We're going to Montana!

8/21/12 – For Immediate Release:

Columbia Falls High School awarded Plum Creek Foundation “Great Classrooms” grant to fund Institute for Creative Music workshops

The Institute for Creative Music is proud to announce an upcoming series of workshops in Northwest Montana. A band of 5 teaching artists from New York will travel to Whitefish, Kalispell, Columbia Falls, and Eureka for a week of workshops and performance with area high schools. In collaboration with Karen Ulmer, Columbia Falls High School’s band director, the IfCM was awarded a grant from the Plum Creek Foundation that will sponsor full-day classroom workshops for 4 schools in improvisation, audio recording, and song-learning techniques. The IfCM band is made up of young professionals who work actively in New York and around the globe including Nick Finzer (trombone), Mike Kaupa (trumpet), Chris Ziemba (piano), Matthew Golombisky (bass), and Chris Teal (drums). In addition to working in the classroom with students, the group will present concerts showcasing their original material for the community. Schools receiving workshop sponsorship include Whitefish High School, Flathead High School, Lincoln County High School, and Columbia Falls High School. All area schools will have the opportunity to participate in an additional day of in-depth recording and performance activities on November 10th.

For more information on the Institute for Creative Music, visit www.ifcmusic.org

The Plum Creek Foundation Montana Great Classroom Awards program is designed to provide public, K-12 teachers with additional resources to enhance the learning environment in their classrooms and help enrich the educational experiences of students across western Montana.

Plum Creek is the largest and most geographically diverse private landowner in the nation with approximately 6.6 million acres of timberlands in major timber producing regions of the United States and wood products manufacturing facilities in the Northwest. In Montana, Plum Creek practices sustainable forestry on all of its 899,000 acres throughout the western part of the state. For more information on Plum Creek in Montana, visit www.plumcreek.com/montana

Come Join the Band!

The University of Rochester presents a summer full of pre-college courses every year; offering a wide variety of subjects to give students a "taste of college." Many participants are from Rochester-area schools and some also travel internationally to take part, staying in the U of R's residence halls for the weeks that they are there.

In my second year instructing "Come Join the Band: Creative Music Making for Everyone", I was joined by multi-instrumentalist, singer/songwriter, and educator Alan Murphy for two weeks of work, play, and creative performance.  We had the fortune of working with 8 fantastic young adults (ages 14-17) with a variety of vocal and instrumental experiences.  All had some experience with instrumental or vocal music in school and brought great openness and enthusiasm in working together.

The goals of the class were to learn songs of the students choosing, utilize new instruments to facilitate performing the songs, and perform and record throughout the two weeks in a variety of settings.  Week one divided each 3-hour class into segments for Creativity (free-writing and team-building), Musical Skills (demonstration of different instruments and vocal arranging, incorporating free-play and informal sharing of songs), and Projects (presenting songs to the group, rehearsing these songs on new instruments with guidance from Alan and I).  The first week culminated with a trip to GFI Music, a premier professional recording studio in Rochester, where the students recorded a version of the song "Valerie" (originally written by the Zutons, we modeled an Amy Winehouse/Mark Ronson collaboration).  Here's some video shot at the studio by the students:

A great time had by all!  We hope to get back and do more next year.  We'll follow up with week two on "Come Join the Band" in our next installment... Stay tuned for more inspired music making...

CT