March is Women’s History Month and by extension, Women in Music Month—an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate women’s contributions to our field.

When I was a grad student at Eastman, they used to have an annual Women in Music Festival in March. Students and faculty worked together to create a series of programs and lunchtime concerts featuring music (and sometimes lyrics) by women. I had the opportunity to accompany on a program one year—it was so meaningful to be part of such a special event. It’s still something that stands out in my memory from my time in grad school.

As a teacher, I love finding ways to honor and celebrate things like this with my students. This year, we’re celebrating Women in Music month with a series of musical informances.

When you think about practicing, what do you picture?

Maybe you think about your instrument in the living room or your favorite practice room at school. Maybe you picture your studio with morning light streaking across the floor or in the evening with a few lamps casting a cozy glow.

Certainly, practicing happens in all of these spaces. But it can also happen at your desk, in the car, at the breakfast table, on a walk, in a carrel at the library, or in a classroom where no instrument is present.

How?

Because practicing is more than the mechanics of playing an instrument.

I have a love/hate relationship with studio classes.

I love the idea of them, and I love being able to offer them to my students. But I’ve never found a structure or approach that works.

At the school where I teach, I’m limited to a classroom with a single piano, which means students have to take turns or do activities that don’t involve an instrument.

In addition, having a group of 6-8 students in a room together for 45-60 minutes (again, with one instrument) was challenging. It’s difficult to keep everyone engaged and focused, give directions, facilitate meaningful learning activities, and assess each student individually.

As an introverted teacher, it can feel a little chaotic and overwhelming.

I did a poll on Instagram recently to see if any of my music teacher friends had ever hosted a musical informance. A few said "yes," a few said "no," but a surprising number of respondents chose the third option: "What's an informance?"

An informance is basically an informal performance or as Eastman professor Dave Headlam describes, "A performance for the information age." (source: Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory)

It's an opportunity to share musical works in progress or perform in a laid-back environment while inviting the audience into the process. There's a teaching component and a performing component, and depending on how you structure it, a conversational or interactive component.

I received an email from a listener recently, a piano teacher in North Carolina. She had purchased a set of my tonal pattern cards and was looking for ideas and suggestions for how to incorporate them into her teaching this year.

This prompted me to sit down and think through the importance of building a musical vocabulary (rhythm and tonal), how we learn to read music, and creative ways to engage our students through listening, pattern recognition, matching, imitating, and improvising using a basic set of tonal pattern cards.

In this episode, you'll learn about the mental process behind how we read music, the importance of reading patterns vs. individual notes, a 5-step sequence for musical skill development, and seven creative ideas for using tonal pattern cards in your teaching on a regular basis.

You know those moments when something just *clicks*? When something suddenly makes sense to you that was confusing before or you make a new connection or you realize you're able to do something you didn't know you could do.

Sometimes we call these a-ha moments or breakthroughs. These are some of my favorite things to observe in my studio: when a student recognizes a new musical concept, makes a new connection, or can do something independently that they couldn't do without help before.

Summer is a great time to rest, recharge, and work on professional development. This is often when we as music educators attend conferences and workshops, participate in training and certification programs, take summer classes at a local university, and catch up on all the reading we intended to do during the year.

Today, I'm sharing a curated list of 11 pedagogy-related books for music teachers. Some I've read, and some are on my reading list, but all offer a fresh perspective on the teaching and learning process that I hope will inspire and inform your teaching practice in the year to come.

What makes learning formal or informal?

Often they’re presented as a dichotomy: Formal learning is learning that happens with a teacher in a structured environment and informal learning is learning that takes place out in the world, between peers, or things the student learns on their own.

In music, genre is often wrapped up in these distinctions. To generalize, classical music and sometimes jazz are taught and experienced in formal situations (like schools, lessons, and community ensembles), and pop, rock, and everything else are experienced in informal contexts (at home, in the car, with friends, in the garage band).

But can music learning be both formal and informal? What does that look like?

That's what we're going to talk about today.

It was 1997.

My piano teacher had just shown us a picture of Belle, Bonne, Sage, a rondeau about love written in the shape of a heart by 15th-century French composer, Baude Cordier. I studied the top two staves, curved to create the top of the heart, the illuminated letter B at the beginning of the first word, Belle, and the unique black-and-red notation.

This signaled the beginning of the annual studio-wide Valentine composition project.