Module 2 Reflection
This week, one of the big topics was improvisation in both our readings and in our discussion post. Improvisation is an interesting subject in music education as there are teachers who are big proponents of it, but there are even more teachers who neglect it. In both cases, it comes down to their experience with improvisation, and even more so, their experience with jazz, as in most public school settings, and even in some colleges, jazz is viewed as the only place for improvisation to happen. Bauer (2014) points out that improvisation is found "in many vernacular musics (rock, pop, folk), jazz, musics of non-Western cultures, and historically in some Western art musics, such as the cadenzas of concertos" (p. 51). Many of us forget or just do not realize that improvisation is utilized in these other musics and a big part of that comes down to what we were taught in our own educational upbringings. For several music educators, either a change in their curriculum or a widening of the content taught needs to be done to introduce our students to improvisation. Teachers lacking in experience with improvisation also need to become more inclined to learn about it, even if it means learning right along with their students. That could actually help ease the fears of students as they would see their teacher also making some of the same mistakes as they are. I mentioned it and elaborated a bit on it in my discussion post, but I am a bit iffy in trying to implement improvisation into a concert band setting because most if not all the music we are doing, there is not any room for it (time is also an issue). Emily Hill in her response to my original post brought up the idea of improvising things such as the rhythm or tempos which could then result in a discussion for why the composer made their creative decisions in composing the piece. That is very intriguing and something I will consider implementing as that could bring about a good discussion about the piece.
Technological tools such as Band-in-a-Box and SmartMusic provide great ways in which to introduce students to improvisation, and musical creativity in general. Some students may fear trying to improvise for the first time in front of their peers. These technological tools provide these students with the comfort of practicing improvisation on their own time, such as at home, without the fear of messing up in front of their peers. They can practice with these tools and become more confident to the point that they will be comfortable with improvising in a group setting. I have never gotten the chance to use SmartMusic, but I have seen it used and I know that it can also be utilized to practice written music and provide feedback to the student. This is a tool that I would like to implement in future semesters. The teacher version is only $40 per year, which is fairly inexpensive, especially for what it provides. I am working mainly with music majors, and although I know they practice, they are mainly practicing music for their applied lessons, and often neglect to practice their ensemble music. Having SmartMusic can resolve that as it could be implemented as a weekly homework assignment.
This week's projects allowed us to work with MuseScore and Noteflight. The latter got to have its own separate blog entry, but MuseScore did not. Prior to this course, I had very little experience with MuseScore. This past fall semester was the first time that I had actually downloaded it. The reason that I downloaded it was because I found a marching band arrangement online that was from MuseScore, but I needed to shorten it. At the time, I did not realize MuseScore was free until one of my students (who happened to be in my office as I was about to start that project) told me it was free and briefly showed me what I needed to do to shorten the arrangement. That saved a lot of time as I was originally going to enter it into Finale manually. That was the only time that I had used MuseScore until this week. Just like Noteflight, MuseScore is a great and free tool to have available to students and teachers for music composition and arranging. I did have some frustrations with MuseScore, particularly when I was trying to select multiple measures to copy. There were times when I would click in the measure to select it, but the program thought I was trying to select a note or something else and it took several clicks to finally get it to realize I just wanted to select the measure for copying. What made it worse was when I needed to select multiple measures and that same issue would happen in the last measure of the series of measures I was trying to copy. Zooming in resolved this, but as I was doing this project on my laptop, which only has a 17-inch screen, that made it a bit annoying, particularly when having to scroll through the score. The only other annoyance I had was following along with the tutorial videos. In the first two videos, Dr. George Hess showed us how to set up the score, but then in the third video, there was only one part displayed, and he did not show us what he did to display just the one part (and it did not indicate which part it actually was). That happened in a couple of other videos when following along to do this project. I eventually got it all figured out of course, but it would have been nice if it did not jump around like it did. It was also a bit annoying in that the version demonstrated in the tutorial videos was of MuseScore 2.0, and we were using 3.0, and not all of the options are in the same place. There were a couple of times I had to pause the video to figure out where an option was because of the differences between the two versions. If MuseScore does not have new tutorial videos by the time this course is offered again, that is something to make aware of to the students.
This week was an intriguing week full of some great discussion about improvisation, various technological tools, as well as introductions into MuseScore and Noteflight. Although Finale is my choice for music composition software, I would most definitely use either of these if Finale was not an option.
Reference:
Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Technological tools such as Band-in-a-Box and SmartMusic provide great ways in which to introduce students to improvisation, and musical creativity in general. Some students may fear trying to improvise for the first time in front of their peers. These technological tools provide these students with the comfort of practicing improvisation on their own time, such as at home, without the fear of messing up in front of their peers. They can practice with these tools and become more confident to the point that they will be comfortable with improvising in a group setting. I have never gotten the chance to use SmartMusic, but I have seen it used and I know that it can also be utilized to practice written music and provide feedback to the student. This is a tool that I would like to implement in future semesters. The teacher version is only $40 per year, which is fairly inexpensive, especially for what it provides. I am working mainly with music majors, and although I know they practice, they are mainly practicing music for their applied lessons, and often neglect to practice their ensemble music. Having SmartMusic can resolve that as it could be implemented as a weekly homework assignment.
This week's projects allowed us to work with MuseScore and Noteflight. The latter got to have its own separate blog entry, but MuseScore did not. Prior to this course, I had very little experience with MuseScore. This past fall semester was the first time that I had actually downloaded it. The reason that I downloaded it was because I found a marching band arrangement online that was from MuseScore, but I needed to shorten it. At the time, I did not realize MuseScore was free until one of my students (who happened to be in my office as I was about to start that project) told me it was free and briefly showed me what I needed to do to shorten the arrangement. That saved a lot of time as I was originally going to enter it into Finale manually. That was the only time that I had used MuseScore until this week. Just like Noteflight, MuseScore is a great and free tool to have available to students and teachers for music composition and arranging. I did have some frustrations with MuseScore, particularly when I was trying to select multiple measures to copy. There were times when I would click in the measure to select it, but the program thought I was trying to select a note or something else and it took several clicks to finally get it to realize I just wanted to select the measure for copying. What made it worse was when I needed to select multiple measures and that same issue would happen in the last measure of the series of measures I was trying to copy. Zooming in resolved this, but as I was doing this project on my laptop, which only has a 17-inch screen, that made it a bit annoying, particularly when having to scroll through the score. The only other annoyance I had was following along with the tutorial videos. In the first two videos, Dr. George Hess showed us how to set up the score, but then in the third video, there was only one part displayed, and he did not show us what he did to display just the one part (and it did not indicate which part it actually was). That happened in a couple of other videos when following along to do this project. I eventually got it all figured out of course, but it would have been nice if it did not jump around like it did. It was also a bit annoying in that the version demonstrated in the tutorial videos was of MuseScore 2.0, and we were using 3.0, and not all of the options are in the same place. There were a couple of times I had to pause the video to figure out where an option was because of the differences between the two versions. If MuseScore does not have new tutorial videos by the time this course is offered again, that is something to make aware of to the students.
This week was an intriguing week full of some great discussion about improvisation, various technological tools, as well as introductions into MuseScore and Noteflight. Although Finale is my choice for music composition software, I would most definitely use either of these if Finale was not an option.
Reference:
Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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