Reliable Sources

 thoughts  3 Responses »
Nov 072011
 

So, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m a geek. I probably spend more time thinking about the web than most people. I probably spend a lot more time thinking about the web than most of my students. This can lead to problems when I say things like, “Sure, use as many web sources in your research project as you’d like. Just use your best judgement in evaluating what would make a credible source.”

In my MUS 218 World Music classes today, we talked about how to determine whether a web page might be reliable enough to be cited in a research paper. Here’s my presentation (Google Docs presentations). I’m publishing it here in part because someone might find it useful. However, I’m mostly sharing this with the world because I know there are lots of people who have spent more time thinking about this stuff than I have, and I’m hoping they might be willing to help me refine it. Please let me know what you think in the comments!

 

(PS – I know the GDocs embedded version chops off a little bit of the right side of each slide. Go fullscreen to fix it if you like.)

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Teaching Philosophy, pt. 2

 thoughts  1 Response »
Nov 292010
 

This is a follow-up to my last post about teaching philosophy statements. That post yielded some solid advice from my friends Patrick Dell (public school choir director) and Matt Schoendorff (instructor at Wayne State University), the latter of whom was kind enough to send me the teaching philosophy he’s been working on and using over the last couple of years.

I had some time to think about my teaching philosophy statement over the Thanksgiving weekend. I basically have no idea what I’m doing with regard to the length or scope or detail or really much of anything with regard to this document. Basically what I’m saying is this: I’d appreciate your thoughts in the comments.

David MacDonald, composer
Teaching Philosophy Statement

Before entering formal music training, we are all used to hearing music and reacting to it on an emotional level. We talk about how music makes us feel. I believe that we all also have the capacity to engage with music intellectually. To put it as simply as possible, this is what I strive to teach students, to think about music, not just feel about it. Thinking about music allows us to talk and write about music in meaningful, objective ways. We can then use those observations to understand why music makes us feel a certain way, or at least what it is about the music that makes us feel that way. This is as important to composers, performers, conductors, educators, and audience members. The goal of any theory course I teach is to give students cognitive tools they can use in any of those pursuits.

To teach that, I try to surround every concept I teach in music theory with thoughtfully selected musical examples. Abstractions, like scales in whole notes or triads in close position, are useful distillations of complex ideas. However, I’ve never lost a class’s attention faster than when I begin and end with abstractions. There are challenges to using real-world musical excerpts. For instance, composers don’t necessarily follow the “rules” exactly all the time. This can cause some consternation in students, but I think it’s worth that small amount of difficulty to present real art in the classroom. It also allows them to develop an appropriately nuanced understanding of music.

When I use examples, I think it is just as important to let them hear the music as it is to look at the score. I am always emphasizing the difference between music, which is made up of sounds, and the score, which is made up of visual symbols on paper. After all, most of the time when we’re experiencing music we don’t have the score in front of us. For example, when I have taught sonata form, I have begun by playing a recording and talking about the sections and cadences as they went by. It is important for students to connect the skills they develop in their written theory classes with those that they develop in their aural skills classes.

I use a broad range of evaluations and assessments, but the ones that I find most valuable and reliable are those that require some creative problem solving. For example, not just writing out a scale, but writing a melody that uses the scale or analyzing pieces that stretch the strict definitions of forms discussed in class. Larger assignments would include small compositions and writing assignments.

The final goal of any theory class is to equip students with the critical thinking skills they need to deal intellectually with music whether or not they have the score in front of them. They won’t always have a conductor or a teacher to explain a piece of music to them. In fact, in many cases, they will have to be the ones doing the explaining. I try to get students to a level of understanding at which they feel comfortable engaging intellectually with the kinds of music they may actually encounter in these situations as they go on to become well-rounded  and thoughtful performers, composers, educators, and listeners.

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Teaching Philosophy, pt. 1

 thoughts  3 Responses »
Nov 172010
 

No, no. Not teaching about philosophy. Philosophy about teaching. As an undergrad at the University of Missouri, most of my friends were music education majors. I saw them go through a lot of assignments about developing a teaching philosophy. These assignments were universally loathed. On the rare occasions they were mentioned in social settings, I gathered that these were multi-page BS-fests full of buzz words and devoid of anything meaningful.

