New Podcast - Episode 2 - Steel Band

I've released Glasgow HS Band Podcast - Episode 2 - The Steel Band. It's basically an advertisement for students who are now signing up for next year's classes. Take a look at it over at http://glasgowband.podomatic.com/player/web/2009-02-25T11_30_53-08_00.

Tentative Schedule for Fall 2009

I am releasing a tentative schedule for the 2009 marching band season.

August
11-14 Band Camp 9:00-5:00
17-21 Band Camp 9;00-5:00
25, 27 Rehearsal 6:00-8:00

September
8, 10 Rehearsal 6:00-8:30
11 Game vs. Pencader 7:00
15,17 Rehearsal 6:00-8:30
18 Game vs. Dover
22, 24 Rehearsal 6:00-8:30
25 Game vs. Charter
29 Rehearsal 6:00-8:30

October
1 Rehearsal 6:00-8:30
3 Game at St. Marks / USSBA Competition at Mount Pleasant
6, 8 Rehearsal 6:00-8:30
9 Game at AI DuPont
10 USSBA Delaware Valley Regional at Upper Darby HS
13,15 Rehearsal 6:00-8:30
17 Game at William Penn
20, 22 Rehearsal 6:00-8:30
23 Homecoming vs. Delcastle
25 Halloween Parade
27, 29 Rehearsal 6:00-8:30
30 Game at Newark

November
3, 5 Rehearsal 6:00-8:30
6 Game vs. Christiana
7 Regional or Chapter Championships
10, 12 Rehearsal 6:00-8:30
13 Game vs. Concord
14 TOB Regional Championship

The biggest change is the late start to band camp this year. School is starting late, August 31st this year, so band camp is a week later. It is still two weeks, it's just starting a week later than usual.

We will be seeing some new competition for the football team this year from Concord HS and Pencader Charter, but it looks like we will be saying goodbye to Archmere and our 896 rivals Middletown. I have some USSBA shows on the schedule this year, and I'm still waiting to see what things look like in TOB before putting anything of that circuit on our schedule. Of course, this is all tentative, so check back often.

GHS Band Podcast - Episode 1

This week in my Web 2.0 class we are looking at streaming media, like I had described in the previous blog postings. We are also discussing the use of podcasts in education. Together with the jazz ensemble today I made the first GHS band podcast episode. In it, the jazz ensemble plays the piece Round Midnight and I make comments to help the students listen to the performance and know what to practice to make the next time even better.

The podcast can be viewed directly at http://glasgowband.podomatic.com/player/web/2009-02-19T13_13_49-08_00. Soon, hopefully, my podcast will be available for download on iTunes if you search for the Glasgow High School Band under my direction. I'll let you know when I find out the podcast has been approved.

Uploading a Streaming Video, Take 2

I uploaded my earilier attempted video to Screencast.com to see if I have any more luck with this. Here goes:




Now it appears to have been successful. I really have no clue, though, since it's a flash file and I can't check it from my work computer. If anyone is viewing my blog please do leave a comment and tell me if this worked. I must rely on the kindness of strangers here.

Streaming Video attempt #1

I've had one heck of a time trying to get what I want from recording video from my computer. There are two things I want to do, and I can't do both from a single computer easily. I want to either record from my computer and record the audio coming out of my speakers or record from my microphone as I speak and show what's happening on the screen at the same time. Now, my Dell laptop is COMPLETELY incapable of doing the former idea. I have tried many ways, and searched the internet for help, but it seems that the sound card that came with my Dell E1505 just cannot record sound from the speakers directly to the internal microphone. I can record just fine from an external microphone, though, so that's easy.

On my school computer I can record from the speakers directly without a single problem, and I can easily hook up my microphone to record my voice, too. However, when trying to use Jing to record it, the free version only make Flash video files. Now, I love my school district; they pay me money to do band stuff. However, either they or the state of Delaware has eliminated Flash players from all computers on the system, so there is no way for me to view what I have done. So, did it work? I don't know. I will try to post what I did on here so I can view it later.

