technology is the excellent iTunes Store. It used to be the iTunes Music Store, but it has grown and expanded with the addition of movie and TV rentals and sales, the iPhone Applications Store, and iTunes U.

ITunes U is a companion to the wonder that is YouTube. The Observer recently ran a feature on the 50 Greatest Arts Videos On YouTube. http://tinyurl.com/5ru4uu Here is a teaser from their Jazz section - John Coltrane performs 'My Favourite Things', 1961; Billie Holiday sings 'Strange Fruit', 1959; Ella Fitzgerald duets with Dinah Shore, 1960s; Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie perform 'Hot House', 1952; Barbra Streisand on The Tonight Show with Jack Paar, 1961.

Fine art performances abound as well – Nureyev dancing The Nutcracker, Jack Kerouac reads from On The Road, accompanied by the jazz stylings of Steve Allen, Callas, Von Karajan, Bernstein. Follow the tinyurl link above and then start searching to compile your list of performances.

Back to iTunes U. I open iTunes (free ar http://www.apple.com/itunes/) and go to the iTunes Store. I click on iTunes U. At first glance I see Smithsonian Folkways Recordings for those looking for archive recordings of folk and world music. There are videos, discussions of music and technology and an outlined series of lesson plans using Smithsonian videos and music to introduce music of world cultures. I do a search for Jazz History in the iTunes store and find the NPR Podcasts. First few titles: Jimmy Smith: Organ Grinder Swing; Village Vanguard: A hallowed basement; Betty Carter: Fiercely Individual. How About Marin Alsop’s Clueless About Classical Music, also in the podcast area.

Best thing about these resources? They are free. Yes. Free.

Download iTunes, go to the iTunes Music Store, stock up your library of teaching resources for free. That should help fill your year with the colourful reverberations of happy voices and instruments.

Play To Learn and Grow

In a very short time technology has changed an entire generation’s behavior radically, and it behooves all of us who are not from that generation but whose daily life involves interaction with them, such as parents and teachers, to learn as much as we can about the new behaviors.

(If you are someone who doesn’t think behavior can change that fast around technology, try to think back to how quickly, when telephone answering machines first appeared, the norm went from “It’s rude to have an answering machine” to “It’s rude NOT to have an answering machine.)

Marc Prensky
The Emerging Online Life of the Digital Native 3

Many of us are reminded daily that we are strangers in a strange land. We approach the field of play in the classroom from a different direction than our students. What is normal to us is quaint to them; what is normal to them is unknown to us. Luckily for us, we have a weapon that many of our colleagues in other disciplines lack: our work as performing musicians has a strong collaborative element to it. We ask our students to work together, share, criticise themselves and their peers and synchronise sounds created by various anatomic or mechanical means to achieve a collaborative result. The group can achieve what the individual cannot.

Likewise we have a strong individual component to our subject where there are levels of performance - benchmarks for want of a better word - against which performers can measure their technical and artistic prowess as they progress in their studies. There are competitions, festivals, master classes and more where students perform for a "master teacher" and are critiqued and helped to work through problems that may be holding them back in the advancement of their studies.

Or discipline also contains the "experimental" branch where an individual sets themselves against the task of transcribing what they hear in their head to paper, or analog waves or bits. Tonalities, tunings, harmonies, melodies; combinations of instruments. voices and, well, who knows what in order to create "in the air" what previously only existed in their imagination.

How lucky we are in this digital age, that many of the tools of our trade have become ubiquitous objects in the household and school environment! Our digital native students can't imagine not being able to use a sequencer with realistic sampled sounds to program a piece of music. Creating music tracks and burning CDs, editing and creating DVDs, stop-motion animation - all with edited original soundtracks or mixes and mash-ups of their favourite music. They think nothing of creating formulae in spreadsheets to simplify their calculations and explore "if, then" questions. Digital images, instant messaging, blogging, Facebook, MySpace, Meebo, Twitter are the ways that they communicate. The mobile phone that we digital immigrants struggle with, is the everyday tool of choice for the digital native: camera, SMS, for starters and the more advanced phones include GPS, radio, Internet browser and access to the normal "office" style applications. We digital immigrants buy CDs - our digital natives download, usually from a Peer-to-Peer source or a Torrent that is outside the normal legitimate channel of distribution that the record companies have created.

We ask them to record reflections and progress on worksheets: they would prefer to have a wiki where the entire group can reflect and interact as well as individuals have individual pages where they can "soliliquise" and accept comments from their friends. Our concerts are posted on YouTube and the performing groups organise sites on Facebook. I am inspired by my fellow teachers who have taken the first steps into social networking and used Facebook to organise reunions and school celebrations. I am also inspired by, and more than a little envious of, my colleagues who tell me that the audition materials we supply are posted on their school provided web sites and the students download them, record the audition, evaluate their own performance and submit their best efforts back to their teacher via E-mail or the department shared space.

