music

Just to follow up on some of the posts here and on Twitter about music as a form of literacy... here are some references that might be of interest to anyone who plans to write on this topic in future.

If you missed my Tweet this weekend, I posted a link to an All Things Considered interview with the director of a new independent film featuring the music of the Bayaka pygmies:  http://n.pr/wmrAhh

The film, Oka!, is a fictionalized account of ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno's experience living with the Bayaka, who create music ingeniously from all sorts of objects. Certainly we should be wary of the film's old familiar theme: "...man from economically developed, formerly known as civilized world, goes off to live and find meaning in traditional, formerly known as primitive society...", as well as the idea that any society is more "ancient" or "pristine" than any other... but, still the film looks interesting or at least fun and the library will acquire it when it comes out on DVD.  Here's a link to the trailer:  http://imdb.to/y5r16G

I want to expand on a definition of literacy that I’ve been working on through this class and my Music Education class. @jrbacch tweeted “Music a form of literacy? Music notes themselves, crescendos, learning how to read music, etc? #BMCed250” and I responded “thinking of literacy as access to a way of connecting w/ppl, ex cultural literacy, tech literacy makes music fit” [into a definition of literacy].

I spend a lot of my free time working on music for my a cappella group--I teach songs to the group and arrange music for the group to learn. When I’m deciding who will sing which voice part on any particular song, as well as while I’m leading rehearsal, I think a lot about who can read music. In auditions for my group, we ask if the auditioner can read music, because it’s a valuable skill. Within the context of a cappella, if I ask “can she read?” I’m asking about whether a singer can read music. And it does feel that fundamental to me. It is possible to be in the group and succeed without being able to read music, but it requires that I take a different approach in my teaching. I have to refer to notes’ position within the measure rather than their duration and name (e.g., “the altos need to watch the second-to-last note in measure 85--it should be longer and higher” instead of “altos: in measure 85, you’re jumping up a third, and it’s a half note, so be sure to hold it out”).