This is a video of a segment of Leaving on a Jetplane for the Glasgow Steel Band. It is being played by Finale 2007 music software and recorded by TechSmith's Jing software. If it works, I will be able to do more like this in the future where students will be able to follow along with the music and perhaps play along, too. It will help students learn their parts especially in the summer months when they are out of school for a long while.

Ok, so no luck uploading the video today. I'll try again from home if I can.

Update - 2/19/09, 9:17AM. I realize now that I was trying to upload a Flash file to blogger, and blogger doesn't accept movies in that format. That is why I was having difficulty and no success yesterday.

Candide, Debussy or something else French

I took a few days off from blogging as, well, I didn't have all that much to share. But today I had a discussion with the French teacher here about finding ways to combine topics that I can teach in history & theory of music class with her French classes. She brought up doing something in French opera or maybe something a lot earlier like the troubadours and that history in French class and I can focus on the music aspect in my class. Leonard Bernstein did an opera on Candide, Debussy is a fantastic composer, and there's a lot else out there!

So, we'll see how that goes and if anything comes of it. I'm sure it's something that the administration would LOVE to see us do, and it's something that can be put on the website for good PR. I mentioned to Madame that the Delaware Opera has dress rehearsals open to students for educational opportunities and that the Marriage of Figaro is opening in May. Now, Figaro is actually written in Italian by an Austrian composer speaking German, but the story was from France just prior to the Revolution. I think it could be really neat to have my music and band students and some of the French students go see it, though it really wouldn't be too helpful since it will be sung in Italian. It's great music; if only the kids could sit through four hours of singing and dancing in a foreign language.

That "Ah hah!" Moment

This morning we were continuing our work with Four Voice Harmony in history & theory class. We're getting into some really in depth music theory material here, so if I'm going to lose anyone in my class, now's about when it will happen. One of my students was struggling and struggling to understand how notes work on the Bass Clef and how it's different from the Treble Clef. No matter what I did, she couldn't grasp it. And now that we're on to Four Voice Harmony, we're layering even more responsibility on top of knowing Bass and Treble Clefs.

I was working with this particular student today trying to get her to figure it all out. And then, suddenly, about 10 minutes before the bell ring, that student had her "Ah Hah!" moment. She did one problem and asked if it was correct. It was. She did the next relatively quickly and, again, it was correct. Excitedly she ripped through the remaining six problems on the page, each one completely correct with no help from me. Eureka!

Sometimes I think I might actually be a good teacher.

International Music Score Library Project

Prior to going on winter break I was looking around for music on the internet. Specifically, I needed to find Antonin Dvorak's 8th Symphony for a project I was working on for the Delaware All-State Orchestra. I knew that you can find just almost all public domain classical music on the internet in at least a MIDI file format, but I was going to see if I could find the real score in PDF format. I did some googling and discovered the International Music Score Library Project. It is a FANTASTIC site, and shows how a wiki setup can be used from something other than an actual encyclopedia of knowledge.

http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page

The biggest drawback of a site like this is that it is really limited to public domain works. That's fine for people who love music from the Baroque period, but I'm more a late-romantic to 20th century music kinda guy. There are a lot of composers I'll be waiting another 20-30 years on before they can be legally posted to the internet. But at least I can find one thing I'm looking for.

One of my favorite all time composers is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. That's a pretty easy composer to have as a favorite; not too many people would challenge me on that one. I'd like to do an arrangement of the overture to the Marriage of Figaro (La Nozze di Figaro). It's just a very exciting and fun piece. Now, whether or not I'll ever be able to get students at Glasgow High School to play the arrangement is another story, but I'd still like to take the time to do a real nice, faithful arrangement for winds and percussion. Now with IMSLP, I can do that pretty easily.

