Standard #4

As a music educator, I am continuing to engage myself in listening, analysis, and performance, ensuring that I am maintaining and growing my own music skills so that my students get the best music education I have to offer. My eight years of collegiate music study has prepared me well to teach music. I am well versed in the vocabulary of music symbols and technique as well as form. All of these elements I am able to interact with on an aural and visual platform. I engage with most of these musical elements in my performance practice. Recently, I have made a point to perform and study contemporary music and music written by living composers. I believe that in addition to studying music from diverse backgrounds, cultures, periods, styles, and techniques, we should be making an effort to promote music written by contemporary composers. One such piece that I have learned much from is a piece called “Alien Loop de loops” This piece is for solo horn and a fixed media track that is inspired by techno music. I spent more time on this piece working out quirky rhythms and nailing the style than any other piece from the classical tradition. It was a true challenge and something that I felt was rewarding to study. This is merely one example of the direction that music study could take that is generally ignored. I hope to plan on highlighting music like this that expands students’ view on what music is worth studying. 

Students will benefit from my instruction in this area because I plan on exposing them to music from a wide variety of background and performance practices. There are many unique ways to analyze music outside of our wetern tradition that are exciting and interactive.Through this students will discover that all music has value if you know how to listen to it or analyze it. Ideally I could do so by bringing in performers and composers, or taking them to see live performances.