Flash Animation

After many unsuccessful attempts, I FINALLY posted my flash animation successfully on my website! Here is a run-down of how it all happened:

1. I download Adobe Photoshop CS4 without realizing that you can't make flash animations in Photoshop (duh). I return to the Adobe website to download the correct program, Flash CS4.
2. I import a bunch of Christmas-y images to create A Very Special Christmas Flash, and play around with the different ways of manipulating the pictures to become a flash animation. (This was surprisingly the easiest part of the process.)
3. I save my work as a ".fla" file. I import this into my public.html directory and find that is NOT the way to post a flash on the internet.
4. I publish my work and import the "flash.html" into my public.html directory. Again it doesn't work.
5. I discover you need both the .html and the .swf files in one directory for the flash to run. Accordingly, I import both into public.html and still it doesn't work.
6. I find out that renaming the files after you have published will prevent the animation from playing. So, I import the .html and .swf files into public.html exactly as I named them when I published, and, voila, my animation appears.

I was often frustrated through this process because I didn't know what I was doing wrong, and even after searching the internet I couldn't find the answer. It seemed the only way to figure out the problem was with the help of the professor. (Thankfully the professor is almost always available and willing to help!)

So what does this all mean to the music educator? I think there will be many times when students keep trying and trying and don't quite "get it," whether the "it" be playing an instrument or singing or composing or improvising. Also, students usually don't have the resources at home to solve musical problems.

To alleviate this problem, I wonder how music educators can provide their students with resources for solving problems. The resources could be over a myriad of media. I could make practice CDs with examples of right and wrong ways of playing, and examples of interpretation. I could also post those audio files on the internet. Additionally, I would consider being available at a specified time by AIM or Gchat to answer practice questions in real time. (I know it might be really hard to get students to use that; they may not want to practice at that specific time. But I could take a survey to find out the most common practice times and fit my online chat into that time. I might even vary the day from week-to-week to give access to different students each week.)

In short, I can infer that music education doesn't stop when class is over. We put so much responsibility on our students to practice outside of class, but we don't provide them with the tools for successful practice sessions. I hope in the future I will be able to provide examples of successful practicing during class, then make available the resources I mentioned above. Hopefully this will produce students who can use their own know-how to solve musical problems, and know when and how to access available resources when their know-how falls short.

New Music Ensemble Concert

Last Monday I performed in the New Music Ensemble concert. It was a challenging class for me. For a long time I had a hard time accepting "new music" as Music. Although I was excited to explore the vast range of extended technique on the flute, for a while I felt I was doing little more than making a bunch of cool sounds. I had to find ways to make music out of this new sound vocabulary. I interacted with the other musicians as in a dialogue, I tried to make a beginning, middle, and end to my phrases and long-term improvisations. It was very difficult to see this as Music, though, since it didn't resemble any Music I'm used to listening to. I think if I spend more time listening to and performing new music I will understand the musicianship involved. Just like any type of Music, one will appreciate it most when one is a part of that music-making for an extended period of time. Over time one will learn the nuances of that Music that make it Music. In the meantime, though, I am glad for the experience and how it stretched my musical horizons.

There are a few aspects of the show I want to discuss. First of all, it was very theatrical. Prior to this concert, the only time I've seen lighting and video used at a musical performance is for a musical theater production. In the NME concert a few pieces used video, and most of them included lighting effects. A few of the videos were fixed media, like the audio tapes, and one was designed to react to the sounds we made on stage. However, we didn't interact with the video like we did with the tapes. Of course they were projected behind us, so we couldn't see them. But I wonder if we would have had a more cohesive performance if there had been musical responses to the fixed videos.

Another thing that interested me was the correlation I noticed between the improvised dancing and the improvised playing. The dancers seemed to use different parts of their bodies in as many ways as they could think of, and emphasized different movements at different times. Really, this is exactly what we were doing with our instruments. We used our knowledge of the sound repertoire to create an improvisation, and used as much of the instruments' capabilities as possible. We were instructed to respond to what we heard in the tapes, down to the smallest pitch or squeak. I could tell the dancers were responding to the general mood of the music, but I don't know if they were instructed to physically respond to every individual sound from the tapes. (Additionally, dancer-musician interactions could have made a more cohesive performance, but we didn't have enough rehearsal time together to work on dancer-musician improvisation.)

Because the dance moves were so exploratory like the musical elements, I think new music is a very difficult genre to bring to high school musicians. The dance could be seen as very silly if one doesn't expect those movements. And although I see the importance of introducing young students to all genres of music, especially through live performance, I think a large group of high schoolers would not be able to handle that performance. I think the mixed media would be appealing to them, but I'd be worried that they would not be able to take the whole performance seriously. I would love to find a way to introduce students to new music; it may be a genre they really like, and maybe they would someday contribute to the field! But I would definitely not make a field trip of the NME concert without some serious preparation beforehand.