Welcome to Music Teachers Insightful Practices (MTIPS) Newsletter!
Written and Published by Nicholas Ambrosino
www.musicsimplymusic.com
director@musicsimplymusic.com

January 5, 2005

Table of Contents:

1. MTIPS Theme
2. Welcome Notes
3. MTIPS Development
4. Notable Quotables

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1. MTIPS Theme

A wonderful creative activity came out of her challenge to me as a teacher. (She challenged me as a teacher, because she presented a limitation in her learning pattern, that, in my opinion, would be detrimental to her growth. She did not like to make mistakes and to me, true learning is mainly about mistake making and fixing!) 
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2. Welcome Notes

Welcome to Music Teachers Insightful Practices (MTIPS) Newsletter!

A very happy new year to all! I hope the holidays were a wonderful reprise from the rest of the year and that you are charged to achieve all you can believe in 2005!

My goal for MTIPS is to provide you with practical tips and insights that will make your career or education in music, more fulfilling, rewarding and enjoyable and to assist you in achieving all that you believe! Please feel free to contact me if you would like to see a certain topic covered in an upcoming issue of MTIPS. My email address is editor@musicsimplymusic.com


SHAMELESS MARKETING PLUG: If you would like to arrange a workshop with me for your group, please contact me via email at nick@musicsimplymusic.com or give me a ring the old fashioned way at 631-863-2069 ext. 62. I would love the opportunity to fuel the fire of musical passion for you and your colleagues! Let’s explore a topic that would ignite your group!

And a REQUEST: If you enjoy MTIPS, please encourage your friends and colleagues to subscribe. Our growth over the years simply comes from "word of mouth." Anyone can subscribe by simply sending an email to: http://www.musicsimplymusic.com/newsletters.htm

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3. MTIPS Development

When I was in college, I had a professor for one of my non-music courses who was a bit eccentric. (I think ALL of the professors for my fine arts courses were a bit eccentric!) Kidding aside, this professor used to give a multiple-choice test. You know, the type of test where you had to choose from four or five possible answers. The test was usually fifty questions long, two points per question. But, there was one neat twist… There were two ways to get a perfect grade of 100 on the test. The first was the traditional way, get all of the answers correct. The second way was, without leaving any answer blank, to get all of the questions WRONG! Now, while on the surface this would appear to be an easy task, it was not, in fact, so simple. For, if you got even one question correct, you would get that score, a two! 

You see, several of the answers for each question were very close to correct, yet only one was exactly correct. In order to know which answer was wrong, you needed to know which one to avoid (the correct answer.)

So by now, I am certain that you are asking yourself what this has to do with music making. Enter my oldest daughter, Brianna. Brianna is a wonderful musician! But unlike her younger sister, she prefers to “play by the rules.” She is more comfortable with the written page then with the creative aspects to music making. So, improvisational and creative starts, for those of you who have read the last two issues of MTIPS, are not comfortable for her. When I ask her why, she flat out tells me that she does not want to make a mistake. Re-enter my eccentric college professor.

A wonderful creative activity came out of her challenge to me as a teacher. (She challenged me as a teacher, because she presented a limitation in her learning pattern, that, in my opinion, would be detrimental to her growth. She did not like to make mistakes and to me, true learning is mainly about mistake making and fixing!) So what was the activity? It was what I like to call the backwards music making.

We were working on creating using chordal tones. We started with the C major chord. Her job, while I played an accompaniment on a C major chord, was to only play notes that WERE NOT IN THE C CHORD. Her job was to make her improvisation sound as “horrible” as she could. We pretended that we were creating the score for a horror movie. 

Consider what she learned. In order to create her song, she had to become masterful in knowing the notes in the C chord and, since there was no way for her to actually make her creation sound “correct”, it was okay for her to make “mistakes” and simply explore. Eventually, we spoke about tension and release and she learned how to resolve the dissonance by landing on a chord tone. But, most importantly, she released herself of the necessity to always play the correct notes and allowed herself to simply play. 

Try this neat strategy with some of your students who are “perfectionists” and watch them blossom in the new year! 



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4. Notable Quotable

The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

The Artist’s Way p. 152


Copyright © 2005 Nicholas Ambrosino. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to reproduce, copy or distribute MTIPS so long as this copyright notice and full contact information about the author is attached. The author of this issue is Nicholas Ambrosino and he may be contacted at director@musicsimplymusic.com or reached by telephone at 631-863-2069

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