Staff Spotlight - Chiaki Hanafusa

Chiaki Hanafusa in the MusickEd lab.

Saxophonist Chiaki Hanafusa recently completed her Doctorate of Musical Arts in Performance at the acclaimed University of North Texas School of Music.  She has been on staff at The Dallas School of Music and MusickEd.com for more than three years and hails from Saitama, Japan.  "It's a neighboring city of Tokyo" she says with a smile.

Chiaki started playing saxophone at age 14. But when she was little she had something else in mind for her life.  "I was thinking that my career would be making music, but with a Japanese stringed instrument called a koto which I played since I was 6 yrs old. Neither I or anyone in my family could imagine that I would end up playing saxophone." 

It was a school band audition that changed everything. "When I entered middle school I tried playing the saxophone, clarinet and trumpet in the band. Saxophone was the most comfortable instrument for me to play, and I really liked the sound. But they assigned me to clarinet

because there were too many people who wanted to play saxophone."

She never lost interest in the instrument even as she played clarinet in the band for two full years.  "I finally convinced my parents and the teachers to switch me over and I haven't stopped playing saxophone since then. That band tryout literally changed my life."

I asked Chiaki if she has any special favorite songs or styles of music that she enjoys. "There are so many pieces I like, so I can't possibly choose just one or two as a favorite! I like to play alot of contemporary or new music and I love the sound of saxophone playing transcriptions of baroque music as well." 

We are happy she's here. Arigatou Chiaki!

Killing...uhh, Saving Classical Music

This is a reply to a post titled Classical Music's Problem...  The author (who writes at a site ironically called KillingClassicalMusic) is actually an advocate for "rescuing the world's best music from a slow, certain death at the hands of tired traditions and oppressively ordinary thought." How could we not read on???  The general premise of the post is "how do we expect untrained audiences to relate to classical music?"

Here is our reply:

They say the definition of absurdity is repeating the same thing and expecting different results. There's simply no reason to put classical music on a pedestal in this day and age - if it dies, so be it (note to newspaper publishers). Times change - new things arise. Watching a symphony play 200 or 300 year old music (or even 50 year old music for that matter) is just not something the i-pad, i-phone or i-pod generation wants to do. So here is one group's solution:

1. Create a digital music learning environment. Make it a professionally designed curriculum that is not a shortcut but a solid user-friendly learning 'system'.

2. Make it personal, affordable, and so crystal clear that even school district music administrators and groups like MENC stand up and take notice.

3. Allow it to grow, change, adapt, and be flexible enough to be used by both teachers as a basic curriculum or students learning on their own.

4. Make it available for all instruments, including guitar, bass, electric guitar, piano, and keyboard (not just band and orchestral instruments).

5. Use many genres of music as playing and listening examples. We hear all sorts of music in our everyday lives, why continue to 'teach' musical concepts using outdated songs, examples, and exercises?

Basically, WE as educators (and the profession of music education) must adapt to create an environment where people of all ages interested in learning music can access it on their terms using modern practices and technology as a vehicle. Until we begin to reach current (and future) generations as they are accustomed, we will be mired in the state we are now, with dwindling in-school music programs (despite all the 'music makes you smarter studies) and poorly attended (classical) concert halls.

At MusickEd.com we have created the Kore Series as a start toward this end. Our goal is to package, market,  and sell (gasp!) music education to everyone, which in turn might lead to selling more instruments, more CD's, more sheet music, and more tickets.  Win-Win.

Our philosophy is simple and hearkens to a quote by Chris Small, "Music is a VERB not a noun, it is something one does and it is valid at every level."  We try and live this each day on campus at DSM and online at MusickEd. Comments welcome!

It's Not Often We're Wowed...

It's not often we read or hear something about music education that makes us stand on our chairs and fist pump.  But our friend David Price (pictured) sent us a link that caused quite a stir on campus at MusickEd.com this morning.  

The quote is from a transcript of the proceedings at the Tunis Symposium on Advocacy in Music Education back in 2009 and comes from Wayne Bowman.

Mr. Bowman is a professor of music education at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada and has written extensively about philosophical perspectives in music and music education.  We look forward to learning more about him and reading more of his work. But for now, let us allow his quote to wash over us...

"And all too often advocacy claims sound like last gasp efforts to defend instructional practices that have simply failed to keep pace with social and musical change."

If you are a music maker or music teacher at any level, read the full transcript here, it will be well worth your time.  And hopefully you'll be as gassed as we were to hear such insight. 

It's time music educators re-vamped their approach, be more inclusive, professional, and by all means, modernize materials and practices to catch up to what is expected by today's students. Not doing so risks extinction. 

Skullcandy - Fostering a Niche Community

I recently had the pleasure of being part of an Inc. Magazine live chat with Skullcandy founder Rick Alden. In case you were wondering, Skullcandy makes headphones, apparel and accessories for the skate, surf, snow, moto and bike crowd...talk about a niche market! 

