pilot workshop at a Waterloo Region high school.

I am thrilled to be leading the research component of The Gahu Project. The Gahu Project is a racial justice community music initiative in the Waterloo Region of Ontario that brings together youth, professional artists and arts organizations to explore and discover the music of Ghana. Through a series of workshops, high school students will engage in conversations about racial justice and learn Gahu, a recreational and social dance music of the Ewe people of Ghana which combines drumming, dancing and singing. The event will culminate on Music Monday (May 6) as over 400 local high school students will gather at Kitchener City Hall Square and be led by Ghanaian master drummer Kwasi Dunyo in a mass musical experience of Ghanaian drumming, dancing and singing.

The research that I am undertaking uses arts-based participatory action research to centre the voices of African, Caribbean, and Black identifying (ACBI) students in examining how The Gahu Project affects high school climates from a racial justice lens. The goal of the research is to strengthen relationships among high school students while also understanding challenges and possibilities in creating more inclusive high school climates for ACBI students to thrive. The specific objectives are:

1. To create participatory music performances that contribute to understanding and improving the high school climates that foster the wellbeing of ACBI students.
2. To identify ACBI student experiences of wellbeing in relation to learning environments, relationships among the students and school staff, and school safety/physical environment.
3. To generate policy and curriculum recommendations for WRDSB that will enhance its efforts to foster inclusive high school cultures and wellbeing of ACBI students across the district.

The research component of The Gahu Project is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Follow the Gahu Project on Instagram: @thegahuproject or #thegahuproject.

So thrilled to announce that I’ve accepted an appointment to join the music faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University. Here’s the official announcement. I’ll be helping build the undergraduate program in community music, the first of its kind in Canada, and I think perhaps also across North America. I am so excited to be a part of this!

This was my first Instagram post in 2012, of Maureen Forrester Recital Hall at WLU.  This was also my first music conference early in my PhD studies. Looking back, that seems like an auspicious start!

I am thrilled to announce that I’ve begun working with Sing for Life, an Edmonton-based organization that provides performing arts opportunities to marginalized communities. Sing for Life operates a choir and music lessons at a federal prison, as well as a choir for men who are socially and economically disadvantaged.

I’m going to be piloting a new program: family music classes for moms in conflict with the law. The classes will be for moms and their children aged 6 and under, and we’ll sing name songs, action songs, and songs for eating and sleeping and bathing. Our hope is that these classes will provide a repertoire of songs to moms that they can sing with their children and weave through their daily activities. And have fun together!

I’m piloting the first set of classes in early April, with a second set of classes to follow shortly after. I’m so excited to work on this program and to be a part of the wonderful work of Sing for Life.

By the way, Sing for Life is a charitable organization that can issue tax receipts. Check out their web site at www.singforlife.ca for a link to make a donation.

I was in Kananaskis at the Fine Arts Council conference of the Alberta Teachers’ Association. I gave two workshops on vocal and movement improv, and we had a grand time. In the first session, I introduced participants to the fundamentals of circle-singing–the improvisation technique of Bobby McFerrin (here’s my favourite Bobby McFerrin video about the pentatonic scale). My group of music and drama teachers were so amazing! No one had sung in this style before, and by the end of the session, we were free-form grooving and experimenting, with one participant improvising a whole song!

In the second session, I led a group through a series of voice and movement improvisation techniques to use with students in grads 4-8, to help them explore a wide range of sounds, and to help shy students feel more comfortable using their voices. We imitated soundscapes and we made machines. We also went for a sound walk around the glorious property of the conference centre, set in the heart of the Rockies. We reassembled and created a soundscape of the sounds that we heard. And we brainstormed ways that we could move these sounds into composition, and integrate creative exploration into the music curriculum.  Such generative ideas!

I’m keen to explore the possibilities of creative sound exploration and improvised music in classrooms. If you do work like this, let me know! What works? What have been challenges? I’m so excited to continue singing and exploring the possibilities for vocal improv in music classrooms and in my own practice. Special shout-out to Karen Porkka, who leads the Vocal Improv Network of Edmonton, a group that I’m now singing with regularly, and loving. Feels so great to get back to vocal improv, and to challenge myself and grow my practice and my pedagogy more.

