Discovering Music

Music and Tarantulas

May 27, 2011

“Music is connected to everything.”  That’s our motto at the Professor Carol office and it proved a good one yesterday. I came home to find a fist-sized tarantula in my kitchen, perched at a 60° angle in front of the refrigerator.   Okay, where’s the musical connection? Tarantula’s are named after a southern Italian town Taranto [...]

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Potholes of History Continued

April 23, 2011

My last post chronicled the bumps I weathered along the road to learning history – including a pretty noticeable bump in graduate school.  During a semester at Charles University in Prague, I took course on contemporary Czech political history.  In that class, I realized I’d forgotten a major piece of World War II history, despite [...]

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The Best Part of Conferences

April 7, 2011

It has to be the best part of the conferences: meeting the actual students who are using Discovering Music. Increasingly, families are coming up and introducing themselves like this: “Hi, we’re the XYZ’s, and these are our kids. . . .” Usually the kids are shy.  Sometimes they seem a bit shocked to see me in person, [...]

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Filling in the Potholes of History with the Arts

March 15, 2011

Growing up in northern Wisconsin, we joked about experiencing two seasons each year: winter and construction.  And it wasn’t far from true.  As soon as the top layer cleared, crews were busy working on the roads, filling in all the cracks, holes and craters that riddled the roads.  They worked feverishly, non-stop, until the snow [...]

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Ash Wednesday and Pop Culture

March 9, 2011

“World Read-Aloud Day”—that’s what the cheerful announcer on the morning newscast declared this morning, as we were eating our breakfast in a hotel near Little Rock, Arkansas. Behind him stood a bevy of young students and a large stuffed “dog” known as “Clifford.” The kids cheered, thrilled to be shown on TV. How things have [...]

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It’s Not Opera Unless the Curtain Rises

February 27, 2011

For his birthday, my husband scored us ridiculously reasonable tickets, in good seats, to Beethoven’s opera Fidelio.  We know that we are in the minority among those our age, taking birthday cash and heading to the opera, but we like it that way.  Fidelio has neither the same floating lyricism of Mozart nor the monstrous [...]

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Classical Music for Boys

January 27, 2011

How do you teach classical music to boys? I was fortunate enough to spend New Year’s Eve at a concert – complete with cascading balloons in the grand finale.  Listening that night, I thought about all the things awaiting discovery by my children, details of the story of the world and the place of music [...]

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Do You Hear What I Hear?

January 18, 2011

Ready or not, here comes the second semester.  And maybe you’ve been thinking about some curriculum adjustments, maybe working more arts, music and Western cultural history into your homeschool curriculum.  Or maybe you’ve avoided thinking about curriculum by . . . watching sports! There are several sports options this time of year: football, basketball, or [...]

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Roll Over Beethoven

December 16, 2010

Thursday, December 16 marks two birthdays.  First, my brother’s, which doesn’t mean a whole lot to anyone but me.  But I always thought it was unfair he got to share his birthday with another mega-personality born that day: Ludwig van Beethoven.  Especially because my brother didn’t particularly care for Beethoven’s music. Well, roll over, brother, [...]

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Oh, Susanna!

December 8, 2010

One of the happiest times as a professor came in the late 1980s when a graduate of Hamline University was assigned as my teaching assistant at SMU. Susanna Behr (now Etzel), a pianist and budding music historian, brought enormous energy, optimism, and creativity to everything she did.  Suffice it to say that we made a [...]

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