Connected Blog

Here is a list of links to concerts in the Fringe featuring solo guitar, guitar duo, guitar in mixed ensemble & guitar/vocals. These links will take you to their entries in the fringe programme – giving details of dates, times, prices. Many of these artists have their own websites where you can hear samples of their playing.

Many of these gigs take place at The Acoustic Music Centre – follow the link to view their complete programme.

Andy McKee & Don Ross (two virtuosi of acoustic guitar – normally original material)

Adam Bulley & Malcolm MacFarlane (Malcolm is a Haddington-based jazz guitarist)

Antonio Forcione & Adrian Adewale (Italian guitar virtuoso with brazilian percussionist)

Bert Jansch (legendary folk guitarist)

Billy Jones

Cafe Cadenza mercurial trumpet & recorder virtuoso John Sampson with guitarist/vocalist Stewart Hanratty

Camera Ritmata (jazz ensemble featuring former Knox lads Simon Thacker (guitar) Paul Kirby (piano)

Neil Wilson – Classical Guitar & World Music

Spyros Dendrinos

Luca Villani

Abigail James (music by Scottish composer, Eddie Maguire – for flute/guitar/piano)

Flamenco for Lunch

Geoff “Hurricane” Watson: Acoustic Hits

Gill Bowman – acclaimed singer/songwriter/guitarist (a Haddington lass)

Sean Shibe – extremely talented young, local classical guitarist

Jan Akkerman + Gareth Pearson (former Focus guitarist meets young acoustic wizard)

John Renbourn (legendary folk guitarist)

Kevin Harding

Mike Whellans

Romantic Guitar – Luca Villani

Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenco

Sorros Duo – Music from Spain & Latin America (Phillip Thorne – of St David’s High School and RSAMD with Selina Madely)

Stefan Grossman (legendary folk guitarist)

SweetJune

Tony Monaco Organ Trio (there is a guitar in it, honest)

Women in Harmony (featuring singer/songwriter/guitarist, Karine Polwart) Check out their Myspace here

How good is your ear for accents? How different do you think one word could sound in a variety of accents? A new interactive site entitled Sound Comparisons by Edinburgh University in conjunction with the Arts & Humanities Research Council allows you to hear the same word uttered in dozens of accents. I tried out the word “brother” and was amazed at the differences.

I’d say it’s impossible to cultivate a musical ear without being sensitive to the subtle changes in pitch and timbre which distinguish accents. Perhaps that’s why so many impressionists are musical.

Some of the pages are slow to load and using Firefox over Internet Explorer is recommended – but not as highly as downloading the entire site – which I’ve just done.

A child starts planning the storyboard, while another begins cutting some archived film. Two other classmates seek out some images on the net. Each student in this group, like all those students who attend Islay High School, are using their own Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), which they bring to and from school to provide a continuous portable base for their work.

But this is not just a story about cool gadgetry – this is a school which has changed itself entirely in the past five years.

I was taking in all of this on Friday, the same day the school won Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Ambition Awards at the Scottish Education Awards. I was joined by John Johnston, primary school teacher and blogger from Glasgow’s Sandaig Primary School, whose account shows how visits like these can lead to new practices in schools many miles away. Krysia and Doug Semple also joined us along with John’s Head Teacher; blog posts to follow, I hope…

But what grabbed us all was the scope of change. First, everyone in the school community (that’s students, teachers and parents, too) is part of a grand peer-assessment ring, with the UMPC acting as a show-and-tell hub for the work and discussions that took place at school that day. Using OneNote, students can capture text notes, audio and video from their classes, with teachers as accomplices in the recording of their explanations and discussions. All too often, the thought of having a teacher recorded on the fly by a student would have the teacher confiscating the device doing the recording. Here, it is celebrated, with OneNote allocating each segmentof audio to each relevant paragraph.

Students can be heard sharing secret numerical codes – their machine’s unique IP Address – so that such documents can be shared and edited collaboratively in real time. This is how students brainstormed and created storyboards collaboratively, keeping all their progress for future analysis in their review of their work thus far.

Andy Wallis, the English teacher running this excited film-making adventure, brings the class to a brief pause, to encourage them to video their own discussions for the next few minutes. It’s a real eye-opener for those who have been hogging discussions, providing a spotlight moment for those who’ve been a little quieter until now. As they say, the camera doesn’t lie. Another piece of evidence for for the formative assessment pile.

It’s not just pedagogy that has changed to make learning work here; the timetable has seen the beginnings of change. Wednesday and Friday afternoons are curious times for the uninitiated: students who, when I was at school, even had separate social areas are now collaborating on projects. It’s not uncommon to have a 14 year old S3 student working alongside a 17 or 18 year old sixth former who’s seeking to work through a brand new subject area. Here, the class you are in is decided by your level of attainment, not your age. Twice a week these afternoons offer an opportunity to expand horizons through extended project work.

