Over-structured settings such as school, daycare, and extra-curricular activities can deprive kids of the chance to find out what they really like to do. A little bit of “leisure education” can teach kids how to rescue themselves from summertime boredom on their own by finding and engaging in activities they know they like. When kids learn to rescue themselves from boredom, they simultaneously learn how to engage with activities moment-to-moment. (Being distracted is boring, is it not?)

Kids today have fewer opportunities for this kind of exploration, Darling writes. “When I was a kid, we were bored all the time. There were no extracurricular activities for kids until junior high except for Scouts once a week or maybe 4H and Sunday School. We…learned to figure something out.” Summertime learning relies less on pressure and direction from adults, and more on individual problem-solving and enjoyment. Darling links this kind of engagement to her concept of “flow”:

Flow is that wonderful psychological state where you are completely engaged in what you’re doing, not self-conscious, and positive. You are in the moment. Flow usually occurs when you are doing something that is challenging (and therefore not bored), but that is not so hard that you’re stressed or scared.

For most, the experience of “flow” is a crucial component of learning and making music. When we listen to fellow ensemble musicians, perform and respond to an audience, or concentrate deeply on learning a passage of music or a technique, we learn better if we are able to engage moment-to-moment, and solve problems in real time.

This summer, whether you’re a music student yourself or a parent of one, try slowing down. You’ll be surprised at how un-boring leisure can be!

Do you have a question or comment about this post? Leave a comment below and tell us about it.

Joseph Piro and Camila Ortiz, in a quest to clarify music education’s effect on language and literacy learning, studied students in two US elementary schools. One of these schools offered keyboard instruction, which increased in difficulty over successive years. The other school did not have a music education program. After two years of keyboard instruction, the keyboard-trained students performed dramatically better on tests of vocabulary and verbal sequencing than did the non-keyboard-trained group.

Piro and Ortiz stress that focused studies like this one will “help education practitioners go beyond the sometimes hazy and ill-defined ‘music makes you smarter’ claims and provide careful and credible instructional approaches.” Because the neural response to music is one of the most widely distributed systems in the human brain, the study of music can affect many other areas of learning in a positive way, including literacy and spatial perception. The goal, Piro and Ortiz tell us, is to understand how and when to teach music in order to maximize its potential benefits on the brain.

You can read a more detailed description of the study here.

What do you think? Should schools teach music only to boost skills in subjects like math and reading, or should music education be supported for its own sake? Leave a comment below and tell us about it.

Explore your instrument with a fresh mind.

How can you make sound on your instrument? A violinist typically draws a bow across strings–but the violin will resonate in many other ways. The violin’s wooden body can be struck with the hand, the strings can be plucked, the bow can be placed at a different proximity from the bridge, or a bow can be made out of different materials all together. Explore your instrument like a beginner. How can you make sound with the instrument in front of you?

Listen to other instruments.

Open your mind to new timbres by listening to great instrumentalists who play a different instrument than your own. Are you saxophonist? See if you can mimic your favorite cellist. Are you a drummer? See if you can make your drums sing like your favorite singer. Listen closely, and be creative.

Generate some new patterns.

If your hands tend to get stuck in the same old scales and arpeggios, try generating some entirely new patterns with musician’s dice. If you don’t have musician’s dice, you can assign each pitch of the scale to a number (1 is A, 2 is A#, and so on) and generate a series of random numbers using a computer. Experiment with the resulting random pattern. Construct an improvisation from that pattern and see where it takes you. (This exercise also works for generating new rhythms!)

Tune your instrument differently.

If you play an instrument that can be retuned, such as a guitar, try a new tuning. This allows you to explore different resonance capabilities of your instrument, and it forces your hands to find new patterns.

Improvise with someone new–and let them direct you.

No one’s improvisational mind functions in exactly the same way. Find a fellow musician who also wants to push his or her improvisational practice, and take turns directing each other. Have your buddy ask you to construct improvisations based around certain (new) patterns, or disallow you from using certain techniques so that you’ll find new modes of expression instead. You will both have to listen to one other closely and be creative. Keep it relaxed and fun, and explore together.

How do you get “unstuck” as an improviser? Leave a comment below and tell us about it.

This is your forum to connect with other music students, ask questions, and share your thoughts about your musical practice, whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned pro. Think of this as a public practice journal: what have you been working on in practice time lately? Workshop your process, share tips and suggestions, and hear from your fellow musicians.

See you there!

(Stay tuned to the Harmonious.ly blog for a recap of the chat later this week.)

Do you have a question or comment about this post? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Why teach roots music? It’s just like the name suggests: “roots” music, which typically comprises folk, blues, gospel, and storytelling idioms, is the grandparent of many more recent musical forms, such as rock, jazz, R&B, hip-hop, and musical theater. Roots music is the culmination of the many musical voices that landed on North American soil. It is also a vehicle for teaching United States history in a hands-on way to young students.

