Category: MTMS Blog Posts

Summer Music Plans

As the school year winds down, we’ve been to concerts and many other events with music. If you’d like to share photos or videos, we’d love to see them!

What are your current summer plans? How do you keep music fun and fresh in the summer while school is out? Don’t forget we have a couple summer camps, but it is a good time to think about what you want to do for the summer.

Need an idea? Try out a new genre to play. Pick out a song that your teacher can help you learn. Maybe it’s time to pick a new instrument that you’ve always wanted to try. No matter what your plans, music will carry you through.

May Theme: Movie Themes

Many movies have a theme, a song that brings the experience to life and memory. This month the lab is exploring movie music themes. Some of them are old – think Wizard of Oz and An American in Paris, to more contemporary ones composed by John Williams.

Think about your favorite movie – what’s the song that brings that movie to mind? What’s playing in that moment where a main character gets the goal? The music binds together images to create the entire movie experience. Next time you watch a movie, pay attention to the sound and when these themes are woven into the storylines. Let us know what you think!

What Our Students Said About K-Pop

My son has been taking drum lessons from MTMS for years. He told my daughter he learned about K-pop music history, and she was jealous. We’re an online lesson family, so she could have listened to it, too, but she was too busy trying to sing K-pop karaoke with a friend over the webs and complaining she couldn’t sing in Korean (I corrected her to Hangul, thanks music history lessons!).

Other comments:

Korean lanuage (Hangul) is the 7th most learned language in the world. Some songs have Spanish in them.

There are lead dancers. They play fast and the music goes low and high, and we don’t see the instruments. It’s a lot like American hip hop, and it is highly energized.

Groups have to be close-knit like a family to be successful. Many have colors and names for their fans. I didn’t know about how many different words are used like ship and bias that becomes a k-pop culture movement.

Did you listen to more K-pop because of this month? I did!

What Our Students Said About Strings (March Theme)

We listen when our students tell us what they’re learning. We post a lot of the information here that we give to the students in lab for the theme.

Archers and those who made the bows and arrows were the first to realize that the strings made sounds and that it was musical. While the bone flute pre-dates this, that is a really cool discovery!

Chordophones – the earliest ones date back to 4500 years ago and they’re string instruments. The first chordophones were the lyres of Ur, and the ravanastrom was a very old stringed instrument from Sri Lanka. The Oud is considered the king of instruments in the Middle East.

Andrea Amati was a violin maker in Italy. Orchestras sync up in cool ways to do music. There are specific woods that are better for instruments and specific ways of moving on those instruments to make sounds.

High is happy and lively and low is sad and slow. (That’s quite a metaphor for life, right?)

Many of the Asian styles of string instruments were surprising and unknown to students, but they loved the patterns of notes.

The evolution of the string instruments, how the guitar gained strings over time and how you can do rhythm and melody on string instruments playing together was quite a revelation.

As a lover of string instruments, I appreciate all of the thought about the way strings are created and played – and I wonder if these kids will be considering that for future composition stations.