As John says, it’s the overriding desire to learn which can be felt from every member of the school community that is quite overpowering – you wonder why you’ve not felt it in every school you’ve ever visited. It’s the responsibility that has been transferred to students – when they misuse their UMPCs they are subject to the ‘normal’ rules of engagement you’d find in any school. The technology has changed all the things it should do, and left some elements of school life, rightly, untouched.

This is a school where the introduction of a new piece of technology has helped introduce changes across the rest of the system. Or where the system’s changes led to the necessary introduction of the technology. You see, that’s the other thing. When change is so integrated into everyday life, it’s hard to remember what happened first.

See the rest of the photos from this trip on Flickr.

Update: Doug “DigitalMaverick” Semple has just added his extensive thoughts, too.

Got a spare 15 minutes? Would you like to take part in a national, online survey about how people listen to music? The mission of Feeling Sound Musiclab is to test how we perceive music – and also to gauge the nation’s favourite chord – the result of which will be used to commission a new piece of music.

Why not read about the project, about the staff involved or take the test?

The piece featured in today’s lunchtime Guitar Group rehearsal featured a short, slow introduction followed by a longer and much more upbeat section. Pupils had been encouraged to relax in the holidays and to refrain from practice in the hope of returning refreshed. So I wasn’t too disappointed to hear that the intro was a little rough round the edges (and the middle to be honest). However, when the more rhythmic section kicked in, it sounded as though the group had tripled in size, confidence and joie de vivre.

Put simply, teenagers appear not to be fond of slow music. The gaps make them uneasy and, the reduced tempo, rather than relaxing them, can put them on edge. What to do?

Should one, through increased hands-on exposure to slower tempi, cultivate their ability to rely on an internal, as opposed to audible, beat? Or, realising that they are giving up half of their lunch break (more for those who play several instruments), choose items to which they will respond more readily – thereby increasing the chances of a spirited, successful concert item? Answers on a First Class postcard……

In a recent edition of The Material World on Radio 4 there was a fascinating discussion on how the brain processes sound. Presented by the mercurial Quentin ‘For me science isn’t a subject, it’s a perspective’ Cooper the guests – Jan Schnupp from the University of Oxford and Sophie Scott from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience – discussed:

• how we select which sounds merit our concentration in a noisy environment
• how, through the one-dimensional information supplied by compressed airwaves hitting the ear drum, we detect location, distance, whether the source is moving and, if so, in which direction. This process, for me, becomes more fascinating when considering that stereo hi-fi products essentially strive to create the illusion of what is already an illusion.
• how 20 millisecond chunks seem to be the choice of the brain for both auditory and visual input – the constant refreshment of sound and vision gives us the illusion of a continuum
• foreign accent syndrome (the Times had a good piece on how the brain works out our accent)
• which parts of the brain become active when an impressionist is conjuring up the sound of of another person – or when a person is selecting different registers of the voice (just take a look at Sophie Scott working with impressionist Duncan Wiseby)

The last of these topics is something we use so naturally in teaching that it is taken for granted:

• the tone used to gently nudge someone back on task
• the slightly more emphatic one used to highlight that what’s being said is a reminder and not the first mention
• the increased intensity which suggests that the behaviour is becoming an issue
• the complete re-orchestration required if we realise that there is a perfectly valid and blame-free source of distraction

You can download the programme here (the item begins halfway through the broadcast).

Why should religious music be of interest to our largely secular society? BBC 4’s Sacred Music, presented by Simon Russel Beale, visited Notre Dame de Paris to show how two innovations of the 12^th Century Notre Dame School underpin what has since come to be known as western classical music.

Four members of early music specialist choir, The Sixteen and their director Harry Christophers, demonstrated music’s journey from homophonic (Int 2 concept) plainchant (H Music concept) to polyphony (Int 2 concept). Their lively, committed performances, which maximised the acoustics of Notre Dame’s Gothic architecture made it possible to believe that contemporary listeners would have experienced something of the vitality of the Punk revolution in the 1970s. This fresh approach was pioneered by Léonin and developed by his successor Pérotin.

Aside from the obvious connectivity between music and architecture, the links between music and science (notably physics) were explored. Composers, deciding which notes would best fit those already present in the setting of the plainchant would choose intervals (an Int 2 concept), in order, from the harmonic series i.e. 8ve, 5th & 4^th. Although the triad had not yet become the building block of Western harmony, the foundations of the genre had been laid.

