The experience with Rodney made me think, “Why don’t we music together more in this class?”. It is great that we are going to be reading books and learning about topics, but personally, I would love more opportunity to practice music making and building my musicianship, since that is what I plan on doing with this degree. For instance, I would love to learn how to sing more efficiently and confidently. Also, improving my ability to improvise on various instruments. I also love the idea of having guest speakers, like Rodney, who come in to share stories and music which we can participate together in.
Just to give whomever is reading this some more context, next Saturday I am going to be facilitating a drum circle at Culture Days in Milton, representing the music school I work for, and I don’t know any ‘go-to’ songs to sing other than Hallelujah or Kumbaya. Instead, I am going to improvise on the spot to be effective. Maybe if we practiced some material in class to be used when facilitating these situations, it would make me a more confident community musician. Personally, I know I’m not going to become more confident by reading a book. I can only speak for myself here, but I learn better by doing and participating. I hope we can explore this idea further.
Murph
Hey Murph,
I enjoyed this post. I enjoyed the playing we’ve done in class too, although I think it’s going to be tricky balancing th performance/academic ratio in class because we have people from such different musical/educational backgrounds in class. ( Which I think is incredibly great and useful. For me, whenever things go to any sort of academic theory or almost anything not directly related to music I start to panic because I think I have a lot of gap filling to do. I guess between all of us, we’ll find a balance. Also, I think the idea of improvising when teaching your drum circle is a very good one. I think it’s great for the students to improvise or even for them to see you in a improvisatory situation. Just my two cents.
Cheers,
Ted