Though in the last 50 years music education has opened up its doors to a wide variety of popular forms, from jazz to rock to hip-hop, when it comes to blues and folk music curricula in public schools, only a handful of organizations and resources exist, and these are often underutilized due to a lack of funding or organization on a local level.

The good news is that if you are a blues or folk musician and want to bring your talents to schools as an educator, now is a great time to get involved with a small organization and make a difference–but you may have to be a self-starter. Here is a list of current resources and ideas for including American roots music in your school’s music program, or for learning more about becoming a roots music educator.

One shining star organization, now in its third decade, is the Blues in the Schools program. It is represented by local branches, such as the Pacific Northwest Blues in the Schools Program. Blues in the Schools focuses on bringing real blues musicians to elementary classrooms to teach guitar, drumming, storytelling, singing, and the history of the blues and the people who played it. The greater Blues in the Schools organization is highly decentralized, and local chapters each have their own angle and curricula. Most Blues in the Schools programs are independently funded through city or state arts grants or private donors, which allows the program to bring quality music education to schools that lack arts funding. Look for a Blues in the Schools program in your area, or contact your local blues society to find out how you can start your own.

If you are an educator looking to integrate roots music into your school’s curriculum, check out these resources at the American Folklife Center. The Folklife Center is the go-to resource in the United States for folk culture information, and is run by the Smithsonian Institution. This organization publishes several volumes of well-researched resources for educators.

PBS also offers blues music resources for the classroom, including recordings and lesson plans.

If you are a teacher interested in short-term professional development or training in folk and oral history, check out C.A.R.T.S. This site offers a list of training and workshops for teachers in a variety of topics related to folk culture and oral history. The courses are not music-specific, but the training is especially relevant for any educator looking to integrate blues and folk histories into their curriculum.

Do you know of an innovative music program in your town? We want to hear about it. Leave a comment here on the Harmonious.ly blog and let us know.

Dr. Larry Livingston, in a recent symposium lecture on music education, suggests new frameworks for music educators. Firstly, he says, music education programs must strive to include as many students as possible, and make inclusion a central goal. In order to include more students, programs must “broaden the base” of the music curriculum. Teach songwriting. Teach blues. Teach mariachi. Teach hip-hop and computer music editing. By fostering kids’ existing musical interests, educators build the foundation for lifelong involvement in the arts, because critical thinking skills learned in one idiom are transferable to any other.

A great part of this goal, Livingston says, we must “demythologize” the idea that classical music is better than all other music. As Livingston repeated throughout his lecture, “It’s just music.” The goal is to connect young people with music-making in a way that interests them, no matter the genre.

Livingston emphasized conceptual teaching methods as a way to introduce students to broader critical thinking and listening skills. When a student, or group of students, makes a mistake, Livingston says, we must teach them to ask their own critical questions about what’s going on. Livingston offers a common example: band students rushing in the seventh measure. Instead of simply instructing the students not to rush, Livingston urges educators to ask, “Why are you rushing in measure seven? What are the conceptual issues at play here? Do you have the fastest note values? Are you louder than everybody else?” By empowering students to work through problems themselves, music educators train students to become lifelong independent learners, of music, or of any subject.

Livingston’s goal is to promote music education for everyone–not just for Juilliard hopefuls. Music education, he says, is about allowing all students to create individual relationships with music, whether or not they choose it as a vocation. Our future musical culture, he says, is in the hands of today’s innovative music educators.

What do you think? Leave a comment here on the Harmonious.ly blog and let us know.

Years ago, a flautist friend who habitually practiced eight hours a day confided in me that she felt she was actually getting worse at the flute. “I haven’t made any progress in weeks,” she told me. “I practice well. I learn from my mistakes. I can’t tell what I’m doing wrong.” A month later, she came to me with a different story. She had thought she was getting worse, she said, because she was actually getting better–at listening, and at evaluating her own playing. During what seemed like her most unproductive moment, she was actually growing by leaps and bounds as a listener. What sounded great to her, months before, no longer satisfied her keen ears.

My flautist friend practiced patiently through her plateau, and when she overcame it, she realized what a productive time it had been. She played better: she had listened more closely and corrected subtle things about her playing that she hadn’t even known were there to correct before. And she was more inspired: because inspiration hadn’t come easily to her during this time, she sought new music, recordings, and concerts to inspire her. She had discovered several great flautists she hadn’t known about before, and even learned some music theory from other genres of music.

It is absolutely natural to reach a point with music practice when one simply cannot seem to make headway with a particular technique or piece. Stay with it, and remember that these phases are all part of the learning process. A plateau is not a stagnant time; your mind and body are accumulating new knowledge, even if you cannot see the results just yet. Stay calm, stay positive, and stay curious about yourself and the music you play. You may find that your most stagnant weeks of practice helped you grow the most as a player!

Have you ever had a practice “plateau”? How did you overcome it? What did you learn? Leave a comment here on the Harmonious.ly blog and let us know.

