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.
Tag Archives: schools
Marx and Althusser
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg Unlike most social theorists of his era and since, Marx can actually write. His prose has a rhythm and urgency that feels more like a sermon than a scholarly text. Of course, he has the advantage that he’s writing a manifesto, so he isn’t bogged down by nuance, …
Music Matters chapter six
Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class. It seems obvious that the point of music education is to foster musical understanding. But what is musical understanding, exactly? Where and how do we learn and teach it? On an emotional level, people seem to understand music just fine …
Music Matters chapter four
Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class. What is education? The etymology of the word “education” from its various Latin roots gives a good overview of modern senses of the word: Educationem: rearing children, animals, plants and promoting physical development Educare: to train or mold …
Music Matters chapter one
This post is public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class.
Composing in the classroom
The hippest music teachers help their students create original music. But what exactly does that mean? What even is composition? In this post, I take a look at two innovators in music education and try to arrive at an answer. Matt McLean is the founder of the amazing Young Composers and Improvisers Workshop. He teaches his students composition using …
The harmonica explains all of Western music
If you want to understand the vast cultural struggle taking place in the study of Western harmony, you could do worse than to start with the harmonica. This unassuming little instrument was designed in central Europe in the 19th century to play the popular music of that time and place: waltzes, oom-pah music, and light …
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Lifelong general music
I’ve been blessed that both institutions where I teach music technology give me considerable freedom in how I do it. I find the music side to be quite a bit more interesting than the technology side, so I center my classes around creative music-making, and we address technical concepts as we encounter them. I’m learning …
Do you need music theory to create music?
This question gets asked a lot. It’s really four questions: 1) What is music theory? 2) Does music theory really teach you what music is? 3) Does music theory teach you how to create music? And 4) how do you learn music theory? Let’s take these questions one at a time.
Talent considered harmful
My fellow radical music educator Jared O’Leary wrote a pretty remarkable paper with a deceptively dry title: A Content Analysis on the Use of the Word ‘Talent’ in the Journal of Research in Music Education, 1953-2012. It got me thinking about talent, and what a pernicious concept it is.