All I have to do is search the IMSLP for Marriage of Figaro and I can download the overture as a PDF file. From that I can imput everything, note by note, into Finale, but that would be tedious. There are programs out there where you can scan music in from either a score or from a PDF version of the score and that will create a file for Sibelius or Finale to read with everything in it. Now, it's not perfect but that would save me a lot of time that I would be able to spend on Orchestrations instead. The program is available, but I just don't have the money to shell out for something like that right now when there are more pressing needs for school. It would be cool, though, and I would love to have the Marriage of Figaro in my portfolio. Plus, there is something about channelling Mozart that could miraculous turn me into a phenominal composer over night!

Picture from band camp '08

I was going through my email account after downloading Mozilla Thunderbird which is an open-source email client much like Microsoft's Outlook. I typically use yahoo mail for all my personal email needs, and I had to do a lot of tweaking and downloading of other programs to get it to work with Thunderbird.

As I was going through some of my old email on my yahoo account via Thunderbird, I came upon a picture taken on my cell phone from this year's band camp. The seniors decided to have some fun during lunch time while I was in my office. That fun included a lot of Saran Wrap and window paint and my car. The result is on the right. I think other students have pictures of me standing at the band room outside door gaping at what had happened to my car.

I did take it well, and I even posed next to my wrapped up car for some pictures so the students could get some good shots with their cameras. This was the first year I think I would have really been cool with something like that and I'm glad it wasn't until this year that the kids made the attempt.

Four Part Harmony

Today in history & theory class we started to get in depth with the topic Four Part Harmony. Basically, it deals with having four notes (based on one chord) being performed by Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass voices. There are many things that must be considered when writing for four parts. I've only touched on the very basics of Four Part Harmony, but a lot of those basics.

It would be nice if I could figure out how to post a PDF file of the sheet we were working from for class online. Maybe I can figure out how to do that eventually. For any students that missed my class today (for All-State rehearsal, for example) they could catch up on their work if I could post my documents on here. Or, if they had questions, they could comment to my blog and I (or other student) could respond to help them out. It gives students one less excuse for missing work and not knowing what to do when they come back!

Also, today my UD student observer finished up his required observations with us here at Glasgow. Mr. Scudlark, I wish you the best and success if the rest of your college career.

Questions (and answers) about RSS Feeds

So today in my online class about Web 2.0 we were discussing RSS Feeds. I had never used them at all, though I had seen stuff about them all around teh interwebs (that's geekish for the internet). I made my discussion posting about them, and I was asked a question by a colleague of mine in the class: "What exactly does an RSS feed allow you to do? What benefits come by adding them to your site/blog and how do you?"

I think I came up with a pretty good answer that I posted to the discussion board for our class, but I think it might be good enough to actually post on my blog for anyone else to read. My response follows.

My best way to describe it is as follows. Again, I've never played around with RSS feeds until today, so here goes:

When I get home from work, I usually grab my laptop, open up my browser (Firefox, in my case) and start going through my usual routine of looking at websites. I have a list, most of them are either music related or geek-ish in nature or I'll go to Facebook and see how everyone is doing. Now, sometimes if I have a lot of time, I'll be paying a visit to 15-20 different sites. If I don't have much time, I'm going to maybe 5 sites. Now, a lot of those sites have an RSS feed on them. Wouldn't it be great if, to save time, I could just view ONE site to see all the latest updates on the 20 sites I like to visit most?

That's basically what an RSS feed is. Let's say I want to go to Drum Corps International (dci.org), then Winter Guard International (wgi.org), and follow that up with Engadget.com (because I like all that tech stuff). That could take me a lot of time and when I go to those sites, there might not be anything updated! It might all be stuff I've seen before. Having an RSS aggregator (is that the term?) allows me to put all that information in the same place to be updated as soon as it is updated on the original site. So, all I have to go to is google.com for the Google Reader where I have all those sites subscribed to. I just opened up google and saw that WGI has an updated story on how you can watch videos on their site from January. None of the other sites had updated since I last looked, so I don't have to waste my time by going there and seeing what they have. I know it's just the old stuff.