I’m thrilled to tell you that I am the incoming director of Inspiration for Teachers–the teacher education component of Singspiration, the award-winning choral camp for youth (grades 4 to 12) at Concordia University of Edmonton.

Participants at Inspiration for Teachers will have many opportunities to observe and work with master conductors Elise Bradley (Junior Choir) and Dr. Graeme Langager (Youth Choir). There are many other amazing presenters through the week, including  Catherine Glaser-Climie (Director of the Cantaré Children’s Choir Program in Calgary), the extremely versatile percussionist Dwayne Hrynkiw, and Alyssa Paterson (Manager of  the Youth Orchestra of Northern Alberta/YONA-Sistema), among an incredible roster of presenters and clinicians.

There’s also an Adult Summer Choir under conductor Graeme Langager (Artistic Director of Vancouver’s award-winning Phoenix Chamber Choir).

Get more information about Inspiration for Teachers and consider joining us for a wonderful week of professional development and singing!

I recently had breakfast with a dear friend. Someone I’ve know for many years. He’s made an incredible career for himself, particularly as a playwright and an actor, with a gorgeous singing voice to boot. At breakfast, I told him how through college, I envied him his talent–he seemed to get involved in so many things. A whole bunch of opportunities seemed to fall in his lap. But as I watched him develop as an artist, I quickly realized that while, yes, he is a gifted performer, he works his ass off. He seeks opportunity. He creates opportunities for himself. As I recounted this at breakfast, I thought I was being generous in noticing that his work ethic  equaled or exceeded his already considerable talent.

My friend’s response? “I don’t believe in talent.”

He went on to say that the idea of talent is a trap: talent suggests something innate. That those who are declared not to have talent should, or do, give up. Those who are deemed talented either get complacent or have the weight of producing genius every time they create. Nobody benefits from decrees of talent.

huh.

Then today I was in a wonderful vocal improvisation workshop led by David Hatfield–a warm and wonderful teacher from Vancouver here in Edmonton for the weekend. And I found myself remembering when I was first introduced to this style of improvisation (based on the work of Bobby McFerrin). Back then, I was shy, anxious, yet eagre to be seen and heard and found worthy. I didn’t know how to start an improvisation, didn’t know how to make interesting sounds, how to join in. I was afraid of, on the one hand, sounding terrible (possibly the worst outcome for a singer). But on the other hand, I was afraid I would attempt to show off and my vocal contribution would be ego-filled, not in service of the music emerging in the group. Even though I did really really want people to think I had something special, something extraordinary, I didn’t want people to think that I thought that. That would be gauche.

Welcome to the jumble of anxieties that filled my mind back then. Yeah, vocal improv was rife with anxiety, my brain running rampant over my creative and embodied impulses.

Today, I kept thinking about that introduction to vocal improv so long ago because today was so very different. I am much more comfortable improvising. I am comfortable in my own skin–largely because I like myself now. Through my work with Fides, I know my body and voice, and I’ve got tools now to help me enter into music, to listen, to follow my body’s physical gesture, or open my mouth and see what sound comes out and follow that. I kept exploring vocal improv over the last ten years, and learned to let go of trying to be a genius in favour of trying to be curious.  Also, I am also a better musician now from all of my conducting training, my performance experience, and my graduate studies. In short: I’m a better musician because of all the work I’ve done, and continue to do. My musical lines today were more complicated, more interesting. But at the same time, I’m totally happy to be a fool. To sound bad, sing wrong notes and stumble along. I’ve discovered that while singing made-up music feels so terribly risky, it turns out that nothing terribly bad happens when I sing a wrong note. I just keep singing until I sing my way into some more interesting notes.

Throughout the entire day, I felt grounded, present with others but not losing myself either. I wasn’t perfect by any means, and there were far more accomplished singers and bigger risk-takers in the group. But that fact was a gift rather than an insult: what an honour to learn from each singer, who came with varying levels of experience and who each gave something uniquely of themselves.