For Glennie, who has been profoundly deaf since childhood, listening has always been a full-body experience. At the age of 12, when she began playing the timpani, she learned to tune the drums in different intervals by feeling the differences in vibrations in her finger bones, and then finally in her whole body. She and her teacher listened to the differences between the orchestral instruments by placing their hands on the walls of the rehearsal room while the instruments sounded. Glennie says this ability to listen with one’s whole body is key to truly listening to and understanding all the music we play, and is possible and necessary for every musician. Her goal, she says, is “to teach the world how to listen.”

Glennie teaches us an art of interpretation that draws from our own personal and bodily experience. “All of my performances are based on entirely what I experience, and not by learning a piece of music, putting on someone else’s interpretation of it, buying all the CD’s possible of that particular piece of music, and so on and so forth, because that isn’t giving me enough of something that is so raw and so basic, and something that I can fully experience the journey of.”

In this immensely inspiring video, Glennie demonstrates her way of listening, plays the snare drum and marimba, and lectures on the art of interpretation. This is a must-see for every musician.
You can also see Glennie in the documentary Touch the Sound, with composer/guitarist Fred Frith.

How do you listen? How do you connect with your instrument? Leave a comment here on the Harmonious.ly blog and tell us about it.

This week I had the pleasure of hearing Pine speak about The String Student’s Library of Music by Black Composers, a pedagogical collection of incredible repertoire written between 1700 and the present day, in countries all over the world, by composers who “happen to be black.” This repertoire has largely been out-of-print, unavailable, or under-recognized by the classical music world. Rachel Barton Pine aims to change all that.

After recording her first record of solo violin works written by composers of African descent, Pine was confronted with more public interest than she expected. Musicians, educators, and parents of young string players wanted to find out about this underexposed repertoire, and looked to Pine for resources. Pine, who is of Caucasian descent and grew up in Chicago, said her first response to these questions was “Why are you asking me?” But as more and more requests rolled in, Pine teamed up with Dr. Dominique-Rene de Lerma, the world’s foremost authority on black classical composers, to collect and catalog these lesser-known works.

The String Student’s Library of Music by Black Composers is the first collection of its kind, and it is certain to be an outstanding resource for any string teacher. The collection will include graded student repertoire for violin, viola, cello, and string ensemble, companion CD’s, biographies of each composer, and interviews with living composers. The text also contains profiles of notable black musicians like George Bridgetower, for whom Beethoven wrote his Kreutzer Sonata, and quality articles on a variety of music topics, from classical music scenes in the African diaspora to violin playing in hip-hop and R&B music.

Pine’s mission is to make this repertoire available to a wider audience of musicians, young students, and music educators, in hopes that a truer picture of the diversity of the classical music world can be seen. Talented young black musicians, who may have trouble finding their own place in the world of classical music, will be able to see their own heritage in this volume, said Pine. In a recent lecture at the Icicle Creek African Music and Dance Festival in Leavenworth, Washington, Pine related her own experience as a young female violin student, navigating her own identity in classical music by connecting with the music of women composers. She hopes to offer a similar experience to students of African descent today. “We’re not only representing the past,” she said. “We’re inspiring the future.”

Pine stresses that the music in her collection deserves to be incorporated into the canon of art music and string student repertoire simply because it is excellent music. “It’s not meant to replace the classical music repertoire,” said Pine. “The idea is to have this be a supplemental curriculum,” included alongside other great works. The music itself, said Pine, “comes in every possible stripe.”

You can find out more about Pine’s collection, hear samples of the pieces, and find other pedagogical resources on the Rachel Elizabeth Barton Foundation website. The foundation also offers grant and instrument loan programs for talented young musicians.

In this post, I offer some of my favorite links and resources for online professional development for music teachers.

Dr. James Frankel’s excellent blog on music technology for educators walks the less technically-inclined through the territory of music education technology. Frankel explains the benefits of building professional learning networks (or PLNs) online through twitter and Facebook, as well as the benefits of webinars and online classes for educators. A must-read for any educator looking to branch out into online PD.

SoundTree offers weekly informational webinars for music educators on different topics. These talks are diverse, high quality, and innovative.

PBS TeacherLine offers a wide variety of online professional development resources for teachers in all disciplines.

Members of MENC, the National Association for Music Education receive access to online “mentors” who are ready to answer PD questions in chat rooms, as well as comprehensive references and general resources for music teachers.

Berklee College Online Courses for Music Educators offers high-quality online courses which can be taken for credit. Berklee offers top-quality courses for computer notation software and computer music production, as well as advanced courses in theory and ear training.

TeacherOnlineEducation offers online courses on general techniques for educators, for credit. This site’s courses are especially applicable for classroom teachers.

Do you have a favorite site, chat room, or other online resource that has helped you grow as a teacher? What professional development opportunities have helped you the most, on or offline?