Fabulous flute warmups from Jen Cluff, free downloads!
9 essential skills kids should learn
Highlights from this week’s ArtsJournal:
- 31 categories Grammy organizers cut
- Pittsburgh symphony looks for concerto soloist via YouTube
- Why is it so hard for new musical instruments to catch on?
- Reinventing classical music, in pubs
- Benjamin Zander on his firing from NEC
- Meryl Streep on her opera training
The latest from Astrid Baumgardner, Why You Need to Plan and and Why The Result Isn’t Important!
And the latest from the Savvy Musician, the mistake that topples careers and industries
Seth Godin being clever on Spouting and Scouting (talking about what we care about and looking at what others are talking about)
From Angela Beeching’s Monday Bytes: check out author Brad Meltzer and this inspirational 16 minute video and consider writing your own obituary
Want to be more creative? Be nice to yourself
So you think you know? More on Alexander Technique at Cello Bello
Some upcoming professional development opportunities:
- Global Learning Studio Summer Professional Development Workshop at the American School in London, June 18-22
- Americans for the Arts 2012 Annual Convention, June 8-10 in San Antonio, TX, earlybird reg. is Fri, April 27
- CMS Film-Music Pedagogy Institute, May 14-17, 2012, The University of Miami, Frost School of Music
- Your Body is Your Strad: Feldenkrais for Musicians (In conjunction with the 2012 National Summer Cello Institute), June 1-16, 2012, University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Music
- Road of Creativity’s Music Entrepreneurship Retreat, June 3-9, 2012, University of South Carolina School of Music
Columbia, South Carolina - Summerflute, What Every Flutist Needs to Know About the Body, the Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais Method®, June 25-29, 2012, Columbus, Georgia
Quote of the week, from Improv Insights:
Removing the musician’s eyes from the process of making music can produce truly astonishing results. You can use a blindfold, turn off the lights, play by candlelight, or ask everyone to close their eyes. Whichever method you use, you will hear a dramatic increase in the group’s musicianship almost immediately. Members of the ensemble will listen more carefully and be more aware of how they use their bodies to produce sound.
Learning by ear, rather than by eye, utilizes the brain in a completely different manner: one that is more consistent with the mental hierarchy we need to be truly great musicians.
–Julie Lyonn Lieberman, The Creative Band & Orchestra
And, speaking of learning by ear…Read about an innovative project with Grade 7 beginning band students at Southridge School in British Columbia (Canada). They worked collaboratively in groups, learned songs by ear and arranged them for performances, based on Musical Futures out of the UK.
Students at Southridge School in British Columbia
Images from
http://www.pianomother.com/assets/images/17-Music-by-ear-PG17-978×1024.jpg
Weekly Digest: Effective Practice, It’s Up to You, Take A Stand
January 25, 2012
The improv game, AMAPFALAP = “as much as possible from as little as possible,” invented by W. A. Matthieu in The Listening Book
NEC and the Firing of Benjamin Zander
Sweden’s School Without Walls
Harmony Project gets featured on ABC news
An ArtsJournal Discussion | Jan. 23-27, 2012, on Audience Engagement
Rather than losing his temper, this musician adapted the notorious Nokia theme, much to the delight of his audience
Bill T. Jones does John Cage
Q2 Interview: Composer-Performer Du Yun Talks Chinese Opera and Electronic Music
Great advice on writing cover letters and why it is essential to think and act entrepreneurially
The 3 Levels of Effective Practice
The Case for Active Practicing
Become a confident performer
Seth Godin says it’s completely up to you
And start singing!
Celtic music fans! Boxwood Canada 2012 registration is now open
Final note: Next week in LA, the Take a Stand 2012 Symposium takes place, and I will be going as a YOLA Ambassador. The Weekly Digest will be off next week, and look for blog posts about El Sistema and my experiences there when I return!
In the meantime have a listen to this radio program from WHYY Radio Times from 1/23/12 featuring Stanford Thompson, Executive Director of Play On Philly, Jamie Bernstein, who is working on a new documentary on El Sistema, and Tricia Tunstall, the author of the new book, Changing Lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the Transformatiive Power of Music. Go to: http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2012/01/24/15442/
Think You Can, or Making a Living as a Musician, from the NEC’s Entrepreneurial Musician Blog
When it comes to careers, musicians learn to improvise
Alexis Del Palazzo on Participatory Audiences
Is Classical Music too elitist or not enough?