Rick spent his life's savings and refinanced his home to start Skullcandy after having his "Aha!" moment while on a ski lift in Park City, Utah.  "I was listening to my iPod and felt the phone buzz in my pocket and thought, 'Wouldn't it be cool to have a set of headphones with 2 jacks?' ..and that was it."  Just a few years later Skullcandy has amazing offices that lookout to the ski resort areas of Utah and a passionate fan base full of alternative sport enthusiasts.

Rick touched on a number of business topics; how the company deals with overseas merchants, how and who they hire and what their plans are for the next five years.  But I was interested in "how the company fosters a sense of community among Skullcandy users".  Here is Rick's response:

"MusickEd...I like the name!  Wow, that's a good question!  It's interesting because that question typically gets asked 'How do you maintain a sense of community within the Skullcandy organization"... but among our users we really do get involved heavily in events and things going on outside of this organization.  

In 2005 it was the first time we opened up a non-endemic lifestyle shop - we went out and started selling headphones to Musicland.  Musicland eventually got acquired by a company called FYE stores and there were 1,400 of them at that time and that was our first national footprint.  In order to create demand for those kinds of retailers we have to be in lot of different places.  But at the same time, because there were1,400 FYE stores we were able to take the revenue with profits we  were making out of places like Target and Best Buy and commit to more endemic marketing efforts like US Open Surf, Maloof Money Cup, and the Warped Tour.  So hopefully we are able to stay in touch with the community of Skullcandy users.


And of course, if you go to the website, you'll see a lot of "reach out" and interaction with the users as well. It's been a great community."

 Watch the entire live-chat here.

Lesson Support - Where Traditional Method Books Fall Short

The mantra at discoverlearnandplay is..."there are no magic bullets!"  Our learning process requires a bit of work, some reading and light study, a sprinkling of memorization and a side order of stick-to-it-iveness....just like most things that are worth tackling. But we've packaged it in a no-nonsense format and painstakingly edited the entire content so that it is orderly and sequential.  There's just not a lot of 'fluff' involved. 

One aspect that separates our product from traditional "method books" is support, which includes (among others), Live Help, Instrument Support and Lesson Support.  Having this information online allows us to make quick and easy changes in real time.  There's no re-printing, no re-shipping required and users always have the most recent version(s) of support right at their fingertips. It's simply too costly for traditional publishers of method books to re-tool and in fact, some books (you know who you are) have included the same mistakes for years and years. It's time for innovation!


The comments below are from Lesson Support for guitar. They are an overview of the 'in-house' experiences our teachers have made during the many years of teaching this (Lesson 1) material.

General Comments 
Whole notes and whole rests are prominently featured in this song. Be sure to hold each whole note for four full beats. Also be sure to count four beats (of silence) for each of the whole rests.

The basic pattern of the melody in this song is to step up through the five notes and then step back down again. However, the pattern changes with the whole note in measure 11. Don’t let this catch you by surprise!

Be ready for the only measure of quarter notes in this song – measure 10. Make sure that these quarter notes move exactly twice as fast as the half notes in the previous measure. 

Every song, for every instrument in each of the 20 lessons of the Kore Series (that's over 7,000 songs!) includes instrument specific information.  The staff has essentially prepared a lesson plan (known on campus as Individual Instruction Documentation) for our users to read as part of their learning process.  The notes below are for Bits and Pieces #1 in Lesson 1 for guitar:

Guitar Info 
For now, use the 1st finger in the 1st fret for the note C, 2nd finger in the 2nd fret for the note A and 3rd finger in the 3rd fret for the note D. G and B will both be played on the open strings.

Be sure to let all notes ring for their full value. That means keeping the fingers of the fretting hand in place or allowing the open strings to vibrate uninterrupted as you count the full duration of each note.

Be sure to stop the strings from vibrating at all rests.

We recommend using a pick but you might also use your thumb to more comfortably find the notes and strings at these beginning stages.

Be sure to stay on the tips of the fretting fingers to create the clearest sound. 

Lastly, each of the first 5 Lessons include pointers to help you set a solid practice routine for future learning:   

Practice Pointers 
Check to make sure that you know how to perform each of the 5 notes required for this song. Practice each of the exercises to help prepare for the patterns of notes and rhythms we're using.

Try just saying the letter names of the notes all the way through the song before playing.

Practice first just moving from one note to the next smoothly and comfortably in each song.

Now add in the rhythm – checking yourself with the melody track can help keep you steady. When you can play through the songs consistently with all of the correct notes and rhythms, try playing with the background tracks - first with the help of the melody and then without.

All of this information comes from just one area of support for the Kore Series.  There's also a killer Glossary, Live Help, Tech Support and Custom Support and the iMusickEd that inlcudes access to our educational Webinars, Forums,  Blog, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages.  

Traditional method books or online services?  Seems like a no-brainer!