Imagine my reaction when perusing the application requirements for a number of newly posted professorships included some form of “a statement of the applicant’s philosophy of teaching.” Gah! Five effing years of graduate school, ostensibly in preparation for a university teaching position, and nobody ever thought to teach me this?! I’m still not sure if I’m madder that I have to write this extra document, or that none of my professors have done more than acknowledge the existence of such documents. 1

One of the first things I do these days when I find myself in this kind of dilemma is tweet about it, especially when I’m pretty sure some of my friends have been through the same thing. I did this in my usual snarky way. Responses came in pretty quickly from friends who teach music at just about every level from grade school to college. My very good friend and frequent intellectual sparring partner Tim Rosenberg, who has a music education degree and is currently teaching saxophone at Ithaca College, told me I should take this task more seriously. He told me that “[A] teaching philosophy is important and describes why you act the way you do while teaching. Writing them is a clarifying experience.” Normally I’m all about clarity, but people who talk about “clarifying experiences” are usually trying to sell you something herbal. Though, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he was (as he is on an alarmingly regular basis) completely right. 2 Part of the reason I blog is to clarify my thoughts for myself. As E. M. Forster famously wrote, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”

Another sure fire helper, after my friends and colleagues, is the all-knowing Google, through which I found this extremely helpful article from the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2003. There are quite a lot of people writing on the web about teaching philosophies, but almost none of them are about higher education. Later that evening, my friend Matt Schoendorff, who also holds a music ed degree and is currently teaching at Wayne State University, was kind enough to send me the document he’s been including in his recent job applications.

So, the more I think about it, the less I’m dreading writing this thing. I’ll continue posting my thoughts as I gather them. Check back in the next few days for a fully(ish)-cooked teaching philosophy. Here’s where I’m starting:

1. This note from Tim:

“Start by outlining, sans buzzwords, about why you teach and why it’s important. Then move to how you teach and why you do it that way.”

2. This excerpt from the Chronicle article I found:

If you’re still feeling overwhelmed by the task at hand, try to focus on concrete questions, as opposed to the abstract question of “What’s my philosophy?” says Mr. Kaplan 3.

“Breaking down that broad question into component parts — for example, What do you believe about teaching? What do you believe about learning? Why? How is that played out in your classroom? How does student identity and background make a difference in how you teach? What do you still struggle with in terms of teaching and student learning? — is often easier,” he says. “Those more concrete questions get you thinking, and then you can decide what you want to expand on.”

Notes:

  1. To be fair to my professors, my research indicates that requiring teaching philosophy statements of university job applicants is a relatively new development. I doubt most of them had to write anything like them when they were applying for their current jobs in higher education. But I”m still mad about it. They should be teaching me about academia as it is, not as it was, right? ↩
  2. Congratulations, Tim, on finishing your document! I can’t wait to read it. ↩
  3. Matt Kaplan of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan ↩
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Great Googly Moogly

 thoughts  4 Responses »
Oct 232010
 

I have a new favorite author and blogger, Jeff Jarvis. My first introduction to Jarvis was watching him as an analyst on one of my favorite “new tv” shows, This Week in Google, on the TWiT network. A couple of weekends ago, I drove from East Lansing, MI to Kansas City, MO and back for a friend’s wedding. On the way back, I listened to the audiobook of Jarvis’s What Would Google Do?. (Get it.You’ll thank me later.) It is instantly clear when reading either his book or his blog, BuzzMachine, that Jarvis “gets” the internet and new media as much as anyone. His book discusses Google’s philosophies about business, customers, publicness, creativity, and community, and how they all might be applied to other institutions.

Jarvis does a really excellent job of distilling some principles of Googliness (one of the many fun, Google-related words he invents) in a way that makes them meaningful while being general enough to apply to a lot of different circumstances. Here are some of my favorites:

  • “Give the people control, and we will use it.”
  • “The link changes everything…Do what you do best and link to the rest.”
  • “If you’re not searchable, you wont be found…Your customers are your ad agency.”
  • The mass market has been (or is being) replaced by the mass of niches.
  • “Atoms are a drag.”

…and, perhaps his most radical proclamation…

  • “Free is a business model.”

My favorite sections of the book, however, are after Jarvis has explained the basic tenets of Googliness. He goes through several hypothetical Googly institutions. Near then end of these is “Google U,” a hypothetical university. Appropriately, Jarvis has made this chapter available as a blog post on his website. He wonders why, in this world of seemingly infinite communications technology, why do students have to be limited to taking classes at a single university? Why can’t they take classes a la carte from programs around the country?


I’m not sure I think this is practical. How do you control the curriculum in such an institution? How do the institutions control their enrollment numbers and standards? I don’t have answers to these questions. However, one thing I do like about the idea is that a degree-holder (would they even have degrees?) would have to be evaluated on something other than the name-brand familiarity of the institutions they attended.

