In preparation for the Jeffco Parent Arts Advisory Coalition meeting on May 20th, we put together this video to impress on the Jeffco Board of Directors that the public school music programs are extremely important.  Our student is Alexie Uecker, a private cello student at Golden Music and in the public school music program at Mountain Phoenix.   He describes how music has been important to him this year and his teacher, Justino Perez talks about his students and the impact the music lessons have on them. See it here:

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Tuesday brought genuine, actual, bona fide, what-I-call Good News, thanks to months of pressure from the Incorporated Society of Musician’sProtect Music Education campaign, which was supported by over 5,000 individuals and 134 music education and industry institutions. The government confirmed extra funding for the Music Education Hubs, to the tune of £18m, which means that the Hubs will receive £75m in 2015-16. And perhaps even more significantly, in a statement from David Laws, the Minister of State for Schools – also released on Tuesday - the government U-turned on its previous advice to Local Authorities that they shouldn’t continue to fund Music Services. Snuck in at the end of the statement is the following: “Local authorities will continue to have total discretion about whether to spend any of the ESG [Education Services Grant] they receive on providing music services”. Within the convolutions of Department-of-Education speak, that may not sound like much of a ringing endorsement, but it’s a return to the status quo, at least, in which the money for the Hubs is ring-fenced for music education, and Local Authorities still have the power and privilege of funding music in their area.

So, with all the twists and turns of these facts, figures, and jargon, it all means that more children will have access to music education, to instrumental tuition, and singing, and that the Hubs can plan their next year with confidence. Yet problems remain: those discretionary grants from Local Authorities have been slashed in recent years, and are still at threat, and the overall grant for Music Education is not back to the historic high that it reached a few years ago. The ISM’s wider campaign goes on, to secure commitments about what happens after 2016, and meaningful pledges from all the major parties about what happens in the next parliament. Along with the still patchy success of the Hub-project, there’s still a lot of work to be done – even if there’s also reason to celebrate just a little too…

Oh, and one interesting detail from the DoE’s latest statement on Music Education: from September, as part of the National Curriculum requirement for music tuition, every child will now be taught “how to read staff notation”, because this is, they say, “the language in which all the greatest works of Western classical music are written, including Mozart’s piano sonatas, Beethoven’s symphonies, and Verdi’s operas.” Well maybe, but it also happens to be the most useful mnemonic and creative system yet devised for many of the practices of jazz, rock, pop, and contemporary music. “Staff notation” isn’t just a route to the past, it’s one of the most important tools that will give children access to a whole world of musical possibility, to making music their own.

from the Guardian

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Image Retrieved From : http://www.mwoy.org/pages/pb/spb13/nancydemarchi

Scot McCracken is a second-generation music industry veteran who has managed and worked with countless producers and musicians, including Rihanna, The Black Eyed Peas, 98 Degrees, Joan Osborne and the Fugees.  His father, Hugh McCracken, was the only guy to play with all four Beatles, was the first member of Paul McCartney’s Wings and played with everyone from Aretha Franklin and Billy Joel to Paul Simon and Steely Dan. How did his career affect your attitudes to the music industry?

Scot McCracken: My dad had this amazing career that could only happen in that window of time when people actually touched instruments and made noises that other people had to record onto a tape – with no mistakes and in real time.  My father would always bring me to the studio with him, so as a little kid, I would be in recording sessions instead of baseball games. Music was like a second language to me and a passion that began at a very young age.  Scot decided to go into management as he saw them as the guys that were calling the shots.

Click and read the article with numerous fascinating anecdotes about the music industry.  More interesting however is Scot's comment on his new phone ap: "As I’m sure you’re aware, music has always been an original source of exploration and transformation, and I believe it will continue to drive social change. I want to inspire the younger generation with genuine role models so they feel empowered to step up and get involved. When you look at the 1^st Verse area of our app, you’ll see it’s buzzing with all the responses from folks eager to connect on today’s topics.  Music is a big part of that.  I want to unlock the potential of Snapverse to be a force that taps into the positive dynamics of culture today."

From Forbes Magazine:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/dansimon/2014/07/31/selfie-starter-scot-mccracken-rethinks-the-music-business/

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His dream has always been to travel the world and tell stories of change through music. Cyrus of Raw Music International went to Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region in the north of Iraq, because few places in the world are changing more rapidly.

He’d read about a rich musical tradition carried out under the most brutal conditions. Singers traveled on foot and kept the Kurdish language and culture alive despite the best efforts of Saddam Hussein. During that regime, the very act of singing in Kurdish was political, and many musicians caught doing it were punished with death.

