Hello World!

Hello!! First official blog post and I could not be more excited to share my first initial thoughts and experiences relating to my first few introductory lessons at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. It was initially quite daunting, but after feeling welcomed and settling in, I was able to start doing some work on Ableton Live! This was a new experience for me as I am normally a Logic X Pro user myself, so there was a slight adjustment that had to be made. In this lesson, we were able to create some songs using some pre-made loops and I began to understand the purpose of the lesson. My lecturer James had taught through Ableton Live fundamental secondary school music elements, these being the concepts of music! Now for anyone who did music in high school, you know how boring teachers can make these concepts. So the fact that James was able to create a fun and engaging lesson while still teaching all the concepts, has changed the way I have thought about approaching music education and is something that I can ideally adapt and use in my teaching career.

My Second Class at the ‘Con’ revolved around composition and had me thinking about what makes a composer. Now the current music curriculum is in all honesty outdated. Music has and continues to evolve all the time. As we progress through the years our technology only gets more and more complex. However, this is a rant for another time! Our lesson was mainly practical, again getting us to learn music through playing music. Again creating a more social and engaging learning environment. Which will have huge benefits for school children. Looking at improvisation as well as teaching a friend a set riff to play helps us cross over into having a composition. The difference is notation or writing the idea down. Because once you forget your improvisation, it’s gone forever, which isn’t a bad thing in my opinion. In fact, I think that’s what makes it so special. That the beauty of an improvised solo can sometimes be a one-time thing. So it’s important to cherish it! Moving on from that super-deep and meaningful, we also looked at performing graphic notation, something that I had no experience with, but found can be very rewarding once interpreted. This for me would be an interesting way to get younger students involved and I look forward to doing some further research into this.

Thanks for tuning in!! It was great to get started!! See you all next week 🙂

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