One of my favorite websites seems to be working toward this idea already, and best of all it’s free! You can watch videos of lectures from many courses at top institutions at Academic Earth. However, when you look through the available lectures, you might notice something missing: the arts (now we’re back to my neck of the woods). There are a handful of offerings in creative writing and a course in Roman architecture, but there are no classes in music (not even theory or musicology), and no classes in artistic “practice.” Courses that are so basic to art programs(life drawing or color theory) and music programs (counterpoint and aural skills) seem to defy the model.

I’ve been wracking my brains since reading and listening to this chapter. I really want for the arts not to be an exception to  the Google U model. I really want arts education (and the arts themselves) to flourish in the Google Age. Is it the art that has to change or is it the way its taught? Or, do the arts simply defy our current communications technology? It’s probably a little of both, and of course the combination of the crusty academics and curmudgeonly classical musicians means that music programs will probably be the last parts of their respective universities to make such a change.

Is it possible to start a “free” university-style music school for the internet? I don’t know. Who wants to help me try?

I know there are a LOT of question marks in this blog post. I don’t normally like writing that way, but there are some many questions and so few certainties. If you have any thoughts on the matter, please share away in the comments!

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The Value of Newness

 thoughts  1 Response »
Sep 252010
 

There are people who collect stamps. There are people who collect baseball cards. There are people who collect books, spoons, coffee mugs, ties, shoes, rocks, and sand. I bet if I can think of a thing, there’s somebody who gets really excited about collecting it in massive quantities. There are even some people who collect things that are less concrete. Some people like to collect anagrams or recipes. Personally, I like cool words (like agathokakological) and university nicknames/mascots (UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs).

Sometimes I joke that I collect hobbies, and it’s probably my most significant collection of all. I think this comes from my passion for learning about new things. Some of them, like music, have stuck around and remain a large part of my life. Others, like the stop-motion animations I used to make with my Dad’s first digital camera, have been left behind in earlier parts of my life. When I think about picking up a new hobby to add to my collection, one of my concerns is the cost. Picking up golf would cost me hundreds of dollars or more, but picking up disc golf (as I did a few years back) only cost about ten or fifteen bucks. What, then, is the value of collecting these hobbies?

The wide variety of hobbies gets me thinking about things differently, like having your whole music library on shuffle. Listening to Bartok, then Ellington, then Berio, then the Beatles will cause you to think about Bartok, Ellington, Berio, and the Beatles differently.

Double Shadow

One of the most recent hobbies added to my collection was art. A couple of years ago, I picked up a basic acrylic paint set to occupy the hours not taken up by class. Never having taken an art class, I really didn’t know what I was getting into. Everything I was doing was an experiment. I learned what kinds of paper held the paint effectively, how paints behaved differently on canvases, and what interesting things I could mix into the paints to create different textures. It was just as exciting to me as learning about the basics of composition, instrumentation, and chord voicings; or learning about basic concepts in electronics or literature. Buried so mind-numbingly deep in studying music, I had forgotten that feeling of discovery, and painting helped me regain it.

I think my friend Matt Schoendorff might say the same thing about quantum physics. He became so enamored of the subject that he wrote as his doctoral dissertation a set of character pieces about quantum particles for wind band.

All too often, fear keeps us from trying new things. Fear of failure may be reasonable in, say, trying a Wild West-type pistols-at-dawn duel for the first time. But most of the time, trying something new isn’t as risky as that. Create something new, I think you’ll find that it’s worth it.

Most recently, I’ve tried producing a film and this.

What new things have you tried recently? How have they changed the way you think about other parts of your life?

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Old Composers are People Too

 thoughts  No Responses »
Sep 172010
 

I don’t like a lot of old music. Mozart, Brahms, et al. don’t really whet my whistle, tickle my fancy, float my boat, or light my fire. Having said that, I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Bach. I think counterpoint is just about the coolest dang thing any musician ever thought of, and nobody’s ever done it better than Johann. That’s why I was so excited when I read about Don Freund (composer and professor at Indiana University) putting a series of lectures on YouTube called “Composition Lessons from J. S. Bach.”

They seem to be geared toward an audience that may not have a thorough technical understanding of the music already, but there is a lot of compelling information in them. Freund runs through a significant chunk of the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, pointing out anything that he finds particularly interesting. That’s really a lot of what composers do when they listen to music, though. “Hey that sounds neat. I’ll take some of that.” Here’s a couple of the videos Freund has posted: part of the introduction, and part of the discussion of the C-sharp minor fugue. I encourage you to check out more of them on his YouTube channel.

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Be Creative…NOW!

 news, thoughts  1 Response »
Aug 032010
 

A couple of weekends ago, I tried something new. I made a film. Well, I didn’t do it by myself, but I was part of a team of around 13 people that made a seven-minute film in only 48 hours. It was part of the 48 Hour Film Project in Detroit.

