Comprehensive Musicianship-Researching Your Selection

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Category: Tales From The Podium

Another part of researching your Comprehensive Musicanship Project lesson plan can be a bit more challenging than the basic analysis of the music.

You simply try to find out as much as you can about the piece, the composer, and any context surrounding the music itself. If you are doing a piece by Bach or Beethoven this is pretty easy. Classical composers have had hundreds of years to be analyzed, researched, and written about by hundreds of authors. For current composers though this is a lot more difficult as very little is available both on the Internet and in print about them. One of the biggest complaints that my group of middle and elementary band directors had is the lack of useful information out there for people that we consider to be major current composers. In most cases you are only able to find the composer's biography and a smattering of program notes found through web searches.

A CMP Resource Directory!

It occured to me while doing my research that while I might read another teacher's lesson plan to get some ideas, I would likely be better off just having access to the resources they used so that I can develop my own lesson, personalized to my style. Being the techie that I am I created a part of my web site that I am going to use to catalog all of the research that I do for my classes, and I openly suggest that other teachers consider contributing to it to help each other out.

Basically I have created a mini directory for composers, both dead and living , that can have subcategories for each of their individual compositions. If you find a little gem of research or a physical resource that you think other teachers might be able to use when rehearsing the same piece then add a bookmark to it. I will see the new submissions and categorize each one of them into the appropriate category. If a composer or a composition is not listed then submit the bookmark anyway and I will add a category for it. I would hope that the Comprehensive Musicanship Project staff would consider doing something similar, but in the interim all teachers are encouraged to contribute to the one here at MusicEdMagic.

Other Comprehensive Musicianship Project related articles here at MusicEdMagic:

• My Comprehensive Musicianship Diary- Day 1
• CMP Diary- Making The Choice To Be A Better Teacher
  
• CMP Diary- Analyzing The Heart of the Music
  
• Comprehensive Musicianship-Researching Your Selection
• Useful CMP Composer and Music Research Resources