Daily archives:April 8, 2015
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9 years ago
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Teaching beat making and digital music production is always as much of a learning experience for me as it is an opportunity to share my techniques and skills with my students. This semester at the James Baldwin School, I have been working with a great group of kids with a very eclectic set of sensibilities. Some already have experience using Fruity Loops, FL Studio, Ableton or other production software on their laptops and tablets at home to make beats or tracks. Some are completely new to the process music making. Still others have experience playing traditional analog instruments, and are interested in expanding their musical palettes. The key guiding principle for me as I work to guide each student toward their own personal music making goals is to instill in them an ethic of making music from intention. By this I don't mean that that they need to decide in advance what their music means, or what experience the end listener will eventually have; although that is another, very interesting conversation. I simply mean that I encourage them to develop the skill of hearing the music in their heads, and having a vision of the ultimate result before setting ideas down. This is especially challenging at the present moment, because many production tools, and especially software based production methods enable us to bypass that step by using pre-existing loops and samples, and automatically time syncing them. Some even put them in tune with one another. While this allows for a n[...]
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9 years ago
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https://vimeo.com/124425796
I am sometimes asked to describe my music teaching methodology. Having done this frequently, I have distilled my basic philosophy to a few key themes, which accentuate the contrast between how I approach music education with Art for Progress, and how music is traditionally taught in public schools. There are clear differences in goals, in repertoire, and in what information is considered important to convey.
First, the goals are different at their essence. Traditional music instruction involves learning the mechanics of an instrument and the written language of music notation in order to reproduce pieces of music that have earned their place in the vocabulary of music educators, often, though not always, centuries or decades ago. There is little explanation of the relationships between the elements of music, or consideration of building skills toward creating original music. Traditionally trained players are often discouraged from improvising, and develop an aversion to it and even a fear of hitting wrong notes if they dare explore uncharted territory.
On the other hand, many untrained musicians, often referred to as self-taught, are undeterred by the pitfalls of exploration because they know it to be the path toward discovery. These include many folk, blues, rock, reggae, indie, pop and hip-hop musicians. Rather than learning music note for note from transcriptions, they develop a modular understanding of chords, scales, and riffs, which [...]
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9 years ago
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The greatest reward a teacher can receive from his students is that they exceed his expectations and do work that is inspired, inspiring, and truly reverses the student/teacher dynamic by teaching the teacher something new. I am exceptionally fortunate to have had that experience many times over as a teaching artist for Art for Progress. Two examples that stand out in my mind are: the band Statik Vision and Humanities Prep junior and chanteuse April T.
The members of Statik Vision have been studying with me for almost four years, beginning while I was at Bronxdale High in the Bronx. When I left Bronxdale and came to Humanities Prep in Chelsea, it was important to me and to AFP to continue to provide opportunities for learning to former AFP program participants who wanted to further develop their musical education. Jason McFarlane and Ramond Moreta were students in the same building as Bronxdale (Christopher Columbus HS Campus) who gravitated to the Bronxdale after school program when principal John Chase asked that the program be made open to the entire campus. Upon setting up shop at Humanities Prep the following year, I invited them and a number of other former AFP students to make the trek to Manhattan to attend sessions after-after school. They began to come regularly, and to bring friends who were both talented and eager to learn, and formed a band, T-10. I helped coach the band’s rehearsals, while also allotting time to give lessons in guitar and bass technique, jazz[...]
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9 years ago
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It’s tempting to wonder what Kurt Cobain would have thought about Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the much buzzed-about new documentary by Brett Morgen. On the one hand, he probably would have appreciated the unorthodox visuals, much of it dark, unsettling animation that builds on the musician’s own drawings. He would probably have been OK with Morgen’s use of Cobain himself as the main narrator, through interviews, home movies and notebook entries. But being an easily humiliated soul (one of the film’s revelations) who both craved attention and hated fame, Kurt might have had a hard time digesting such a raw, unflinching portrayal of himself, or really, any portrayal of himself. As the film shows again and again, Cobain was tormented by his own contradictory nature – he both wanted and despised normalcy, success, maybe life itself.
Like Morgen’s The Kid Stays in the Picture (adapted from producer Robert Evans’s autobiography), this is far from a conventional documentary. With its elaborate animation sequences and chaotic audio and video montages culled from films, ads and other sources including Cobain himself, it’s almost an art film – which makes sense given Morgen’s attempt to portray the inside of his subject’s head. It’s not a pretty place.
Montage of Heck (the title comes from one of Kurt’s own audio creations) is the first documentary about the Nirvana frontman that is “fully authorized” by his family. (Daughter Frances Bean Cobain is an executive producer; Ku[...]
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