Focus project for Design Process For Learning
For my focus project, I’m reviewing Clark Quinn’s 2014 book, Revolutionize Learning & Development: Performance and Innovation Strategy for the Information Age.
Making better citizens through dance
Public-facing note-taking for Philosophy of Music Education with David Elliott
This week, I’m taking a look at two chapters from a new book on the red-hot topic of artistic citizenship, the social responsibility of artists and arts educators.
QWERTYBeats design documentation
QWERTYBeats is a proposed accessible, beginner-friendly rhythm performance tool with a basic built-in sampler. By simply holding down different combinations of keys on a standard computer keyboard, users can play complex syncopations and polyrhythms. If the app is synced to the tempo of a DAW or other music playback system, the user can easily perform good-sounding rhythms over any song.
This project is part of Design For The Real World, an NYU ITP course. We are collaborating with the BEAT Rockers, the Lavelle School for the Blind, and the NYU Music Experience Design Lab. Read some background research here. Continue reading “QWERTYBeats design documentation”
Artistic citizenship in the age of Trump
Public-facing note taking for Philosophy of Music Education with David Elliott
This week I’m reading about the social and ethical responsibilities of artists generally, and musicians and music educators in particular. That topic is especially relevant at the moment.
Before we get to the moral philosophy aspect, let’s talk about this performance. Why is it so good? Movies and TV have run “Hallelujah” into the ground, but for good reason. The song blends joy and pain together as well as any song ever has.It’s right there in the first verse: “the minor fall, and the major lift.” It’s the same reason we love “Amazing Grace,” and the blues.
You can hear Kate McKinnon’s Leonard Cohen tribute as the concession speech Hillary Clinton would have made in a perfect world. This verse in particular gave me chills:
I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
You can also hear it as an expression of Kate McKinnon herself, a queer woman mourning the world of growing inclusiveness that she thought she was moving into, the one we all thought we were moving into. And you can hear Leonard Cohen’s bitter irony, too. SNL had Trump as its host just last year, and they’re as much to blame for normalizing him as anyone.
High school masculinity
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
This week’s reading was C. J. Pascoe’s riveting study, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. If you’re at all interested in gender, or the culture of schools, it’s a must-read.
Coping strategies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvuM3DjvYf0
Some thoughts gathered from Twitter this morning:
Inspired by Harry Belafonte, we’re reading this Langston Hughes poem in class right now. And listening to the Hamilton Mixtape.
The mood in the Park Slope Food Coop this morning was like a New Orleans funeral–multiethnic people talking about genocide to a soundtrack of funky jazz.
Foucault – History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume One
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
This was a tougher read than Discipline and Punish. To get our morale up, let’s enjoy some Salt-N-Pepa first.
Also, we should let Kanye West set up the other big theme of the book:
Continue reading “Foucault – History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume One”
Music Matters chapter seven
Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class.
This chapter addresses musical meaning and how it emerges out of context. More accurately, it addresses how every musical experience has many meanings that emerge from many contexts. Elliott and Silverman begin with the meanings of performance, before moving into the meanings of composition, listening and so on. They insist that performance is not an activity limited to an elite cadre of “talented” people, that it is within reach of anyone who has the proper support.
We propose that people’s capacities for and enactments of an intrinsic motivation to engage in different kinds of musicing and listening are extremely widespread phenomena, restricted only by lack of musical opportunities, or ineffective and indifferent music teaching. Indeed, developing a love for and devotion to musicing and listening is not unusual when students are fortunate enough to learn from musically and educationally excellent teachers and [community music] facilitators, and when they encounter inspiring models of musicing in contexts of welcoming, sustaining, and educative musical settings, including home and community contexts (240).
Foucault – Discipline and Punish
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
This week’s reading is Discipline and Punish, by noted ray of sunshine Michel Foucault. The book begins with a memorably graphic torture scene that pretty well sets the tone for what follows.
This video gave me some helpful biographical context.
The title of this book is everything wrong with music education
This is a widely used college level music theory textbook.
Remember, kids, to be a complete musician, all you need to know is the most formal version of the harmonic preferences of aristocratic Western Europeans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.