RSS is really just a way to save time. In regards to this class, I can see how it would work in education if you take the following situation. Let's say you have ALL your students make blogs for a project. Let's say they have to update their blog every day talking about... let's say dogs. It's a project on dogs for a animal science class. They have to go on their blog every day to talk about how their dog is doing at home with any usual or unusual behavior. Now, you, as their teacher, COULD just go on to EVERY student's blog to see if they've updated it. Instead, you can subscribe to everyone's RSS feed. Then, all you have to do is check one site which will always have the most updated information on it so you know who has updated their blogs, and who hasn't... all in one place.

That's what I got so far. Hope it helps.

Of course, RSS only works with sites that are able to produce RSS feeds. Plenty of sites don't use RSS, but they are also sites that don't get updated too often. For example, I like to go to West Chester University's marching band website (for obvious reasons) and also because my students think that it is almost as great as I do. However, it is hardly ever updated, especially when it isn't summer or fall. So, even were it to have an RSS feed, it wouldn't be used too often.

There's a reason for this. Blog sites and other modern, more professional websites use something called a Content Management System (CMS). On my band's website (glasgowdragonbands.com) , I've used Joomla. Sites that use a CMS like Joomla are REALLY easy to update and it would make sense to offer an RSS feed. Now, actually, I don't have an RSS feed on the band's site, but I'm sure I could make one now that I know how it works.

Importing CDs and Percussion Ensemble

I had our first strictly drumline rehearsal for percussion ensemble. We were missing 2 people, and that really hurt us though we did manage to get work done. I'm always amazed at how much a rehearsal is affected by having anyone missing. When any of my ensembles is full everything goes SOOOOO much better no matter what. And it doesn't matter if it's concert band, jazz ensemble, steel band or percussion ensemble. As soon as even one person is missing, things just are never quite so good. I'm sure the students feel it, too, and I hope anyone of them that might be reading this blog will think about it a little more next time a friend might be talking about ditching rehearsal for, ya know, a trip to Denny's. Not that ANY of my students would EVER skip school!!!

After rehearsal let out, I started looking for listening material for after tomorrow's test in History & Theory. Some of the songs I was looking at on iTunes I realized I had on a CD already somewhere. And then it occurred to me: I have most of my CD's here at school when I brought them in after Christmas break. So, I imported a good 4 hours of music from old CD's onto my school computer. Tomorrow morning I will have to remember my iPod since I use iTunes to put all my music on my school computer onto my iPod and then plug that into the sound system in the band room for the listening. It's a good system, though it does risk me losing my iPod to a student with sticky fingers if I do something stupid and put it down somewhere unsafe. Are there any teachers out there that have a good way of protecting a small valuable like an mp3 player in school so it doesn't get stolen? Though, I have indeed managed to keep my personal Dell laptop from too much harm after 2.5 years of working here at Glasgow.

Reviewing for a test

Today in History & Theory class we were reviewing for our test on Treble and Bass Clef notes and Leger Lines. That, by itself, doesn't really lend itself too well to Web 2.0 type stuff. Well, not in any specific way that would be exciting. I can always blog about it and have that be a study guide. If students miss class for one reason or another (for example, one student at least will be missing school on Friday due to All-State Chorus) they can check out my blog, find out what they missed, and get caught up more easily. I will make use of that idea for this posting.

On Wednesday, 2.4.09 History & Theory of Music class will be having a test on Treble and Bass Clef notes as well as the notes on the Leger Lines. Remember, the lines of the staff for Treble Clef are: EGBDF (every good boy does fine) and the spaces spell the word FACE. For Bass clef, it is GBDFA (good boys do fine always) and the spaces spell the words ACE G (or all cows eat grass). The treble clef leger lines above the staff extend up G, A, B, C, D... and D, C, B, A, G below. The Bass clef leger lines above the staff extend up B, C, D, E, F... and F, E, D, C, B below. If you are able to identify and notate those notes on the treble and bass clef staves, you are in fantastic shape! If you have any questions about it, leave a comment and I (or one of your classmates) may be able to help you out before we get to Wednesday.