Musicologist, Helen Deeming, enthusiastically outlined the possibilities afforded by the second innovation of the time, the development of musical notation. Although the words of the liturgy were written, the associated music was taught by rote and memorised. This meant that, were a new setting to be sent to another cathedral city, a singer, familiar with the music, would have to tag along to coach the choir. Now, the music could be sent and realised from afar.

There remain three more episodes of this promising series. Here are links to details of all episodes, an overview of the series and a reflection on the place of sacred music in a secular world.

Overview of the series

The four episodes: The Gothic Revolution; Palestrina And The Popes; Tallis, Byrd and The Tudors; Bach And The Lutheran Legacy

Richard Langham Smith, Head of Music at the Open University, writes eloquently on Sacred Music in a Secular World.

I was reminded of this quote today:

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826); 3rd president of US.

The reason it came to mind was that while thinking about apparent serendipity, an alternative perception occurred to me which might best be summed up by a paraphrasing of the above quote as follows:

“I’m a great believer in serendipity, and I find the more connected I become the more frequently it occurs.”

While reading one of my favourite language blogs I was referred to a site entitled The Mnemosyne Project which aims, not only to provide a sophisticated free flash-card tool, but also to research into the nature of long-term memory. A few seconds earlier, I had been referred by Ewan McIntosh to Quizlet – another free vocabulary training tool. Both seem very impressive.

However, something about the url of The Mnemosyne Project rang a bell, and it soon came to me that it appears to be the work of the same talented, open-handed people who offer the free audio editing & recording program, Audacity.

Audacity is loaded on many PCs in East Lothian schools. It was that program which I used to extract, amplify, bass boost and eventually fade out the short mp3 sample in this post. It sounds like a lot, but it was the work of seconds really.

I would imagine that any organisation offering this much to learning communities of whatever kind should be eligible for an award of some kind, at some point. Any ideas?

In the Music Matters special on Music & Health one of the guests, Dr John Zeisel, claimed that music attacks The Four A words associated with Alzheimers – agitation, aggression, anxiety & apathy. Aware that the study of dysfunction often enhances awareness of function, I soon began to wonder whether music (specifically the study of music) has the potential similarly to benefit those not affected by that particular disease.

All of us experience elements of the above conditions at some time or other – perhaps never more so than during our teenage years. I’m inclined to believe that any activity which heightens awareness of surroundings at the expense of that of the self is bound to help.

I learned one new term in this broadcast – retrogenesis – the degenerating mind’s equivalent of a common response to staffing cutbacks i.e. last in – first out – or rather – first in – last out. It seems that music has been hard-wired for so long in our evolution that it outlasts many other abilities. This disposition to longevity seems also to be due to its reliance on procedural as opposed to declarative memory.

Sergio della Sala’s video contributions to LTS stress that memories are recreated dynamically as opposed to being accessed from an unchanging archive. This certainly resonates with how I feel when playing music by memory (which constitutes the majority of occasions) and also with what pupils describe of their experiences of memorising music. If pressed, one could name the pitches, durations, harmonies, concepts etc. – but it seems so much easier just to play it!

One of the more interesting features to emerge from the New Scientist (NS) special The Roots of Music was an article on amusia. Like many people, I had imagined this simply to mean the inability to carry a tune or to perceive changes in pitch and rhythm. However, researching further in a listen again edition of BBC Radio 4’s Frontiers I began to appreciate how annoying the omnipresence of music in our society might be for sufferers.

What, to the majority, must seem like easily filterable background music in pubs, shops etc. must constitute little more than an irritating clatter – perhaps something like trying to think or have a conversation in a noisy hotel kitchen.

It is thought that around 4% of the population are amusic. This could amount to more than 50 people in a large school – perhaps some on the staff – perhaps some in the Music Department

At the bottom of the NS article was an invitation to take part in an online test. Why not log on and try for yourself? It consists of listening to two playings of short tunes and deciding if they were the same or different. I was interested in taking part see whether it might be possible to simulate what it must be like for the P5 pupils who undergo an aural test at the start of each session.*

However, I quickly found my lengthy experience of processing music made it impossible for me to hear the tests in the same way that a beginner or an amusic person might. I realised that just a few notes into the first playing of each test I was unconsciously encoding the sounds – specifically the tonality (key) and metre (pulse and rhythmic groupings). This gave me something more concrete with which to compare the second playing. However, there were a couple of examples which were sufficiently up-tempo, irregular and lengthy to feel quite challenging.

I’ve often been struck by this educational paradox – the more proficient you become in your chosen field, the more difficult it becomes truly to appreciate what those who struggle with it really feel.

* In August of 2006 I wrote 5 posts on the testing process for instrumental instruction: 1 2 3 4 5