Boys and Girls Clubs

This morning I was able to spend about an hour at the McKeesport Boys and Girls club. How cool!

I was up there because NAMM has created an after-school program with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America as a way to create more music makers.

I was there to talk a bit about the Music Makers program, but I was blown away by what goes on there everyday. I had no clue! There were probably about 70 kids there - which is more than I expected and there were volunteers there today who were from as far away as Rhode Island and Wisconsin. How cool to see these kids in an environment where they are having fun and learning at the same time.

And from what I could tell, it's not all about sports - there is also lots of focus on learning. But, it's the great kid of learning that happens when the kids don't even realize that they are learning.

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In other news, I just found out last night that a friend from high school is leaving tomorrow for six months in Paris. Can you imagine that you would HAVE to go to Paris for your job?

Some National Advocacy News

Louisiana Adds Music/Arts Mandate - Massachusetts goes the other way

Governor Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana just signed into law Act 175 mandating the visual and performing arts for all schools. Full implementation of the law is scheduled for the 2010/2011 school year and will require all students to have music and the arts as a part of their basic education. The Louisiana law was largely based on the Arkansas legislation that mandated music and art instruction for all children starting with the 2005/2006 school year. Louisiana is now the first state to replicate the Arkansas legislation. Music for All worked closely with Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee along with music and arts advocates to pass the model legislation.

In Massachusetts, arts advocates are pushing the state Department of Education to make arts education a bigger part of recommended high school graduation requirements, which list music, art and related subjects as electives. The recommendations, which the state Board of Education plans to vote on this fall, include four credits each of English and math, three credits each of history and a lab-based science, two credits in the same foreign language and six credits in a chosen elective. Electives may include visual and performing arts, career and technical education, technology or additional courses in other academic subjects. Advocates would like to see students required to take at least one credit of art.

Source: Music for All

Cows Milk Quality Improved By Music

Do you want to improve your cows' milk quality? Play them Mozart
05/23/2007

In an orderly fashion 700 cows queue up for milking, with no fuss, no stress and very little mooing. The sharps and flats, bass and alto of Mozart's music have been found to be the perfect mix of tonality.


The Chirigota farm on the outskirts of Madrid is using an innovative system to produce the best quality milk possible from its milking cows.

The bovines are treated like VIP's at this Spanish farm with the help of accessories such as waterbeds, electronic brushes and sprinklers that have turned the complex into a five-star hotel for pampered cows.

However, the biggest influence on milk quality, according to the farm owners, is the use of music. It is not any old music though, but that of the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The placid harmonies of the Austrian composer's concerto for flute and harp in D major is played continually at milking time. The music soothes the nerves of the Friesians.

"It only happens with Mozart and although it was discovered by monks in Brittany, the idea is being used mainly in Israel. We in fact have specialists come over from Israel to explain to us new concepts of production. And it was them that told us to use Mozart," said Nicolas Sieber, the head of marketing for the milking farm and company.

In an orderly fashion the 700 cows on the farm queue up for milking, with no fuss, no stress and very little mooing. The sharps and flats, bass and alto of Mozart's music have been found to be the perfect mix of tonality: enough to get the cows to relax but not too soothing that they fall asleep.

"It is relaxing music for them but at the same time it is dynamic, it keeps the cows active. The trick is not to have music too relaxing, " added Nicolas Sieber. What the music does for cows is passed onto the milk both in the quality and quantity of the milk they are producing. Any other cow on a normal farm would normally produce 29 litres daily, these cows yield is between 30 to 35 litres per day.

The milk, which is marketed exclusively under the farm's own brand name of Priegola, also has higher levels of healthy fats and proteins.

