1 1/2 years ago in Dave’s curiosity class, my term curiosity project was to learn all that I could about education systems over the course of ten weeks. Since then, and especially now that I have joined the education field, I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about education models.
I won’t go into detail now (or else this will turn into a novel), but in my brainstorming (and by drinking the Ken Robinson kool aid), I realized that my orchestra + choir classes were the what taught me the most relevant and long-term content.
In Deb’s class, I made a book explaining how music has guided my education, using a piece by Tchaik. that my orchestra played back in 2005 – I don’t think I’ve ever played my orchestra music for anyone, but alas, the time has come (=
At first I was hoping to get a video up here, as I know we are a hugely visual culture and perhaps more of you would be apt to watch the song in its entirely if there was some sort of visual (= However, I was reminded of Mr. Nelson always telling us to “keep our eyes above the stand” AKA, stop trying to listen to the music with our eyes.
So…now it is that time for me to pass along this knowledge and encourage the same. Some of the best performances we had were when we turned the lights off and had to rely on just two senses to create music: touch and hearing.
Our generation is over stimulated – it’s so easy to multi-task and do 15 million things at once, but with this opportunity also comes the consequence of losing sight of the details that perhaps seem minute, but in all actuality are major components of the whole.
With that said…I encourage you to put everything else aside for 9 minutes and 31 seconds and enjoy some Tchaikovsky.
Here’s the recording of my orchestra at the 2005 Vienna International Youth + Musical Festival playing the 4th movement of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C:
