School of Music Faculty Reflections: Remote Teaching, Week 2
Week Two, Remote Online Teaching
In response to a Mini-Grant opportunity in the CFA School of Music, a group of faculty members is blogging each week on their experience teaching remotely online to their students at BU. What follows are the individual experiences of talented and dedicated faculty members as they adjust to new pedagogical modalities. Each demonstrates commitment to learning with and frequently from their students.
Lynn Eustis Associate Professor of Music, Voice; Director of Graduate Studies
Week Two started off much better with the arrival of the new cord for my ancient Roland digital piano. I was deeply comforted by playing the piano again. Over the weekend I played all kinds of things: Bach French suites, old pop songs, hymns, Broadway tunes, and anything else I had handy, since most of my scores are in my BU office and I’m under travel-abroad quarantine until March 27. Playing the piano is like breathing to me; I’ve been doing it since I was five years old. I breathed in greedily.
Things fell into a rhythm for both lessons and studio class because we humans can adapt to all kinds of changes in circumstance. The students noticed how helpful it can be to have video feedback, in the moment as well as for playback later. We learned to accept the sound quality issues and the absence of a collaborative pianist, and we tried to emphasize skills necessary for a cappella singing. We also developed a plan for studio class. This week I sent them a listening assignment consisting of lighter performances in the English language, which sparked a lively discussion. (Think a comparison of British mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly and our own James Taylor singing versions of “The Water is Wide”). In the remaining five weeks we will have two guest instructors and we will cover French, German, and Italian language issues for singing through similar comparative listening assignments.
I have to be honest. There were mornings when I really did not want to do this. What is the point of teaching singing in such a compromised way when the world around us is changing on an hourly basis? I fight the powerful urge to spend the day eating Cheetos and watching trashy reality TV instead. But then I enter my Zoom classroom and see a bright, hopeful young face on my screen. We find a way to do something joyful and useful together. And I am reminded that while teaching is not an easy profession under the best of circumstances, it is always a uniquely rewarding one. As we all are, I am humbled each day by the beauty, terror, and humanity of this moment.
Bayla Keyes Associate Professor of Music, Violin
I have found this second week to be much easier than the first—I now have a good set up for doing my Zoom violin lessons, and I am learning what I can teach best using this format. However, I believe my students are beginning to feel the loss of a normal end to their college year much more keenly as they have time and space to be with themselves. Eight of my eighteen violinists are graduating this May, and to have their musical activities cut short so abruptly is clearly jarring to them; it is wonderfully clear in retrospect how much joy came from being able to make music with others—they miss their orchestra, chamber music and collaboration with pianists. We are truly social animals, and music making is a conversational undertaking! I am assigning repertoire that takes advantage of our ability to play more than one voice, such as solo works by Bach, Ysayë, Paganini, Prokofiev, Bartok, and Harbison; and I am asking my students to practice sonatas from the piano score and concertos from the orchestra score, so they can see how much their parts interact with the other lines. Just as in life, the movement of the separate voices—counterpoint—creates dissonance, consonance, and sometimes gorgeous harmony. From E. M. Forster: “Only connect…” There are so many ways to find our connection in the music itself!
Karin S. Hendricks Associate Professor of Music and Chair, Music Education
More Filling! It seems like it has been much longer than two weeks since we began this remote teaching exercise, but the calendar doesn’t lie (…um, what day is it again???). I thought it would be helpful to offer a quick recap of last week’s blog, where I introduced three main ideas:
- Most of us are teaching classes remotely, not teaching online classes. There’s a big difference between the two in preparation, approach, style, design, etc. – and fortunately our administrators understand this, given the amount of time we have had to make the switch!
- Rebekah Pierson is a Rockstar—not only at helping us through this technology transition, but in “real life” as well. Check this out.
- According to my songwriting friend, creativity and innovation come when we FILL (listen and learn), CHILL (relax), and DRILL (create). Last week I offered some resources as “filling” but the hyperlinks didn’t transfer, so I thought I’d provide them again here:
- CFA remote teaching resources, including lots of arts-specific beauties
- American String Teachers Association (ASTA) remote teaching ideas
- College Music Society (CMS) COVID-19 resource bank (you can add your own ideas to this bank too!)
- National Association for Music Education (NAfME) Coronavirus information
- Online [they really mean remote] learning Facebook Group
Since last week’s blog I have witnessed social media “fill” with all sorts of other alternative musicking ideas, with musicians using various technologies that simply blow my mind. As Richard Cornell and Gregory Melchor-Barz pointed out last week, many are turning to music at this time of crisis in unprecedented ways. People everywhere are making music together asynchronously, creating tracks to which others add later. Eric Ruske recorded his own duet for us (unless he, like Jim Demler, has an identical twin I don’t know about).
Last week our incoming faculty member Gareth Dylan Smith posted some short clips from his drum practice to Instagram. A student in our online program—living in Singapore—saw the post, pulled one of the videos, separated the audio, and then composed and recorded a keyboard ditty to go with it. Here is the product of their asynchronous improvisation, which they produced half a world away from each other.