An ELementary School Based Around Music

First, violin
At this charter school, music is the primary tool for teaching
By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff | May 30, 2007
Ten-year-old Isaiah Simmons of Roxbury is the picture of concentration as he carefully makes his way through a solo violin version of the venerable folk song "Old Joe Clark."
His classmate Bernard White, however, is eager to play along on his own violin. So Bernard politely asks his teacher, Mona Rashad, "Can I try to play the harmony to it?" She shakes her head in a firm no. But Bernard, a 10-year-old from Roslindale, is not defeated: He tucks his chin to his chest and proceeds to play air violin, pantomiming the bow strokes along with Isaiah.
Literally and figuratively, music is in the air at the Conservatory Lab Charter School -- and in the curriculum, too.
Plenty of elementary schools teach music, but how many require students to attend a 45-minute music class every day, and to take half-hour violin lessons twice a week, and to practice every night? How many issue a violin to each student in first grade, which he or she gets to keep until graduating fifth grade? How many organize the entire educational experience around music?
"At most schools, you don't get to learn how to play an instrument," Bernard says a few minutes after he completes his own solo. "You just do one thing. But music and math kind of go together." Adds Isaiah: "Music helps me do other things."
Researchers -- and parents -- tend to agree. Maybe that's why there's a waiting list of more than 600 for a spot in the Conservatory Lab Charter School, a racially and ethnically mixed elementary school in Brighton for mostly low-income Boston youngsters. Tomorrow afternoon , all 132 students will take the stage at Jordan Hall for a year-end concert during which they will showcase the kind of learning that can't be measured by a standardized test.
At a time when some schools are cutting back on performing-arts education, this school has decided that music is the best way to animate the study of seemingly unrelated subjects. Jonathan Rappaport, the school's executive director , is a longtime music educator and musician who describes the organizing principle of the school's curriculum as "learning through music." The goal is not to produce musicians, he says, but rather "to use music as a way of educating kids in a very comprehensive way."
At this moment on a recent weekday, that interdisciplinary approach is on display in a classroom not far from where the young violinists are playing. More than a dozen students -- black, white, Latino, Asian-American -- are swaying in a chorus line, their young voices raised in their own version of a protest song.
They wrote the lyrics and the music as part of a "co-teaching project" overseen by their music and social studies teachers. The idea is to connect music with their study of the civil rights movement. Their words poignantly combine youthful idealism with a sense of the world's struggles: "Let good be your guidance/ Stop doing violence/ We should all get along/ Try not to do wrong/ Don't discriminate, it only makes hate." The refrain is punctuated by rap interludes that allude to Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and the mid-1970s busing crisis in Boston.
"Every time there's a ready connection to be made, we make it," says Katherine Hakim, 27, the music teacher, who accompanied the students on the piano. "We'll say [to other teachers], 'What are you doing in the classroom, and how can we enhance it with music?' " The teachers also draw from the world of music to impart other lessons. During the violin exercise, Rashad exhorts the students to practice, noting: "Anne-Sophie Mutter, a famous violinist, practices her pieces two years before she performs them." Malcolm Doremus Cuetara, a 10-year-old fourth grader, is impressed. "Wow, she's dedicated!" he exclaims.
The school was founded in 1999 by administrators and faculty members at the New England Conservatory who thought a music-centered curriculum fit logically within the state mandate that charter schools strive to be laboratories of innovation. (As the performance scheduled for tomorrow at NEC's Jordan Hall suggests, the school retains a close relationship with the conservatory . )
"What is different here is that music is taught as a daily core curriculum subject," says Rappaport. "The development of critical-thinking skills is so important, and a lot of that comes out of the music." He points out that music has a mathematical basis, with phrases divided into measures and measures divided into beats. "Music has a very profound effect on the cognitive development of young people," he says. "I think we're proving it here."
Rappaport admits, though, that it has been a struggle to raise the MCAS scores of the students. With such a small student body, the sample size for standardized tests is relatively miniscule. Last year the school finished below the state average in a number of categories. However, it improved from the previous year, prompting the state Department of Education to say the school had achieved "adequate yearly progress" in math and English language arts. Rappaport says he expects further improvement this year.
The ratio of students to teachers at the school is 9 to 1. The student body is a broad cross section of Boston: Nearly 40 percent of the students are African-American, 30 percent are Hispanic or Latino, 20 percent are white, and 4.5 percent are Asian-American. More than 70 percent of the students come from low-income families; for more than one-third of the students, English is not their first language.
Young as they are, the students seem to have grasped that the time they spend rehearsing and performing music may help them master the three R's. "You have to be patient," Bernard says. "You can't just pick up a violin and play a song you haven't learned yet." Malcolm adds: "Sometimes I use music to do my math. I'll think of adding quarter-notes, half-notes. I put my notes together as math." Beyond such pragmatism, of course, lies the pure joy of performing music. "It has a lot of emotion," says Yarimar Muniz, 11, a fourth-grader from Roxbury, though she admits "it's a little bit complicated when you first learn a new song."
Back in the classroom, the students are running through their song one last time. Hakim offers praise, advice, and something more. "The harmony, I want you guys to keep the pitch up, be a little stronger," she says, while a roomful of young strivers listens attentively. "With the melody, you have that nice soaring melody."
"That's what I want from you," she says. "Soar."
Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin @globe.com.

Community Bands in the PA Spotlight

There just aren't enough community bands out there, but Pennsylvania is rich in community bands. The famous Allentown band is one for example. Our state house has proclaimed July as Community Band month in PA. Wouldn't it be great to have some type of great community band festival in PA to celebrate?



THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF PENNSYLVANIA

HOUSE RESOLUTION

No. 341 Session of 2007

INTRODUCED BY MENSCH, HUTCHINSON, BAKER, BARRAR, BEAR,
BENNINGHOFF, BEYER, CALTAGIRONE, CLYMER, CONKLIN, COSTA,
CREIGHTON, DiGIROLAMO, J. EVANS, EVERETT, FABRIZIO,
FAIRCHILD, FLECK, FREEMAN, GABIG, GEIST, GEORGE, GIBBONS,
GILLESPIE, GINGRICH, GOODMAN, HARHART, HARKINS, HENNESSEY,
HERSHEY, HESS, KILLION, KIRKLAND, KORTZ, KOTIK, KULA, MAJOR,
MANN, MANTZ, MARSHALL, MILLARD, MILNE, MOYER, MURT, MUSTIO,
NAILOR, O'NEILL, PALLONE, PASHINSKI, PERZEL, PETRONE,
PHILLIPS, PYLE, QUIGLEY, RAPP, READSHAW, REICHLEY, ROHRER,
ROSS, SAINATO, SAMUELSON, SAYLOR, SCAVELLO, SIPTROTH, SONNEY,
R. STEVENSON, SWANGER, R. TAYLOR, THOMAS, TRUE, VEREB,
VULAKOVICH AND WALKO, JUNE 21, 2007
INTRODUCED AS NONCONTROVERSIAL RESOLUTION UNDER RULE 35,
JUNE 21, 2007
A RESOLUTION

1 Designating the month of July 2007 as "Community Band Month" in
2 Pennsylvania.

3 WHEREAS, This country and this Commonwealth in particular
4 have a long and rich tradition of supporting community bands;
5 and
6 WHEREAS, Community bands have a variety of origins, including
7 as militia and military bands; and
8 WHEREAS, Community bands have been celebrated in musical and
9 theatrical performances; and
10 WHEREAS, Community bands perform an important role in our
11 communities; and
12 WHEREAS, Pennsylvania is home to some of the oldest and most

1 renowned community bands, including the Allentown Band, in
2 continuous existence since 1828, the Franklin Silver Cornet
3 Band, in continuous existence since 1856, and the Red Hill Band,
4 which has performed summer concerts each year since 1900; and
5 WHEREAS, These community treasures have continued through the
6 tireless efforts of volunteer musicians and organizers;
7 therefore be it
8 RESOLVED, That the House of Representatives designate the
9 month of July 2007 as "Community Band Month" in Pennsylvania
10 with thanks for the immeasurable contributions of community
11 bands and band members to the betterment of this Commonwealth.