We met at 7pm on a Friday in Detroit and were assigned a genre (Sci Fi), a character (Jason/Janice Strawberry, realtor), a prop (an award), and a line of dialogue (“Take your time.”). All of these things had to be included in a final film that we turned in at 7pm the following Sunday.

It was a pretty crazy 48 hours. I was the producer, and my great friend and frequent creative collaborator Sam Merciers was the director. I would guess that we each got about 7 hours of sleep over the whole weekend, but it was completely worth it. I had more fun than just about anything else I’ve done all summer long. I experienced some of the same satisfaction I experience as a performer when a lot of hard work and preparation comes to fruition. There was also the exhilaration of improvisation from being asked spontaneously create something that is at once artistic and appropriate and technically sound.

In the end, I am extremely proud of what we created, especially considering we had never made a film before on any schedule. We got to see it on the big screen (or at least a big screen) at the Main Art Theater in Royal Oak, MI along with an audience of around 500 people. The experience reminded me forcibly of the feeling I get at the premiere of a new piece I’ve written. I hope it goes well, but it might completely bomb, and worst of all, it’s completely out of my control at that point.

For your consideration: Download.

Tonight, we’re going back down to Detroit for the awards presentation. I’ll be sure to post back here with the results.

Here are a few pictures of us during the production:

If we deploy enough gear, we almost look like we know what we're doing. We didn't really have a compelling plot reason for shooting at SCENE, but Tim Lane was kind enough to give us permission and the place and the art just looks so dang cool, we couldn't pass it up.

Emiliano and Matt (left) are composing and recording the score. Ben (top right) is editing the audio recorded on set. Corrina (bottom right) is working on a logo graphic for the credits.

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Me and JC

 news, thoughts  No Responses »
Apr 282010
 

Me and John CoriglianoDespite spending a week or so being nervous about Saturday’s John Corigliano masterclass, I think it went pretty well. I presented Falling up the down escalator, a saxophone quartet that H2 has recorded. The format of the masterclass was very different from the one John Adams described on his blog last week. Corigliano was not interested in his or anyone else’s opinions about the music. “That’s meaningless,” he said. He wanted to demonstrate to us what musical material people were able to observe and retain after one hearing. After all, in most situations, that’s all anyone is likely to hear a new piece of music.

He separated the audience into two groups for each piece: a group who had heard the work before and a group who hadn’t. The latter group he liked to call “the innocents,” and the masterclass mostly took the form of a focus group discussion. After each piece, Corigliano asked, “What did you hear?” He wasn’t interested in what anybody liked or didn’t like. He wanted their empirical observations about the materials, their development, and the form. It was a nice little experiment that proved one of the things that Dr. Lorenz has told me before: anytime you feel like you’re really beating the audience over the head with an idea, you’re only beginning to make it clear.”

Toward the end of the observation discussion for each piece, he allowed himself to slip into a few opinions. He told me the disintegrating ending of my quartet was “really quite lovely” and that it was a “great piece.” Not much to snip out and put on a website or anything, but I’ll take it.

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Masterclassin’ up the joint

 news  No Responses »
Apr 212010
 

John CoriglianoComposer John Corigliano (winner of an Oscar, a Pulitzer, and three Grammys) is in residence at Michigan State this week. The band, orchestra, and choir programs are putting together a program this coming Saturday night of his works, including Pied Piper Fantasy (feat. Prof. Richard Sherman, flute), DC Fanfare, and Circus Maximus. I’m looking forward to what I’m sure will be an excellent program, and I’m also planning to catch some of the rehearsals with Corigliano this week. On Saturday morning, Corigliano is giving a masterclass. I, along with my colleagues Kevin Wilt and Victor Marquez-Barrios, have been invited to present a piece in the masterclass for Corigliano and the rest of the assembled hoard to critique.

If you don’t know what a masterclass is, or if you’ve only been to performance masterclasses, composer John Adams just wrote a humorous and thoughtful essay on composition masterclasses that you should read. As a summary, I will tell you that he calls the student composer “the victim” and the process “ritual disembowelment.”

I find masterclasses to be a bit nerve-wracking in the best of situations, but this will be something else altogether. This will be a masterclass given by one of the most prominent American composers of his generation, and I imagine it will be attended by several members of the faculty from outside the composition area. Thankfully, I will be presenting a rather short (6½ min.) piece, Falling up the down escalator. Also, I happen to have a stellar, recently-released recording by the H2 Quartet.

I’m hoping to come out of the experience smarter but not in too much pain.

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© 2012 David MacDonald, composer Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha