Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

Everyone has their own favourite YouTube moments but I’ve never seen a claim to having grouped together The 50 Greatest Arts Videos on YouTube. However, there are some crackers here – chosen for The Guardian by Ajesh Patalay.

For some time now I have suspected that my piano colleagues have been been harbouring too narrow a view of what potential means in prospective pupils. All becomes clear here:

Thanks to Laurie Bartels of Neurons Firing for flagging up a two part interview of Sir Ken Robinson by Riz Khan on Al Jazeera English on the topic of creativity in education.

I would describe myself as aurally blessed but visually cursed. How bad is it? I have absolutely no sense of direction and part of this is the fault of poor observation. If I visited your house on two consecutive days and the living room had undergone a change of colour that fell short of drastic, it’s quite possible I wouldn’t notice.

That’s why I was intrigued to see a few posts on Dave Gray’s Visual Thinking in Practice (from the CAIS Conference) on Laurie Bartels‘* blog, Neurons Firing. Among the links** was a short video from Visual Thinking Strategies featuring some eloquent observations of paintings by primary school pupils.

I understand that visual input takes up 90% of the brain’s processing power and it seems a shame for this to be undernourished. However, I also find myself frustrated at the difficulty experienced by people – including pupils – to articulate musical content. There are various levels to this:

• description of techniques – seen in action; the need for one identified in the music; identifying the individual elements in a compound technique

• description of concepts heard in music – ascending; descending; scale; sequence; repetition; variation etc.

• description of mood of music – even after many years, many people do not get beyond happy/sad – a vocabulary too coarse and impoverished to depict their everyday emotional life

The third of these strikes me as the most problematic. Is it possible to calibrate and database the expressive intention as encoded musical content of a composition in the way that LTS has for concepts? Or is it simply a subjective minefield, best avoided?

*Laurie also contributes to the Sharp Brains  blog

**Another interesting link was to an Online Encyclopaedia of Western Signs & Symbols

I like to get an early night on a Sunday because you never know what Monday mornings can throw at you. This morning, a group of P7s announced that we were all going to die midweek. Never fear, I was on the case and knew they were referring to the switching on of the large hadron collider at CERN – I’d done my research, you see. I was able to pacify them by reassuring them that the mere switching on of the machinery was quite safe and that, although a beam of particles was going to be introduced into the collider on Wednesday (webcast here), there was to be no collision of protons. Conditions similar to those just after the Big Bang would not be simulated this September - we would not be dying this week. One promised to sue me if we did – I suspect he doesn’t even have a lawyer. Anything to get out of practising.

The unlikely event of science bringing civilisation to an end is scheduled for Tue 21 October – so at least we’ll have had a holiday – although I question the value of a full day’s in service just before entering a black hole. Were we to exit a black hole, intact but in another universe – would we expected to try our best to make it to school? Would we get travel expenses? Normally, in cases of nature interfering with our professionalism, one is encouraged to tune into local radio for details. Increasingly, though, I find local radio and the end of civilisation difficult to tell apart.

In the even less likely event of my serious treatment of the subject leaving some blanks in the science, let the groovers in the CERN Rap Team explain:

If your memory of a song you’d like to play is a little vague, or your harmonic ear challenged, why not turn to Chordie? The front page defaults to alphabetical search by artist, but you can change this to browse by song.

Having made your choice, you’ll be taken to a version of the song containing lyrics, chord names and guitar chord diagrams e.g. Downtown – written by Tony Hatch and performed by Petula Clark (cited as the most successful British female solo recording artist).

Should the key turn out to be unsuitable for your voice, there is a transpose function. The song, originally in E is shown here in the key of G. Should your mandolin-playing cousin show up, the chords can transcribed – like this. It is even possible to see the chords for left-handed players.

Even if you don’t play, and assuming that the lyrics are accurate, this might also be one way of avoiding mondegreens.

If you’re too young to remember this song, here is a video of Petula Clark performing it in 1964. If nothing else, you’ll be struck by how dancing styles have changed in the last 44 years!

I’m not really sure what musical dreams are being sold in this video by John Q. Walker – particularly from 9′ 55” to 11′ 18” - but it’s certainly interesting. Without giving the game away, it sounds like a comprehensive, cross-referenced database of musical nuance and human emotion would be required. Perhaps it’s entirely natural to be incredulous of possibilities which lie far in advance of your own lifespan - although in this video interview he concurrs with the estimation of 10 -20 years.

However, there is some great footage of a young Glenn Gould playing some of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (his first of two recordings, separated by 26 years) and some lovely photographs.

This Youtube video shows the Aria and Variations 1 – 7 from the later recording of 1981. May I recommend the elegant, lyrical fireworks from 7′ 14” to 7′ 50”

I strive not to stray too far from the music/education area if I can avoid it, but occasionally something so impressive comes along that I feel I have to flag it up. I just heard on Radio 4’s Material World about a project by staff in the University of Nottingham’s School of Chemistry, to create a Periodic Table of Videos. Each one could be sought out on YouTube, but it’s easier to find them on the team’s dedicated website. This really is a labour of love of which would surely have touched the heart of the table’s originator, Dmitri Mendeleev.

Professor Martyn Poliakoff has one of the bets science hair-dos of all time!

You can listen again to the programme until Thursday 4^th August or download a podcast from the website.

There is another artistic representation of the Periodic Table here – flagged up by Brian a while ago.

As someone who spends 5.5 hours-a-week in Meadowbank Stadium (though you’d never guess it), I know that its forthcoming diminution will affect many pupils from our schools – because I see them there. However, I hadn’t realised that young people travel from much further afield than East Lothian. Chris Hoy explains:

One of my favourite games, called into play to allay the tedium of supermarket shopping, is to guess the origin of foreign languages before I’m near enough to hear the words. What’s this nonsense, I hear you read. But really, you can tell from the tunes. However this becomes more difficult when foreign nationals are speaking English, as the mixture of our words to their tunes tends to hide the traces. Try out your ear on this online spot the accent quiz.

Thanks to Omniglot for the link.