Friday, March 27, 2009

UMass Lowell Music Education Sessions at the 2009 Massachusetts All State Conference

Teacher-Student Feedback Loop for Technology Training in the Classroom
*
Dr. Gena Greher & Dr. Alex Ruthmann - UMass Lowell
* Pat Fitzpatrick - Lowell High School

* Thursday, March 26 - 12:15-1:15pm - Beacon Hill 2 & 3

UMass Lowell Alumni Reception
* Thursday, March 26 - 8 to 10pm - Beacon Hill Complex

Preparing the Next Generation of Music Educators: How Well do Colleges do the Job?
* Dr. Gena Greher - UMass Lowell
* Dr. Rhoda Bernard - Boston Conservatory
* Dr. Sandi Nicolucci - Boston University

* Friday, March 27 - 3-4pm - Harborside Room

Technology, Composing and the Arts: Student Projects from the Classroom
* Dr. Alex Ruthmann - UMass Lowell
* Tony Beatrice - Pentucket Regional Middle & High School

* Saturday, March 28 - 11:45am-12:45pm - Waterfront 1A

Session handouts will be posted here shortly!

Conference details can be found at http://www.mmeaonline.org/.

UMass Lowell Music Ed students work with local middle school students

Improvising in the hallwayOver the past year, senior music education majors have been taking General Music Methods I and II with Dr. Gena Greher and me at UMass Lowell. Since October of 2008 these students have spent Wednesday mornings teaching 3rd, 6th and 7th grade classes at the Bartlett Community Partnership School here in Lowell, MA. RehearsingLast week one group of our students invited the 7th grade class from the Bartlett School to spend the day at UMass Lowell recording a song the class arranged in the UMass Lowell recording studio.

Students spent the morning rehearsing their arrangements and taking turns leading peer-conducted free improvisations. Once rehearsed, they spent the balance of the morning laying down the vocal tracks, classroom instrument and guitar tracks followed by the piano accompaniment.

Singing in the studioThe rehearsing and recording was facilitated by UML graduate sound recording technology major Tim Brault and UML music education majors Jo Price, Lindsey Sherman and Zach Cooper.

After the recording session, the Bartlett School students experienced a rare treat... a live lecture demonstration of vintage Edison wax cylinder recording. UML Sound Recording Technology Professor Alex Case made arrangements for Gerald Fabris, curator of the Edison National Historical Site in West Orange, NJ, to visit and present the lecture/demo. Virgin wax cylinders were flown in from the United Kingdom and UMass Lowell SRT major Brian Corey composed a piece to be used in one of six live takes directly to wax cylinder.

wax recording

Each of the takes were recorded directly to wax cylinder as well as digitally in mono, stereo and surround sound mic-ing. After each take, the composer listened back to the wax cylinder performance and physically readjusted the placement of the musician's closer or further away from the recording "horn." We take for granted today that we can simply move a microphone to achieve a different sound. Back then you had to move the musicians!

I am told that all of the wax cylinder recordings from the session will be digitized and the audio will be posted side by side with the digital mono, stereo and surround sound versions on the Edison National Historical Site webpage in the near future. I'll be sure to post a link when that goes live.

Click here for the article and more information about the project in the Lowell Sun.

Saturday, January 31, 2009

UMass Lowell CMENC Composition Festival deadline near!

The University of Massachusetts Lowell Collegiate Chapter of the Music Educators National Conference is proud to announce our Ninth Annual K-12 Composition Festival. We are inviting you to send in audio recordings of your students’ compositions. Submissions from students in grades K-12 are once again eligible and encouraged.

Please send each composition on a separate CD recording. We ask that you limit composition lengths to ten minutes to allow us to include as many pieces as possible. Please also send four copies of the score on standard letter-size paper with the CD. Compositions will not be considered without scores. Four copies of the attached form should be included with each submission for each of our four adjudicators. Only one composition may be submitted per student. The Youth Composition Festival will be held in May of 2009 in UMass Lowell’s Fisher Recital Hall.


