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Composing Our Future is the ideal book for music teacher educators seeking to learn more about composition education. It provides resources to guide the development of undergraduate and graduate curricula, specific courses, professional development workshops, and environments where composition education can flourish.
Learn how to develop and sustain multimodal, project-based learning (PBL) instruction in secondary English Language Arts classrooms. National standards encourage authentic forms of reading, writing, and communication that can support college and career readiness, and this book highlights PBL as a powerful way to harness students’ interests and engage them in academically rigorous learning. The authors provide specific, research-informed curricular approaches and instructional guidance for classroom teachers, as well as an overview of the dimensions of PBL that are often overlooked in the broad expectations of inquiry-based teaching. Instead of “quick fix” lessons, Compose Our World explores how core dimensions of equitable teaching—such as social and emotional support, universal design for learning, and cultivating classroom community—function as the bedrock for student success in PBL contexts and beyond. Book Features: Based on the authors’ extensive experience developing and studying a PBL curriculum.Brings PBL to life through classroom vignettes and teacher and student voices.Provides classroom resources that facilitate customization to unique contexts. Shares ideas for developing teacher communities around PBL practices.Offers additional curriculum materials online.Appropriate for ELA teachers new to PBL, as well as veterans.
Each composer addresses the following topics: Biographical information, The creative process ... how a composer works, Orchestration, Views from the composer to the conductor, Commissioning new works, The teaching of composition, Influential individuals, Ten works all band conductors at all levels should study, Ten composers whose music speaks in especially meaningful ways, The future of the wind band, Other facets of everyday life, Comprehensive list of works for band.
In Composing for the Revolution: Nie Er and China’s Sonic Nationalism, Joshua Howard explores the role the songwriter Nie Er played in the 1930s proletarian arts movement and the process by which he became a nationalist icon. Composed only months before his untimely death in 1935, Nie Er’s last song, the “March of the Volunteers,” captured the rising anti-Japanese sentiment and was selected as China’s national anthem with the establishment of the People’s Republic. Nie was quickly canonized after his death and later recast into the “People’s Musician” during the 1950s, effectively becoming a national monument. Howard engages two historical paradigms that have dominated the study of twentieth-century China: revolution and modernity. He argues that Nie Er, active in the leftist artistic community and critical of capitalism, availed himself of media technology, especially the emerging sound cinema, to create a modern, revolutionary, and nationalist music. This thesis stands as a powerful corrective to a growing literature on the construction of a Chinese modernity, which has privileged the mass consumer culture of Shanghai and consciously sought to displace the focus on China’s revolutionary experience. Composing for the Revolution also provides insight into understudied aspects of China’s nationalism—its sonic and musical dimensions. Howard’s analyses highlights Nie’s extensive writings on the political function of music, examination of the musical techniques and lyrics of compositions within the context of left-wing cinema, and also the transmission of his songs through film, social movements, and commemoration. Nie Er shared multiple and overlapping identities based on regionalism, nationalism, and left-wing internationalism. His march songs, inspired by Soviet “mass songs,” combined Western musical structure and aesthetic with elements of Chinese folk music. The songs’ ideological message promoted class nationalism, but his “March of the Volunteers” elevated his music to a universal status thereby transcending the nation. Traversing the life and legacy of Nie Er, Howard offers readers a profound insight into the meanings of nationalism and memory in contemporary China. Composing for the Revolution underscores the value of careful reading of sources and the author’s willingness to approach a subject from multiple perspectives.
Music Outside the Lines is an informative and practical resource for all who are invested in making music composition an integral part of curriculum. Author Maud Hickey addresses the practical needs of music educators by offering both a well-grounded justification for teaching music composition and also a compendium of useful instructional ideas and classroom activities. Hickey begins with a rationale for teachers to begin composition activities in their own classrooms, with a thoughtful argument that demonstrates that all music teachers possess the skills and training needed to take children along the path toward composing satisfying musical compositions even if they themselves have never taken formal composition lessons. She also addresses some of the stickier issues that plague teaching music composition in schools such as assessment, notation, and technology. Most importantly, she introduces a curricular model for teaching composition, a model which provides an array of composition activities to try in the music classrooms and studios. These activities encourage musical and creative growth through music composition; while they are organized in logical units corresponding to existing teaching modules, they also offer jumping off points for music teachers to exercise their own creative thinking and create music composition activities that are customized to their classes and needs. As a whole, Music Outside the Lines both successfully reasons that music composition should be at the core of school music curriculum and also provides inservice and pre-service educators with an essential resource and compendium of practical tips and plans for fulfilling this goal.
This textbook enhances preservice and practicing music educators' understanding of ways to successfully engage children in music composition. It offers both a rationale for the presence of composition in the music education program and a thorough review of what we know of children's compositional practices to date. Minds On Music offers a solid foundation for planning and implementing composition lessons with students in grades PreK-12.
Music is for everyone — no prior experience required! Make Music! invites kids and families to celebrate the joy of sound with a variety of inventive activities, including playing dandelion trumpets, conducting percussion conversations, and composing their own pieces. Musician and educator Norma Jean Haynes brings the pioneering work of Ann Sayre Wiseman and John Langstaff to a new generation of kids aged 5 and up, focusing on the playfulness, spontaneity, and creativity of music. Kids explore rhythm with clapping, body drumming, and intonations. They learn to create found sound with kitchen pots and pans, the Sunday paper, or even the Velcro on their sneakers. And step-by-step instructions show how to make 35 different instruments, from chimes and bucket drums to a comb kazoo and a milk carton guitar.
