1. Get my students at FAMS blogging. I have created a new blog for my students at FAMS where they will post critiques to musical compositions representing various periods of music history. I am looking forward to seeing how blogging works with middle school students.
2. Get my students at TC blogging. I have created a new blog for students enrolled in my Int/Adv Technologies as an alternative to the Discussion Board feature of ClassWeb that we usually use. Each student will create their own blog to post their thoughts about music technology and music education.
3. Continue my daily blogging. I find the process of blogging on a daily basis very therapeutic - both mentally and professionally. Setting time aside each day to think about what I am actually doing, as well as the direction that music technology is taking, is a very rewarding experience.
4. Get my Copyright Book for TI:ME finished.
5. Spend more time with my family.
6. Get my computer repaired -finally.
7. Read more fiction.
8. Exercise - a little.
9. Stress less.
10. Lose the holiday weight.

Now that I have posted my New Year’s Resolutions in a public forum, hopefully I will be more likely to keep them. Resolutions #1 - 5 are very important to me, and I have no intention of breaking them. Resolutions #6 - 10 are on the list every year. Maybe this year I’ll keep them. Wish me luck!

I wish you a very happy & healthy 2007!

Feel like getting into the Christmas spirit in that music technology sort of way? Look no further. Garritan Software - the maker of high-quality sampled sounds that can be used with Sibelius and Finale - has a terrific little website set up that contains some pretty cool arrangements of Christmas carols that are realized with the sounds from their sample library. I have to say that I am a big fan of the Garritan sounds and the renditions of the Christmas carols are very well done. Downloading the carols is free, and there is even cover art and liner notes available for free download as well. Merry Christmas! I’ll be back blogging in the new year!

Creative Commons is a wonderful organization founded by one of my favorite authors, Lawrence Lessig. The purpose of the organization is to give artists and authors an alternative to current copyright law and the draconian restrictions to creativity that it often causes. For the past four years musicians, authors, websites, and blog writers have been licensing their work with a Creative Commons license. This license allows others to share the work with others - including the rights to copy, perform, display, and distribute the work - while attributing the work to the original author. My own personal website and many others attach the CC logo to their site. As educators, I firmly believe that we should share our knowledge with each other for the common good of the students. In addition to their work with copyright and licensing, Creative Commons is a center for materials that you can use for your own works. With sections of the site like CC Mixter, Open Courseware, and the Commons, users can find all types of media for non-commercial uses.

As with any other not-for-profit organization, Creative Commons relies heavily on the donations of it’s supporters. This holiday season I am continuing my support of this wonderful organization, an I urge you to consider donating as well. To support the work of Creative Commons, click HERE.

Have a happy, healthy and creative holiday season!

The New York Philharmonic has hosted a wonderful website geared toward children for many years now. Called Kidzone, the site has a number of sections that your students - I recommend grades 3 through 8 - will thoroughly enjoy. These sections include the Game Room, the Instrument Storage Room, the Dressing Rooms, the Instrument Lab, the Musicians’ Lounge, the Composition Workshop, the Composers’ Gallery, and the Newsstand. There are a wide variety of things that students can do in these rooms, but my personal favorite is the Composition Workshop. Once you enter the room, you are presented with two options, the Minuet Mixer and the Orchestration Station. The Orchestration Station allows students to re-orchestrate Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and then compare their version to the original orchestration by Ravel.

The Minuet Mixer is a very clever piece of software that allows students to create their own 16 measure minuets in the style of Mozart. The interface presents the students with 8 tiles, each one containing a one measure phrase. The students can drag one of these tiles into the score. Once doing so, the tiles change immediately so that they will work harmonically with the previously chosen tile. The students continue selecting tiles until they have filled in all 16 measures. Once complete, the students can play back their minuets - it’s really pretty cool. There is also a free compose option that allows users to make the choices of which tiles to choose on their own - without the aid of the software. You will need to have Shockwave installed to run the site. I strongly recommend you try this site out with your students.

I welcome your comments and suggestions.

I often read online newspapers from around the world in search of an unbiased look at world events. This morning, as I was looking the London newspaper The Guardian, I came across an article about an educational technology event that will be happening this January in London called the BETT Show. Each year at the BETT Show, educators gather for a look at the latest releases in educational technology and the article, entitled Roll Up, roll up! The Circus is in Town. spoke mainly about music technology. Of the new resources listed, I checked out an online composition site called Numu, and I was immediately impressed. The site is a center for new music composed by students. Unlike the Vermont MIDI Project however, the music on Numu is primarily pop-oriented - a place for new bands to get their music heard. The site is extremely well put together and features many different songs from a wide variety of genres - everything from alternative rock to pantomimes. There are top-ten lists, links to other websites that deal with music - including Sound Junction and Music Manifesto. The subtitle of the NUMU website is The Future of Music. I believe they are right on the money.
With Numu, students have an opportunity similar to blogs and websites like MySpace - they can create their own music and have a safe place (that’s also pretty hip) to showcase it. It will be interesting to see the direction Numu takes these students. It would be great to see a similar site here in the States.

I welcome your comments and suggestions.

I was listening to WNYC’s Radio Lab last month and I heard a program on Musical Language. There was a story about David Cope and his Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI). Composer David Cope has been synonymous with electronic music from it’s inception. One of his experiments was designing a piece of software that uses J.S. Bach voice leading principles to compose 4-part chorales - completely on it’s own. Cope has posted 5,000 of these compositions on his EMI website. You can download these files as MP3s and listen to them for yourself. To download these files, click HERE. While certainly not Bach, they are functional chorales and they can lead to some interesting debates as to whether EMI creations are “music”. Here are some questions you might ask your students, or yourself.

Can computers make music?

What implications does EMI have on the art of composition?

Is EMI something we should embrace or fear as music educators?

Do you see software like this one day replacing “real” composers?

I welcome your comments and suggestions.

In addition to my position at the Franklin Avenue Middle School, this year I have taken a position as the jazz ensemble director at the Indian Hills High School in Oakland, NJ. We are playing a number of funk songs as well as some jazz standards, most of which my students have never heard of. In an effort to provide the students in the ensemble with listening examples of each tune, I created an iMix on iTunes for my students. It’s a great way to provide the students with free clips of the songs which they have the option of purchasing if they desire. Here’ how to do it:

Step One: Log on to iTunes.

Step Two: Create a playlist of all of the tunes you’d like to include in your iMix.

Step Three: If you own the track already, simply drag the track into the playlist. If you do not own the track, you can log on to the iTunes Music Store and drag the desired track into the playlist.

Step Four: Click on your playlist - you’ll see an arrow pointing to the right next to the name of your playlist. Click on the arrow. Then click create iMix. You’ll then need to log into your iTunes account.

Step Five: Name your iMix, create a description, and click publish. You’re finished!

Your students can access your iMix by logging on to the iTunes Music Store and searching the iMixes for your given title. My iMix this year is called simply: Indian Hills Jazz Ensemble. One important note - the only way that a song can be included in the playlist is if it is available through the iTunes Music Store. If iTunes doesn’t carry it, it cannot be included.

I welcome your comments and suggestions.

MENC has an interesting section of their website called Creativity in the Classroom. This section features lesson plans targeted at copyright issues and how they effect creativity - everything from intellectual property rights to fair use. The lesson plans are broken into interdisciplinary subject areas including: English, History, Civics & Government, Economics, Technology, and the Arts. Each discipline has a series of lesson modules that address how copyright issues effect everyone from the creator to the owner of the content. They are interesting lessons in that they were funded and created to teach students specifically why downloading music without paying for it is a crime. Organizations such as ASCAP, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the National Schools Boards Association, the U.S. Register of Copyrights, and the American Bar Association supported the creation of the lessons, and they have had a strong influence on the lens that copyright law is presented through.

I have lectured at countless workshops and conferences about this topic with my presentation titled To Burn Or Not To Burn: It’s More Than An Ethical Question. The thrust of my discussion has always been what teachers can do to educate their students about copyright law and what the Recording Industry Association of America is doing to stop illegal downloading. As part of my lecture, I pressent the other side to the story and some of the amazing cases involving students, parents and the fines they incur when they are caught. Teachers need to realize that there is a strong argument being made by people like Lawrence Lessig, author of my favorite book on the topic of copyright law: Free Culture. His work with the organization Creative Commons is trying to create opportunities for students to work with copyright protected materials that does not violate copyright law. Teachers should not only use the lesson plans from the MENC website but should also consider Lessig’s arguments and give the students a broad view of the issue. I am a firm advocate against piracy, as is Lessig, but when teachers and students are worrying about violating the law when they use literary and musical works as inspiration in their classrooms - it’s a problem. I strongly recommend you read Free Culture for yourself. It is a powerful book. I also recommend MENC’s Copyright Guide, also on their site.
I welcome your comments and suggestions.

As I was driving home from Teachers College last night I happened to be listening to WNYC, which shifts from being an NPR station during the day to an all classical music station at night. Normally I switch to WBGO for the ride home - my favorite jazz station - but I was caught up in a performance by the Hanover Band and kept listening. After the piece was over I heard a commercial about a new feature of the Carnegie Hall website - a free bi-weekly podcast featuring interviews and music from a wide variety of performers.

There are six podcasts so far, including interviews with Steve Reich, Roswell Rudd, Daniel Barenboim, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The podcasts are very well put together and can easily be used in a classroom setting to give students an idea about what it is like to be a musician and insights into their creative processes. Users can subscribe to these free podcasts via iTunes so that every time there is a new podcast posted you can download it automatically. Have a listen and see what you think. I believe that many other arts organizations will follow Carnegie Halls lead - trying to connect Classical Music with the iPod Generation.

I welcome your comments and suggestions.

British Music Educators have a wonderful resource on the BBC website with links to the British GCSE Music Standards. It’s called Bitesize Music and there are six sections including: Elements of Music, Music Appreciation, Classical Orchestral Music, Music for Dance, Contemporary Music, and World Music. Each section has two paths - the revise path that teaches the concepts and the test path that assesses student understanding of those concepts.

It is very interesting to see the way that British music teachers sequence and present musical concepts - and I love the new mnemonic devices for teaching the lines of the treble clef: Every Green Bus Drives Fast - I’ve never even seen a green bus!  The site is filled with sound clips and the assessments are very well done. There are also links to many other websites and other subject areas that music teachers might find interesting as well. My personal favorite is the Onion Street Link which allows users to download a free 16 track sequencer, as well as some pretty cool mixing software, radio channels, and a discussion board that students can post their opinions to. I strongly recommend you check out this site and find ways to integrate it into your teaching. It’s perfect for elementary and middle school students.

I welcome your comments and suggestions.