Day 208: Teaching with sound
36yearsago.com
Vienna 1971—A Student Journal
A year of music, study, travel, sightseeing &
friends.
Day
208 — Teaching with sound
26-February-1972
(Samstag–Sat.)
TRANSCRIPT
Mixed day of work with
practicing and El. Musik. The horn seems to be going
somewhat better.
REFLECTIONS
Influence
of Prof. Kaufmann. A normal
day of practice and work in electronic music.
Normalcy in 1972 Vienna. More exciting, is the work I
did with students a few years later. My Vienna
experience from Prof. Kaufmann’s course was a
satisifying and great influence in my future
composition and teaching.
Students
are creative. The
opening picture shows a student, Nancy (grade 8), at
the Electrocomp synthesizer in 1976. When given the
opportunity, students can be extremely creative. The
picture below shows a student, Bill (grade 9),
exploring sound manipulation techniques with
microphones and tape recorders (just like musique
concrète in Vienna).
Teaching with sound. A few days
ago, I talked about the musique
concrète techniques
used to create and manipulate sound. This experience
influenced me in my future work. When I later became
a middle school instrumental music teacher, I won a
NJ State grant to create an electronic music program
to let students experience musical creativity through
musique concrète, electronic music, and filmmaking.
In this program, I had developed two large bound
notebooks, hundreds of pages, of materials and
handouts that were used by the students. There were
diagrams of sound, musique concrète techniques, music
concepts, how to splice, musical form, and so on.
These notebooks were lost long ago. Wish I had them.
Bicentennial
learning. Students
learned the principles of music through sound, using
the same techniques I used with tape recorders and an
electronic synthesizer. The kids loved it and were
proud of their work. They had a great chance to be
creative in music. In 1976, the culmination of their
work was a one-hour Bicentennial presentation to the
entire school, featuring electronic music and musique
concrète compositions, original films, historical
narrative, historical and avant-garde slide
projection, and modern dance. The students were
great! Their work was presented at several
educational conferences including MENC, the Music
Educators National Association. I’ll try to post a
few new digital slides of the students.
Instrumental
music teacher. Here are a
couple of pictures of my instrumental students in
middle school—my primary job. I had to provide the
local newspapers with the photos and news articles of
our performances (photo journalist). I had two bands,
orchestra, jazz band, and small group instruction.
The students were all great and performed extremely
well. The jazz band, below, was one of two middle
school bands invited to the Glassboro Jazz Festival
(a college festival in New Jersey) and they received
the very highest of praises from the judges, who
couldn’t believe that young kids could play so well.
I made them wear jackets and ties and sit up
straight. 
Teaching is a difficult profession and a rewarding
profession. Thank your children’s teachers, today.
Picture
1 - Student
violinists.
Picture
2 - The
student jazz band.
John
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