Community and Service:
As part of my curriculum I spend time exploring the idea of musicians as part of a group of communities. It’s important enough to me, that I try to include work regarding music, community and service in every unit I teach. Some of the question I pose to students are; What roles do we play within our communities and what services we provide as musicians? Over the weekend I started to think more about ways we can work toward providing a service within our communities.
The obvious thing to do during this unprecedented time, is to create performance project using digital tools. This is not a new concept, nor is it unusual for my students to work collaboratively in virtual spaces and share their work with other students. The difference is, now I am insisting my students use a digital audio workstation to complete and turn in their assignments.
Thanks to the work of my counterpart, Soundtrap is the application we are working with at my school. My colleague is the choir teacher and also teaches a class called Understanding Music. She first used Soundtrap as a tool to help students understand structure, form and composition through creating/producing digital music. The site added another dimension to her students experience with music in general. Since it worked so well with students who were not in her performance based class, she thought to use it with here choir. As it turned out, she figured out it was a great tool for sending guide track to her students and listening to individual performers in her choirs. Giving her the opportunity to give specific instruction to members of her ensemble.
Now I’m in on the fun. I ask my students to record their performance assessments on Soundtrap and invite me to their projects. Once I have graded their recordings, I start to add drum loops and effects to their project and send it back to them. By modeling in this way the cappabities of this website, my hope is that students will start creating more project and inviting one another to participate in this space. Perhaps this is how musicians can build community and provide a service during the covid19 era.
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