But in the Kurdistan of 2014, I found a musical void. The old musicians were gone. They were dead, or living abroad, or they had simply taken other jobs and forgotten how to play. The ouster of the old dictator came with the side benefit of new oil money. Those who once sang sad songs of the Kurdish past now found themselves preoccupied with more capitalist pursuits. The Kurds may be ignoring the music of the past, because for the first time in recent history, they can afford to imagine a future.

He traveled mountain villages and dusty cities and found almost no one who could play an instrument. In Kalar, a conservative, religious desert town, 18 year-old Mohammad described his situation to me: “I crave art, but my family says make money. My mother burned my books. They don’t understand.”

He met Helly Luv and Iraj, two amazing artists from opposite ends of the socio-economic scale, trying desperately to make it in the new Kurdistan. "I may have arrived too late to meet the legendary singers of old. But I was just in time to meet the young musicians shaping a new nation"    NBC News story on Cyrus:  http://www.nbcnews.com/news/mideast/ground-kurdistan-musicians-shaping-new-nation-n157901 Continue reading

Opening in the beautiful church, with Mark Alan Filbert, Organist led the way in a nuance filled evening with Dielterich Buxtehude’s Praeludium in C.

The other performers were Catherine Rands on harp and Fran Piazza on flute. While the music selection was smart and interesting and Catherine and Mark were excellent players and delivered their parts well, Fran Piazza pulled sounds out of the flute that were beyond comprehension. I watched as the other audience members were in awe at the sheer beauty of her sounds, her imagination was intriguing to us as she floated a note, turned it upside down, inside out and backwards and forwards, loud soft, piercing, warm rich… all these sounds were heard last night.  What control she showed and on top of that, it all looked completely effortless like she was a child playing a tune for  the fun of it!

Fran teaches flute at Golden Music and at The Music Lesson Place in Aurora. She performs regularly around Denver and is producing and performing on a Children’s CD. She performed the Five Hymn Settings for Flute and Organ by Robert Powell, Elegy for Flute, Harp and Organ, Harold Friedell, Image for solo flute, Eugene Bozza, Six Short Italian Classics for Flute and Harp, Light Eternal: Meditations for Flute and Organ.

Two comments from audience members; “She is one with the flute” and “She is a Master of her instrument.”

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We can clean it for you which is included in the maintenance plan if it's on our rent-to-own program.  A bath might be what it needs.  Here's the directions for that.

1. Find a bath big enough to comfortably take your horn and line it with an old sheet or towels. (This prevents damage to horn and bath.
2. Fill the bath with lukewarm water.
3. Remove all slides, mouthpiece and any other moving parts from the horn.
4. Submerge the horn completely in water and press down all valves to open them (just a couple of times, you don't need to keep them down.)
5. Leave the horn for an hour to around three hours (only if it is an instrument that hasn't been bathed in a very long time, or if the valves are stuck down.)
6. Get a snake to clean the horn. While the horn is soaking, use a pull-through (snake) to clean out all your slides in a separate sink. If the pull-through is too wide to get round the bends in the slide, don't force it. It will get stuck and just cause damage. Use a mouthpiece brush to clean out your mouthpiece just now as well - no point in blowing all your mouthpiece gunk down into your nice clean horn!
7. Finish cleaning. When bath-time is almost up, put your pull-through through your lead-pipe (from mouthpiece end to tuning slide) and then use either the end of your pull-through or a similar smaller brush to clean out all the valve-slides.
8. Remove your horn carefully from the bath and tip all the water sitting inside of it out. You should be able to hear any water sloshing around inside but if you are having trouble getting it out try depressing all the valves and tipping the horn round 360 degrees towards the bell - any water should come out of the bell!
9. Dry the horn. After making sure you have gotten rid of any water sitting in the valves, lay your horn on some towels or another clean sheet to dry. Remove any surface water with a clean cloth or towel and then leave the horn, preferably in a room with some circulating air for a few hours to dry out.
10. Wait a few hours then tip your horn out again to remove any water that has settled.
11. Pour some low-viscosity valve oil down the slides into the valves, and oil all the bearings and rotors.
12. Re-grease all slides and replace them.

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The story of the piano begins in Padua, Italy in 1709, in the shop of a harpsichord maker named Bartolomeo di Francesco Cristofori (1655-1731). Many other stringed and keyboard instruments preceded the piano and led to the development of the instrument as we know it today.

Mankind’s knowledge that a taut, vibrating string can produce sound goes back to prehistoric times. In the ancient world, strings were attached and stretched over bows, gourds, and boxes to amplify the sound; they were fastened by ties, pegs and pins; and they were plucked, bowed or struck to produce sounds.

