In my opinion, some of the best orchestral music these days is being written for movie soundtracks! It's like the "classical music" of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. If you want to hear some great music, mostly instrumental, go to streamingsoundtracks.com and just let it play - it's great background music, and once in a while something will really catch your ear and you'll have to dance to it or go to the computer (iPhone/iPod) to see what it is and who wrote it. My husband and I listen to it a lot - he streams it through his iPod touch. We play "name that movie", but he always wins, cause he's such a movie buff!

I thought some of you might be interested in some of the other music I've chosen for play-alongs this semester. We've used:

The Pink Panther, by Henry Mancini (from the movie of the same name)

Dalinette, by Les Primitifs du Futur, from the album Tribal Musette

The Lion Sleeps Tonight, by The Tokens, used in the movie The Lion King, but originally a 60's hit.

Frosty the Snowman, by the Glenn Miller Orchestra

and of course, we've used the Play Along 2 and When the Saints Go Marching In from our Sticks collection.

I haven't decided yet what we will use this week :) Wait and see.

This week, Feb.15-17, our play-along music is "Hush Little Baby", a traditional song, done non-traditionally by Bobby McFerrin and Yo Yo Ma. It's on the album called Hush.

The music we used for the PlayAlong this week was "Fiesta" by Dave Grusin. It is from the soundtrack to The Milagro Beanfield War.

Hi everyone! Welcome to the Director's Blog.

This is where I'll post items of interest concerning musical development, musical theory ("lite"), things I observed in class, perhaps class concerns, etc. If there is something you'd like me to address concerning class or any of the above, and it's something you think other parents would also be interested in, please email me and I'll try to respond promptly in this space. I will still email announcements and urgent messages - This will be more of a place for "Food For Thought". 

Here's a small dose of music theory to get us started: 

Today in class, we did three songs in a row based on the note D. Two of them, Trot to Grandma's House and Blow The Wind Southerly, were in D Major, the scale most of us know as Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti-Do. For most people in our culture, this is a relatively happy sounding mode, with the third step, "mi", being a major third above the resting tone, aka the tonic. The seventh step, "ti", is only a half step from the upper resting tone, giving it a lot of tension wanting to be resolved by going on up to the resting tone. If a melody stops on "Ti", to us it sounds unfinished. Think of the "bum, bum, bums" at the end of Trot to Grandma's House; if you leave off the last one, it really sounds left up in the air! We really want it to go on! To me, this gives songs in a major key a drive, an active-ness that some other modes do not have.   

Spin and Stop is in a mode called Dorian, in which the third ("mi") and the seventh ("ti") scale steps are lowered by a half step. For those of you who don't know, a half-step is the move from one note on the keyboard to the one immediately adjacent, for instance from a white note to the black note right next to it. Not a large interval, but one that changes the sound and the mood of the piece a lot! The lowered third step, a "minor third" above the resting tone, in Dorian mode gives it (for many of us) a somewhat melancholy sound. The lowered seventh step tends to give it less of a drive back to the resting tone. My feeling about Dorian mode is that it is a little melancholy, restful, maybe even comforting. A well-known folk song in Dorian is "Scarborough Fair".

Of course, the feelings and responses we have to the various modes are mostly due to our learned expectations of what music should be and do. Those of us who grew up in western cultures are used to hearing Mozart and Andrew Lloyd Webber, Christmas carols and Twinkle, Twinkle. The traditional and commonly heard music in some other cultures may be very different to our ears, and western music may sound unusual to the people in those cultures. 

OK, maybe more than you wanted to know, but there it is. You may add a comment, below. Please let me know if it's too little, too much, irrelevant, interesting, unclear, terrific, etc. Some of you are more musically trained than others, and I want to cover things simply enough for those who are untrained, but hopefully not too simplistically for the more experienced.