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Sound And Music Education In Schools: Listening, Playing And Adapting To Current Times
Figuring out how to safely teach in-person during COVID times and adapting music education to virtual platforms are challenges that we understand. Our Teaching Artists are working hard to help teachers and schools do just that!
ArtistsInspire Teaching Artists collaborate with teachers to facilitate workshops that bring inspiring music and sound experiences to any class, whether in a specialized music education, general or subject-specific classroom. All our Artists are vetted for their professional work and experience engaging children and youth in Music & Sound activities and are experienced in facilitating online musical experiences.
Our current ELAN Artists specialized in Music & Sound include:
Alison Notkin, Roy MacLaren, Geremia Lorenzo Lodi, Guillaume Jabbour, Louise Campbell, The Préville Fine Arts Centre, Rob Lutes, Kathy Kennedy, J.P. Mortier, Annette Bauer, Les Brasileirinhos, Sheri Pearlman, Joey Zaurrini, Auro Moura, Nadia Bashalani, The Préville Fine Arts Centre, Luciano Porto, Taia Goedert, Alireza Tarviji, Stéphanie Jones, Fana Soro, Patrick Hutchinson, moe clark
Music Education: What Does Music And Sound Bring To Schools?
When asked what Music & Sound brings to schools and students in these times, our Artists agree: cultivating the ability to listen and relate to each other and the world. Beyond this starting point, their answers are as passionate and diverse as their practices. As Singer-songwriter and Teaching Artist Rob Lutes says, lyric writing specifically is “a way to take things from the inside, and put them on the outside in some creative way and then share them with other people. What ends up happening is people realize that we’re all kind of struggling in similar ways.” As Teaching Artist Geremia Lodi puts it, music “connects us via reciprocity, to our fellow schoolmates… we are shaping the music together, and at the same time, listening.”
Music In Schools… And Music Outside Of Schools!
Teaching Artist Guillaume Jabbour connects Music and Sound to the natural environment, saying, “By paying attention to our immediate surroundings and the sounds that are created naturally in the environment whether that be from cars or people talking or walking or birds or the wind in the trees, it just makes life better. We pay attention to our immediate surroundings and recognize the beauty in that Sonic landscape.” Teaching Artist Purna takes a similar approach to indoor sonic environments, asking students to record an indoor sound that are then mixed together to, as she states, “turn a tough time into a positive one.”
Teaching Artist Louise Campbell relates Music & Sound to history and our personal contexts: “Music has such a fantastic history to be learned from. We can play works that are hundreds of years old, and gain an understanding of what people lived through back then. We can also create our own works to offer to each other that speak about our own experiences, giving them to somebody in the next classroom or a family member or friend. Music in schools is all about creating connections and creating community.”
What do our Music & Sound Teaching Artists do with students? Our Artists are creative in how they facilitate music in schools, including activities that range from listening to and creating soundscapes, body percussion, building instruments using found objects, virtual improvisation on Zoom, to songwriting and even opera! Our partner Jeunesse Musicales welcomes elementary students into the world of opera through an interactive workshop series that explores the voice, and finishes with a short online performance sure to appeal to young children: Opera Candy: the Gourmet adventure of Hansel and Gretel!
Using Today’s Tools For Music Education: Sound Editing And Digital Production
For those music educators interested in levelling up students’ skills in sound editing and digital production, this virtual age of music education is full of possibility. Our artists will work with you to achieve your goals, the skills and experience of your students and the technology available. As Teaching Artist Guillaume Jabbour says, “you don’t need a lot of fancy equipment to make music in schools”.
As Teaching Artist Louise Campbell says, “There was no such thing as affordable sound equipment really when I was a kid. Now, students have it in their own phone. Just imagine where we can go if the kids today have great chops on their instruments and also start to learn the digital production skills in order to make their own music… If we work together, then we can do anything.”
For more information about ArtistsInspire Grants, see:
Artist Profiles (select Music & Sound in the search engine)
Artist Interviews
Teacher Testimonials
Music & Sound Projects