Eventually, a family of stringed instruments with a keyboard evolved in Europe in the 14th century. The earliest of these was a dulcimer, a closed, shallow box over which stretched wires were struck with two wooden hammers. The dulcimer led to the development of the clavichord, which also appeared in the 14th century. These were followed by the spinet, virginal, clavecin, gravicembalo, and finally, the harpsichord in the 15th century.

The harpsichord, however, was limited to one, unvarying volume. Its softness and loudness could not be varied while playing. Therefore, performing artists could not convey the same degree of musical expression as that of most other instruments. The artistic desire for more controlled expression led directly to the invention of the piano, on which the artist could alter the loudness and tone with the force of one’s fingers.

The harpsichord was a particularly important development leading to the invention of the piano. Its ability to project sound more loudly than its predecessors, and refinements in the action (or touch) inspired many more musicians to compose for the keyboard and thus, to perform keyboard works.

First exhibited in Florence in 1709, Cristofori’s new instrument was named gravicembalo col piano e forte (roughly “soft and loud keyboard instrument”). Eventually, it was shortened to fortepiano or pianoforte, and finally just piano. His earliest surviving instrument dates from 1720 and is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Pressing a key on the piano's keyboard causes a padded (often with felt) hammer to strike steel strings. The hammers rebound, and the strings continue to vibrate at their resonant frequency.^[2] These vibrations are transmitted through a bridge to a soundboard that more efficiently couples the acoustic energy to the air. The sound would otherwise be no louder than that directly produced by the strings. When the key is released, a damper stops the string's vibration and the sound.  Despite the fact that a piano has strings, it is usually classified as a percussion instrument because the strings are struck rather than plucked (as with aharpischord or clavichord).

Despite many improvements during the past 300 years, it is truly astonishing to observe how similar Cristofori’s instruments are to the modern piano of today.

From Pianonet.com and Wikopaedia

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The Lira is the Origin of the Violin

The history of bowed string musical instruments in Europe goes back to the 9th century with the lira (or lūrā, Greek: λύρα) of the Byzantine Empire, a bowed instrument (held upright). The Persian geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih (d. 911) of the 9th century, was the first to cite the bowed Byzantine lira as a typical instrument of the Byzantines and equivalent to the rabāb used in the Islamic Empires of that time.[1] The Byzantine lira spread through Europe westward and in the 11th and 12th centuries European writers use the terms fiddle and lira interchangeably when referring to bowed instruments (Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009). In the meantime rabāb was introduced to the Western Europe possibly through the Iberian Peninsula and both bowed instruments spread widely throughout Europe giving birth to various European bowed instruments.

Youtube video of a person playing the 6th century lyre: http://ow.ly/yyd0P

Gamba and braccio

Over the centuries that followed, Europe continued to have two distinct types of bowed instruments: one, relatively square-shaped, held in the arms, known with the Italian term lira da braccio (meaning viol for the arm) family; the other, with sloping shoulders and held between the knees, known with the Italian term lira da gamba (or viola da gamba, meaning viol for the leg) group.[2] During the Renaissance the gambas were important and elegant instruments; they eventually lost ground to the louder (and originally viewed as less aristocratic) lira da braccio family of the modern violin.

Emergence and early spread of the Violin – 16^th Century

The violin as we know it today first emerged in northern Italy in the early 16th century especially from the Brescia area. Many archive documents testify that from 1485-95 Brescia was the cradle of a magnificent school of string players and makers, all called with the title of "maestro" of all the different sort of strings instruments of the Renaissance: viola da gamba (viols), violone, lyra, lyrone, violetta and viola da brazzo.  One of the firsts documents that testify the excellence of brescian masters is the 1495 order of three "viole" from Isabella D'Este Gonzaga to an anonymous maker in Brescia.  One can find "maestro delle viole" or "maestro delle lire" and later, at least from 1558, "maestro di far violini" that is master of violin making.  From 1530 the word violin appears in brescian documents and spread all around north of Italy especially in the last decades of the century. While no instruments from the first decades of the century survive, there are several representations in paintings; some of the early instruments have only three strings and were of the violetta type.  Most likely the first makers of violins borrowed from three different types of current instruments: the rebec, in use since the 10th century (itself derived from the Arab rebab), the Viola da Braccio (or Renaissance Fiddle), and the lira da braccio. The earliest explicit description of the instrument, including its tuning, was in the Epitome musical by Jambe de Fer, published in Lyon in 1556. By this time the violin had already begun to spread throughout Europe. (Wikipaedia)

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The question of when and where the bow was invented is of interest because the bow made possible several of the most important instruments in music today. Authorities give different answers to this question, and this article will give only the predominant opinion.

