UTunes: Music 1.01

The Tanglewood Symposia: I

2007-10-03T19:54:00.000-07:00

In the midst of the Summer of Love came what the Technology Institute for Music Educators has declared to be one of the "most oft-cited sources in the field of music education:" A report produced after a week-long gathering of 34 scholars and 17 guests to discuss "Music In American Society," which even at the time they called "an event unique in the annals of music in the United States."

It was by all accounts a fascinating gathering, involving such luminaries as Boston Symphony Conductor Erich Leinsdorf, opera singer Dorothy Maynor, jazzman Stan Kenton, not to mention musical polyglot Gunther Schuller, Seattle Symphony conductor Milton Katims, Opera Company of Boston founder Sarah Caldwell, and a host of music educators, publishers, and thinkers...including no fewer than FIVE heads of public-school music programs...in Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and Glens Falls, New York.

It's a fascinating document, brought about by "...the serious and widespread concern of many music educators, who strongly urged that the profession appraise its role and think ahead to the year 2000." (Hmmm....sound familiar?) And the resultant "Tanglewood Declaration" doesn't seem so far off from our own time. Though the parts bolded here are redolent of the 60s:

The intensive evaluation of the role of music in American society and education provided by the Tanglewood
Symposium of philosophers, educators, scientists, labor leaders, philanthropists, social scientists, theologians,
industrialists, representatives of government and foundations, music educators, and other musicians led to this
declaration:

We believe that education must have as major goals the art of living, the building of personal identity, and
nurturing creativity. Since the study of music can contribute much to these ends, WE NOW CALL FOR MUSIC
TO BE PLACED IN THE CORE OF THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM.

The arts afford a continuity with the aesthetic tradition in man’s history. Music and other fine arts, largely
nonverbal in nature, reach close to the social, psychological roots of man in his search for identity and
self-realization.

Educators must accept the responsibility for developing opportunities which meet man’s individual needs
and the needs of a society plagued by the consequences of changing values, alienation, hostility between generations, racial and international tensions, and the challenges of a new leisure.

Music educators at Tanglewood agreed that:

Music serves best when its integrity as an art is maintained.
Music of all periods, styles, forms, and cultures belongs in the curriculum. The musical repertory should be expanded to involve music of our time in its rich variety, including currently popular teen-age music and avant-garde music, American folk music, and the music of other cultures.
Schools and colleges should provide adequate time for music in programs ranging from preschool through adult or continuing education.
Instruction in the arts should be a general and important part of education in the senior high school.
Developments in educational technology, educational television, programmed instruction, and computer-assisted instruction should be applied to music study and research.
Greater emphasis should be placed on helping the individual student to fulfill his needs, goals, or potentials.
The music education profession must contribute its skills, proficiencies, and insights toward assisting in the solution of urgent social problems as in the "inner city" or other areas with culturally deprived individuals.
Programs of teacher education must be expanded and improved to provide music teacher who are specially equipped to work with the very young, with adults, with the disadvantaged, and with the emotionally disturbed.

The entire document (in PDF form) is viewable here. Take a moment to check it out.

What Are Digital Humanities?

2007-09-24T13:29:00.001-07:00

The UTunes project is funded under the NEH's Digital Humanities Initiative. What, exactly, does that mean? It might useful here to define the phrase here...or at least as the NEH defines it:

Digital technologies offer humanists new methods of conducting research, conceptualizing relationships, and presenting scholarship. NEH is interested in fostering the growth of digital humanities and lending support to a wide variety of projects, including those that deploy digital technologies and methods to enhance our understanding of a topic or issue; those that study the impact of digital technology on the humanities--exploring the ways in which it changes how we read, write, think, and learn; and those that digitize important materials thereby increasing the public's ability to search and access humanities information.

More About What's Behind UTunes

2007-09-24T12:48:00.000-07:00

UTunes: Music 1.01 grew out of the conviction that today we are in an unprecedented new "Golden Age" of Music Discovery, broughy about by a “perfect storm” of better and cheaper technology, coupled with a “Long Tail” of unprecedented access and inventory via the web. The result is significantly increased societal demand and interest in music: finding it, making it, sharing it, and learning more about it. But this new golden age of musical discovery has largely been happening in arenas far removed from academic life. Through the uTunes project, we plan to investigate and to pilot methods to bridge this growing gap, while bringing the work of some of our nation's most accomplished and insightful music professionals into the modern media landscape.

The Adventure Begins!

2007-09-24T11:48:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the first installment in what we hope will be a continuing collaborative effort in re-examining and re-defining how we learn about music. Thanks to a Digital Humanities Start-Up Initiative from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we're going to be creating a new multi-media effort to create some podcasts, build a website, and other cool stuff.

Who's we? It's RoeDeo Productions and The College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas-Austin, not to mention YOU! We want your ideas, contributiions, and feedback, and we'll chart is all here. So let the games begin!