Send CDs, Scores, and Application Forms by February 1st, 2009 to:

UMass Lowell Dept. of Music
Dr. Gena Greher, Composition Festival
35 Wilder Street; Suite 3
Lowell, MA 01854


If you have any questions/comments/concerns, please contact Marissa Broe, the Composition Festival Chair, by phone at (978) 934-3881, or by e-mail at uml_menc@yahoo.com.

New Music Performamatics projects launched for the Spring 2009 semester


During the Spring 2009 term, two music performamatics projects will be underway. As part of a National Science Foundation CPATH grant several faculty at UMass Lowell from the Music, Art, English and Computer Science departments are allied in collaborative interdisciplinary projects designed to attract more students to computer science majors through arts-focused experiences.

This semester music education professor Gena Greher and computer science professor Jesse Heines are collaborating on a general education course entitled Sound Thinking:

Course Description:

What is sound? How do we capture it, manipulate it, and harness it in the digital world? The field for multimedia applications is expanding, creating new challenges for artists, technologists, and educators as well as consumers.

This course will explore the intersection of the arts with technology, where students majoring in the arts will interact with those in computer science to explore the art and science of digital audio from the perspective of basic end-user applications. The specific applications to be examined will be chosen based on their abilities to promote creative expression and exploration. We will also consider the underlying code that allows these programs to run and function.

This course will use a learner-centered approach that emphasizes project-based experiences. It will provide students with multiple opportunities to explore, create, and solve problems with music technology. The concept of collaboration is integral to this course. As the workforce moves to a more collaborative structure, it is important that students learn to work in groups with others who may not share their skill sets and levels of expertise, and that they gain experience in problem-solving the myriad issues that arise when using technology.



Music education professor Alex Ruthmann is also collaborating with computer science professor Jesse Heines as part of a synchronized course. Ruthmann's General Music Methods II  students will be working together with students from Prof. Heines' GUI Programming II course on a project to develop online music composing software. Working together with middle school students at the Bartlett Community Partnership School in Lowell, MA music education and computer science students will collaboratively develop new online music composing applications for use by middle school students. 



Graduate Student Tony Beatrice Featured in MENC Online Article

Tony Beatrice (B.M. in Music Studies '08; M.M. in Music Teaching '09) was recently interviewed for an online article for the MENC (The National Association for Music Education) website entitled: What's Lurking in Your Online Profile, a special feature for the Future Teachers section.

While finishing his Masters degree in Music Teaching here at UMass Lowell, he is Director of Instrumental Music at Pentucket Regional High School and Middle School in West Newbury, MA. Check out his website and online student projects.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Alex Ruthmann presents Keynote at Michigan Music Conference


Technology fluency and the ability to think creatively are two skills highly prized by employers in the 21st Century knowledge-based economy. As music educators, we are intimately familiar with the possibilities our music classes provide for developing these skills in ways that are personally meaningful and engaging for students. However, new developments in interactive online and portable computing are inspiring totally new cultures of engaging with and experiencing music. In a world where our children and students touch the screens of iPhones or move Nintendo Wii controllers in a whole-body approach to experiencing music, it is imperative that we take the time to understand these new modes of music making and to learn how to better connect to our students' increasingly complex techno-musical culture within our music classes. Today's technologies are enabling a more active engagement with music than ever before. This presentation will offer small glimpses into the musical worlds of today's students and offer insights into how we as music educators can support this culture within our school programs.



This extended, hands-on workshop will engage participants with area students in a variety of composing projects. This workshop will focus on how to develop an in-class peer-learning network where students along with the teacher support each other musically and pedagogically. In our dialogue with actual students, special attention will be paid to how the design of the composing experience can enable or hinder students' creative thinking and expression. 

All links and presentation slides are available on Alex Ruthmann's blog at http://www.alexruthmann.com/blog/mmc-2009/.