Scholars are agreed that stringed instruments as a category existed long before the bow. There was a long period—possibly thousands of years—in which all stringed instruments were plucked.

In fact, it is likely that bowed instruments are not much more than a thousand years old. Eric Halfpenny, writing in the 1988 Encyclopædia Britannica, says "bowing can be traced as far back as the Islamic civilization of the 10th century... it seems likely that the principle of bowing originated among the nomadic horse riding cultures of Central Asia, whence it spread quickly through Islam and the East, so that by 1000 it had almost simultaneously reached China, Java, North Africa, the Near East and Balkans, and Europe." Halfpenny notes that in many Eurasian languages the word for "bridge" etymologically means "horse," and that the Chinese regarded their own bowed instruments (huqin) as having originated with the "barbarians" of Central Asia.

The Central Asian theory is endorsed by Werner Bachmann, writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Bachmann notes evidence from a tenth-century Central Asian wall painting for bowed instruments in what is now the city of Kurbanshaid in Tajikistan.

Circumstantial evidence also supports the Central Asian theory. All the elements that were necessary for the invention of the bow were probably present among the Central Asian horse riding peoples at the same time:

• In a society of horse-mounted warriors (the horse peoples included the Huns and the Mongols), horsehair obviously would have been available.
• Central Asian horse warriors specialized in the military bow, which could easily have served theinventor as a temporary way to hold horsehair at high tension.

• From all this it is tempting to imagine the invention of the bow: some Mongol warrior, having just used rosin on his equipment, idly stroked his harp or lyrewith a rosin-dusted finger and produced a brief continuous sound, which caused him to have an inspiration; whereupon he seized his bow, restrung it with horsehair, and so on. Obviously, the degree to which this fantasy is true will never be known. To this day, horsehair for bows is taken from places with harsh cold climates, including Mongolia,^[7] as such hair offers a better grip on the strings.
• Rosin, crucial for creating sound even with coarse horsehair, is used by traditional archers to maintain the integrity of the string and (mixed withbeeswax) to protect the finish of the bow.^[8]

However the bow was invented, it soon spread very widely. The Central Asian horse peoples occupied a territory that included the Silk Road, along which goods and innovations were transported rapidly for thousands of miles (including, via India, by sea to Java). This would account for the near-simultaneous appearance of the musical bow in the many locations cited by Halfpenny.

The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 – ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic,Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinaviantalharpa and the Finnish jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.

While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.

Paraphrased from Wikipaedia

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The All-Time Top Six Psychological Reasons We Love Music from Psyblog

Modern technology means it’s never been easier to hear exactly the music we want, whenever we want it. But whatever technology we use, the reasons we listen to music are universal. It engages us on all sorts of different levels.  A few bars of a song can take us back decades, to a different time and place.  North (2010) asked 300 young people about their main reasons for listening to music to see which came out top.  Here are the answers, in order of importance, counted down from six to the number one spot.

6. To learn about others and the world
Languishing down at number six was the way in which music teaches us about the world.  Music tells us stories about other people and places and it gives us access to new experiences.  Music can teach us how other people think and even suggest how we might live.

5. Personal identity
In at five is identity. The type of music we like expresses something about ourselves. Even the broadest genres like rock, classical and blues begin to give us a picture of a person. We also seem to discover ourselves through music: it can teach is who we are and where we belong. Through music we can build up and project an image of ourselves.

4. Interpersonal relationships
The fourth most important function of music is its social dimension. Music is a point of conversation. We listen to it while we’re with other people and we talk to them about it. It’s a way of making a connection.

3. Negative mood management
Tying for the second spot is negative mood management. When we’re in a bad mood, music can help us deal with it. When your mood is low, there is something cathartic about listening to sad music. Somehow it helps to know that you’re not alone. We use music to relieve tension, express our feelings and escape the realities of everyday life.

2. Diversion
Also coming in at number two is diversion. Music relieves the boredom of the commute, or of a lazy Sunday afternoon. It’s something to do when we don’t know what else to do.

1. Positive mood management

Right up at the top of the charts is positive mood management. This is rated people’s most important reason for listening to music: making our good moods even better. It entertains us, relaxes us and sets the right emotional tone.  Music makes us more hopeful, even after things go wrong for us. In one study by Ziv et al. (2011) participants were falsely told they’d done badly on a task. Those who were played some positive music afterwards, were more hopeful about the future than those left in silence.

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