John Cage’s Song books

During the most productive period of his life, in 1970 John Cage was commissioned to write two sets of voice solo pieces around a minute long each for singers Kathy Berberian and Simone Rist during only about three months. Cage continued in his Song books to experiment with voice solos or “vocal impressions of electronic music” (Fox, 2011), the first three of which were written in 1958 while visiting Luciano Berio and Kathy Berberian in Milan, Italy. In planning the quantity of solos in each book, Cage consulted with I-Ching book (Pritchett, 2012) out of an interest in random numbers generator rather than any in spiritual aspects of the book; I-Ching determined the amount of songs per book as 56 and 34. To create each of the 90 songs originally, Cage asked I-Ching three questions: 

Hip-hop pedagogy within a frame of formal music education

Lately, the hip-hop pedagogy emerged in a spotlight of the most radical and effective alternative educational choices. “As teachers concerned with developing a critical learning search for new and innovative ways to introduce educational relevance, hip-hop should be located in the range of approaches. Developing relationships based on familiarity and importance, students have the greater propensity to grasp concepts originally considered foreign or “uninteresting.” (David Stovall. (2006). We can relate: hip-hop culture, critical pedagogy, and the secondary classroom. Urban education, Vol. 41, No: 6, November 1, 2006, pp. 585-586). Unlike the common school subjects, there’re quite specific difficulties which so far had prevented hip-hop pedagogy from spreading over the formal music education: “music education researchers have arguably done little to consider developments in hip-hop pedagogy, critical hip-hop pedagogy, and hip-hop based education” (Adam J. Kruze. (2016). Toward hip-hop pedagogies for music education. International Journal of Music Education, 2016, Vol. 34(2), p. 247). This paper discusses the particular ways in which hip-hop culture affects music classrooms and proposes several methods of integrating hip-hop pedagogy and/or hip-hop based education in music studios. My contextual standpoint in researching this topic is of a white third-world female who had been formally trained as a classical pianist worldwide including in the USA, and works as a formal music instructor. I understand the role of hip-hop culture in American society and in urban societies around the planet, and am first-hand acquainted with the ways in which the system of academic music education operates.

In music schools and studios, there’s something about music that students know and comprehend better and deeper than their instructors.

Del vell al nou, del nou al vell

While on a field trip to Barcelona, I have attended the art exhibition “Del vell al nou, del nou al vell” (active between February 15 and March 4, 2018), which took place in Arts Santa Monica Museum. The name of the exhibition translates from Catalan as “From the old to the new, from the new to the old” and suggests somewhat of the reconceptualization of the artistic values against the traditional approaches to European fine arts. As a European born person who respects the ‘old’ ways in fine arts, I was eager to see what do the exhibited artists propose for the “new” in the day and in the future of Catalunya.