Astrid Baumgardner’s latest, Finding Passion in Your Life’s Work: Do What You Love
Just live Your Own Damn Life, from the Sun Magazine
Michael Morgan of the Oakland East Bay Symphony pushing programming in new directions
Musical America’s musicians of the year
The success of the LA Philharmonic
The orchestra’s guide to looking cool
Photos from Mahler Remixed from the New England Conservatory , a creative performance featuring creative arrangements
From the blog String Visions, Breaking Boundaries with Aaron Dworkin
Coaching Advice from the author of the Talent Code: Talk less, Matter more
Some Alexander Technique observations
Check out Yoga Nidra, thanks to John Ranck who shared this on the FLUTE list
Video of the Week:
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull with orchestra, thanks Flutronix for passing this on!
Showing Up
September 28, 2011
By Ariel Friedman, guest blogger
This post was originally published at NEC’s entrepreneurial musicianship alumni blog on 9/28/2011, and is reposted here with permission from the author. IPAP thanks Ariel Friedman for sharing this post.
Now that school has started again and I’m not there, I’ve been thinking about how to commit to continued creative growth without the container of school. I am a classical cellist gone folk cellist gone aspiring jazz cellist, pianist, singer, and songwriter and now that I’ve graduated, one might think I’d have all the time in the world to hone these skills. On the contrary, my days are filled with errands, gigs to play, lessons to teach, and a seemingly endless flow of email-answering and planning. I feel grateful for my active touring and teaching schedule, but I continue to come up against this question: how can I make my own music and wellbeing a priority?
I think it is the constant striving for creation that propels us forward in this world. No matter how many times I practice a new standard or Popper etude, nothing compares to the satisfaction of writing a piece of music, or adding a new verse to a song in progress. It is this act of tapping into something “beyond the margins of the self,” as Mary Oliver puts it, that I am after—this elusive quality, combining concentration with subconscious, and the time and energy it takes to access it—and what continues to fall to the bottom of my to-do list.
For most of my life, I have struggled with feelings of powerful guilt if I do not somehow improve myself in a given day. It’s only been within the last three years that I’ve begun to access the part of me that creates music, and now there is a new level of commitment at stake. Practicing is still something I check off the list. But songwriting? The creation of new, deeply personal and relevant art? Do these things have a place on my checklist?
Yes.Yes yes yes.
And that’s because it is about showing up. It is about waking up in the morning, doing yoga, eating breakfast, and writing. If I do not show up to my work, to that higher self beyond my own margins, then that self will disappoint me. Writing, in whatever form, is not about waiting for inspiration to strike. In the opening line of my favorite essay by Mary Oliver, she writes, “If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet—one or the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere—there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them.” Writing takes place when I show up, whether or not I am inspired, day after day after day.
We are a culture who shows up: for our jobs, for our students, our teachers, our families, our partners, our friends. We show up at the registry of motor vehicles when our license has expired. We show up at the grocery store when we’re out of bread. But how often do we show up for ourselves?
I don’t think this answer will come to me in the bright flash of revelation. By now, it is slowly dawning on me that there will never be a day when I say, “Now I am done practicing. Now I have arrived.” If I did arrive (wherever that is), life would be awfully boring. Instead, I am in pursuit of pursuit. For the rest of my life I will be navigating how to write “Show Up For Self” on the top of my daily list, just as I will be negotiating what it means and how to approach the process of creating meaningful music (while, ever-hopeful, simultaneously practicing all of my instruments and genres). The first, and hardest, thing I have learned is that patience must be involved: patience with the writing process and patience with myself, for the myriad of days when I just don’t show up.
In this monthly blog post, I hope to continue to reflect on my feelings about this issue in relation to my current experiences outside the walls of any institution.
You can read more from Ariel and other authors writing about Entrepreneurial Musicianship at http://necentrepreneur.posterous.com/
Innovative Ideas in Performance and Pedagogy (IPAP) 