And now I really know, I KNOW, my friend’s point. Talent is a shallow way to think about how we engage in the arts. It suggests the start and end point are the same. “Talented” renders artistic practice into a Yoda-like tautology–you either are or you are not. But this is a false way of thinking that splits the world into artistic winners and losers.

In fact, artistic practice is about engaging in exploration, risk-taking, curiosity, and willingness to make something bad. Artistic practice is work, it is continual growth. Throughout today, I didn’t care whether I was talented. I only cared to sing and follow musical impulses. To sing in community. To learn from others. To find times to stand out and find times to support the musical excellence of others. Above all, to sing in service of the music.

Thanks, friend.

I defended my thesis at the end of August, and handed in the final document a week later.

I think that, technically, I’m not a doctor until my convocation in November, but unofficially:

I AM A DOCTOR!!

And I am a doctor who now lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

I just had my childhood piano delivered from my parents’ house to mine today. My new studio needs work, but it’s looking promising:

Not quiiiiite homey yet, but with a little love and a lot of work, I think this will make a fine studio.

I also have plans in the works, including group classes, a vocal playlab, and mulling over the possibility of a no-commitment pop choir. I’m also beginning work on a solo interdisciplinary performance piece/research project.

I’m very excited for what’s to come.

Big changes in my studio. I will be defending my ph.d. in August this summer, and then relocating to Edmonton, Alberta (apparently the most up-and-coming city in Canada).

I will continue to teach privately through my studio in Toronto until early August, and will likely re-open my studio in Edmonton once we are settled, teaching in person and via skype, while also continuing my academic and artistic work.

Feel free to contact me for more information or to stay in touch.

Have a great summer!

Echo Women’s Choir is performing a concert on Mother’s Day afternoon, with Ukrainian singers Mark Marczyk and Marichka Kudriavtseva of Lemon Bucket Orkestra. I am not conducting in this concert, but am singing with a full heart!

Come join us!

Sunday May 10, 2015 @ 3:00 pm
Church of the Holy Trinity
(10 Trinity Square, next to the Eaton Centre)
Tickets: $15 advance/ $20 door/ $10 seniors, children, underwaged

As you might know, I am finishing my PhD in Music Education at the University of Toronto. So last week I attended the international conference known as RIME: Research in Music Education in the beautiful University of Exeter in England. This was the view from my bedroom window:

Besides the tremendous views, I also got a lot out of the conference itself. Now that I am back in Toronto, I find I am left both excited and troubled about the state of music education world-wide.

Excited because I saw many presentations that examined a wide array of music teaching and learning scenarios that wandered well beyond school-based choirs and bands: music education was constructed very broadly to include all ages, and many contexts, from underground rock music in Iran to music as a form of participatory culture to drama-oriented teaching strategies. And I also saw research about what I think of as traditional approaches to music education: school-based ensembles. And here too, I was excited to see how this research grappled with how to create culturally relevant pedagogies, and how to work with students more fully. In short, most of the research I saw considered music as embedded in, and constituted through, social relations rather than something that is separate from the politics of our daily lives.

I also walked away quite troubled. Music education around the globe appears to be diminishing: governments everywhere are simultaneously requiring post-secondary institutions to measure and quantify results, and demonstrate courses and programs in terms of market employability. Funding to music programs has been cut drastically. I’m not sure where I stand on this: I don’t want to suggest that music programs shouldn’t be accountable, or that we shouldn’t be thinking about what happens when students graduate, but the steady and constant erosion of music programs is alarmingly consistent and pervasive in many countries around the world. Add to that the erosion of stable faculty in post-secondary education, and it feels quite desperate indeed. I presented on a panel about the state of tenure in post-secondary music programs in Canada, and our research team painted yet another bleak picture for several reasons, not least of which being the shocking decline of tenure-track positions in Canada. Hiring freezes have been in place for…well, decades, in some situations, and tenure positions are disappearing.

Yet I am left feeling hopeful. Not about the state of music education in higher education, but about the capacity of music education scholars and practitioners to meet the challenge. These academics, from Norway, England, Ireland, Australia, Brazil, America, Poland, Canada, and so many other countries, are thoughtful, reflective, creative, and striving to make the world more just as best as we know how. Their passion ignites my own and I am newly excited to think and practice music.