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Category: Uncategorized
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In this week long camp, students will have the opportunity to receive private vocal instruction on a song of their choice, ensemble singing experience, performance coaching and will work on rhythm, harmony and sight reading skills in a fun and interactive way. Students will share their week’s work in a final celebration and will experience the joy of singing with others.
Sign up for either or both weeks of the Vocal workshop. Each week also features an additional guest vocal instructor who will be working with Tracy.
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- Week 2 – August 7th –10th
UPDATE: Our Summer program has been CANCELLED due to lack of enrollment. - featuring Tracy with Mackenzie Peters – assistant coach – Mackenzie is a local singer-songwriter and recent star of South Delta Secondary School’s musical the Sound of Music.
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- Open to students ages 10 – 16 years
- program runs at Delta Community Music School – 9:30am – 3:30pm
- Fees: Week 1: $250 : Week 2 (August): $200.
- Registration: Download our Sounds of Summer Vocal Camp Registration form
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photo: DCMS Board Chair Pat Rogers with Kiwanis President Larry Rossiter (photo by S. Robb)
On Friday May 11th the Kiwanis Club of Tsawwassen and Ladner made a presentation to the Delta Community Music School of one thousand dollars. The funds will be used to provide funding for some local youth to attend our Thrive City String Boot Camp and the South Delta Jazz Workshop. Both of these events will be held at the school this July 2012. Thanks to Kiwanis Club president Larry Rossiter and Karel Ley for being on hand for the presentation to our Music School Board Chair Pat Rogers. Thanks to Kiwanis member Jim Matson for helping make this possible.
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Music and the Mind: New Research published by psychologists Laurel Trainor and David Gerry of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind report music training can foster babies’ emotional development and communication skills. The effects begin at just 6 months of age!
“The infant brain might be particularly plastic with respect to musical experience,” the researchers write in the journal Developmental Science. “When parents are actively involved and materials appropriate for infants are utilized, musical training can profitably begin early in infancy.”
Below is a quote from the article “Duets and Diapers” on Pacific Standard
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The researchers describe a six-month experiment featuring 34 infants and their parents. The babies’ average age at the time of the first session was six and one-half months; the last week of classes occurred around their first birthday.
Twenty of the infants and their parents participated in weekly, hour-long interactive music classes, which utilized the well-known Suzuki method.
“Two teachers worked with the parents and infants to build a repertoire of lullabies, action songs and nursery rhymes,” the researchers write. “Parents were encouraged to use the curriculum CD at home and to repeat the songs and rhymes daily.”
The other 14 infants and their parents enrolled in passive music classes, where they listened to “a rotating series of recordings from the popula Baby Einstein series” while playing together with balls, blocks or books.
After six months, those who took part in the active music lessons demonstrated a preference for tonal over atonal music—a pattern not found in the passive group. (Struggling record companies: These passives might grow into a potential audience for that backlog of Arnold Schoenberg CDs!) In addition, the researchers found “significantly larger and/or earlier responses” to piano tones in the brains of the babies who took active lessons.
But the benefits of this training went far beyond early indications of music appreciation.
“After participation in active music classes, infants showed much lower levels of distress when confronted with novel stimuli than after participation in passive music classes,” the researchers report. All the babies smiled and laughed less as they aged during the experiment, but the fall-off was greater among the passive listeners.
Communication skills were also positively affected. “Use of gestures increased greatly between six and 12 months of age,” the researchers note, “but increased more so for those in the active compared to the passive music classes.”
Trainor and her colleagues do not view these developments as isolated. “Positive social interactions between infants and parents likely lead to better communication and earlier acquisition of communicative gestures, which in turn lead to more positive social interactions,” they write.
So never hesitate to teach your little one a lullaby. Even at a very young age, making music together is great way for parents to bond with their budding baritone or Beyoncé. [/quote]
Here is a great article out of Australia by composer Andrew Ford. It is intended as a response to the massive downsizing of the School of Music in Canberra, but its message is universal. You can find the whole article here
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Music as an art from is being sidestepped somewhat in today’s culture If you find the water too chilly, you can always get out and try again later – or try somewhere else. Eventually you are likely to find something that holds your attention and this, in turn, will lead you to another piece of music and another. Most people get this far.
The next step is to find yourself listening to music you don’t like or understand, reasoning that with a little persistence on your part the piece in question will begin to reveal its secrets. Surprisingly often, it does. If you’ve come this far, you are, I believe, a musical person, even a musician of sorts, engaging with music at quite a profound level, participating in musical thinking.
The next level involves playing and singing, improvising and composing. Indeed in many of the world’s more musically advanced cultures – I’m thinking particularly of Africa – this comes first. Making up our own music and performing it is how we truly engage with our musical traditions and how we preserve and critique and nurture them. [/quote]