What is the end of year message in al of this? Ah, grasshopper. As the spring turns into summer and we begin to de-compress and re-create, all of us digital immigrants need to take a little step out of our comfort zone and explore some of the technology around us. If you have an interactive whiteboard, prepare a set of flipcharts for a favourite lesson. If you don't have an interactive whiteboard but have a projector or beamer in your room, prepare some PowerPoint or Keynote presentations of a lesson that you teach. Explore that mobile phone. Grab the digital camera and take a photo essay of your your holiday and use one of the free or inexpensive photo editing tools or web sites such as Picasa or Flickr to share your images with your friends, family and the world. Open up that copy of Garageband, Acid Pro, Cubase, Sibelius, Finale or whatever new music tool you have and play. That's right. Play. Arrange a song, write the Romantic Composer Rap, score that arrangement that you've always heard in the the back of your head.

Enjoy exploring the technology and enjoy some of the "new ways" of approaching our subject.

Hope is the thing with feathers

Why is Alice called Alice?
This is one of my favorite questions. It always lets me know the question asker is thinking in the correct direction. After all, the ability to name something is a tremendous power, and in this case, there's a terrific reason.

Alice pays homage to Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Carroll was a mathematician, novelist, and photographer. Most important, he could do intellectually difficult things but also realized the most powerful thing was to be able to communicate clearly and in an entertaining way. This inspires our efforts to make something as complex as computer programming easy and fun.

Randy Pausch, answering "Why is Alice called Alice?"

Many of you devoted readers know my affection for the work of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and that his characters feature quite regularly in the jumping-off points for these missives. The whimsy and surprising logic of his world never ceases to amaze and enchant me. The software he is describing, Alice is a piece of free software that is a 3-D, graphics based computer programming tool. Bear with me, technophobes. It seems that in this day and age of everything computer, there is a significant drop in students enrolling in computer science courses in universities. Apparently the students are put off by rigourous courses that require hours of practise at a keyboard and a strict dedication to syntax and coherent expression of creative vision arising from the simplest of materials. To many of us, it sounds like the courses you had to take featuring the work of Palestrina and his 16th century polyphonic colleagues, and it is similar in many ways.

Alice was developed to offer a visual form of computer programming where it was impossible to create syntax errors in programming and to produce an engaging product. Many of you will remember the glory days of computer education for teachers when we were all expected to learn to program in order to use a computer and the lack of a bracket or semicolon would send your precious programme which printed a line of text or moved a coloured square across the screen into a tailspin. Alice uses the metaphors of story telling or creation of an interactive world to teach programming concepts. This is in some ways related to the visual programming now available in the music world in programmes such as Garage Band, Reason and other loop based compositional tools. You music tech historians may also remember the visual programming language Max.

It is not this programming language, but rather one of the men behind it that is the real focus of this article. You may recognise the name of the quotee - Randy Pausch. He has been featured heavily on the Internet and on the Carnegie Mellon University web site. You may of heard of him in conjunction the phrase "The Last Lecture". This refers to a tradition where a retiring or dying professor presents his final lecture and is feted by the academic community where he has toiled. Randy Pausch is a very young man who has delivered his last lecture - he is in the final stages of pancreatic cancer and has only been given months to live. He chose not to give a momento mori complete with the spectre of the grinning skull looming in the background in the background. He gave us a gift, what I would like to call a a momento spero - a remembrance of hope entitled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

He begins by telling us what he won't be speaking about - cancer, his wife and children, religion. He does, however admit a deathbed conversion: he bought a Macintosh. His theme speaks of the things that probably brought many of us into the teaching profession. He talks of facing brick walls, of being honest, of doing good things, and of love. He tells of the people who he met who believed in him and who helped him get over the brick walls he found in trying to achieve his dreams. Many would say that as teachers, helping achieve dreams is a part of our daily life. We've seen success and failures: we've seen brick walls fall as well as stand resolutely despite the best efforts of all concerned. I can not really do justice to any of the themes or ideas he brings to the speech – the transcript of the talk runs to twenty-six A4 pages, Nor do I want to give away any more of his illustrations, other than this one as it applies to us who work at bringing music into the lives of others:

And I think that that’s one of the best things you can give somebody – the chance to show them what it feels like to make other people get excited and happy. I mean that’s a tremendous gift.

Please look him up on Google, YouTube or via the Carnegie Mellon web site and watch and learn from his lecture.