I’m not necessarily the fastest to catch on to new technologies, but as I have observed the ways in which youth interact with technology, I have learned that it’s something that takes an open mind, a willingness to make mistakes, and a penchant for asking questions. I’ve also learned that, when all else fails, “The Google” most likely has the answer. In fact, Google (if you include Google Scholar) is probably my #3 go-to for information, next to my spouse and—of course—Barb Raney.
Lucia Lin Associate Professor of Music, Violin
Choices in interpretation, technique, and style are made possible by the subtle tonal differences we make on our applied instruments. When I can’t tell whether or not my students are making dynamic differences between forte and piano, I feel ineffective. Likewise, I cannot fully project over the internet tonal nuances in my own playing. How can we keep our students engaged and inspired for the full hour lesson or 90-minute class while struggling with the limitations of this platform?
Tapping into the global advantages that the internet provides, I’ve decided to “zoom” guests from afar for mini meetings with my classes. The idea came from a conversation with Gabriela Lena Frank. An esteemed composer, she is also a successful entrepreneur, having started her highly regarded academy for budding composers three years ago. She also models a lifestyle that addresses the global warming crisis, limiting travel and meeting people remotely. I was so inspired by our conversation that I asked her to “zoom” with my studio class. It was a unique chance for my students to ask her one-on-one questions, with added benefits of using a low carbon footprint and being economically feasible. The meeting left the students inspired and thinking beyond the challenges our current situation presents in higher education studies. Topics included climate citizenry, the evolution of one’s unique community as one develops as an artist, and the importance of self-reflection as inspiration.
Why not bring the world to our BU community in this less complicated way and give us this unique opportunity to open all of our minds? I have since approached a violinist from the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra to speak remotely with my orchestra repertoire class about audition procedures in Germany. A colleague from the Pittsburgh Symphony will join me in listening to some of my students’ orchestral excerpts, giving them a chance to hear another interpretation. And I plan to create a panel of judges hailing from different parts of the country for the mock auditions that constitute the final exam for my class. This will provide constructive criticism from a variety of sources, which will also help me to have a fresh perspective on my own teaching material.
Richard Cornell Professor of Music, Composition and Music Theory
At the end of the second week—Why breakout rooms are Zoom’s best feature. Our tribe of artists and scholars frequently seek out solitude in order to work out projects, to turn ideas and sketches into plays, paintings, books, orchestral pieces, or to refine the performance of a challenging work, or to commit a scene to memory, or as we used to say, to learn something “by heart.” It takes extraordinary focus, concentration, and, yes, solitude. As a composer, I have often sought solitude and consider it a necessary feature of my practice.
But the art forms we love also require community. While this period of confinement promotes some of the benefits of solitude, it takes its toll on us. I was not aware of how much value there is in the daily, casual, interactions with colleagues, old friends and new, and students. And I can well imagine that everyone is feeling the same way. Those easy conversations with students before class begins, the hallway or stairway exchanges, trips to Starbucks, or lunch with colleagues and friends cannot be replaced by side chats on Zoom.
I find it increasingly important to create a space for the students to interact in small groups using the “breakout room” feature. It actually provides a setting where informal exchanges are OK. There must be something about the size of a group of three or four that promotes such informal exchanges. I have listened in as students wrestle with an analytical problem, arguing about whether a tune is in one mode or another, whether some detail has analytical significance, whether a piece is in binary or ternary form. But along with these exchanges is a bit of humor, some good-natured ribbing, and of laughing at the absurdity of our common situation, relating as if we are all in the same boat and we’re going to make the best of it.
Off line, I am worried about covering everything in my syllabus, and realizing that it is not necessary to do so. I make daily adjustments as I learn what works and what is really practical on line. Developing skill, vocabulary, strategy, and drawing out a creative impulse, these are so much more critical. Finding small ways that students can share with each other, particularly in the breakout rooms, enhances their engagement and offers a space for something like those casual daily exchanges we have often taken for granted, but now crave.
Kính T. Vu Assistant Professor of Music & Dissertation Progress Coordinator, Music Education
Along Came a Virus that Sat Down beside Us—Schoolteachers around the world utilize laptop, iPad, and/or Chromebook technology as a way to engage children and youth in all kinds of subjects such as language arts, mathematics, music, science, visual arts, and many more topics. One-to-one programs in which each student uses a school-issued device are very popular. Since students have access to any number of school-issued or personal devices, digital composition has become an increasingly important curricular component of many secondary (high school) general music classes.[1]
As a music teacher educator and instructor of Secondary General Music Methods (SGMM), I like to engage pre-service teachers in activities that they might use when they enter their first classrooms as professional educators. The more important issue to me, however, is how learners become the makers of their own destinies and makers of their own musics as learners and leaders. Since Coronavirus sat down beside us, I have been reflecting on my course syllabus so that I might create opportunities for learners to choose how they will successfully complete the semester.
These strange times, thankfully, necessitate adaptation; a shift in the curriculum is imminent. To borrow a term from Disney, SGMM students and I are Imagineering [2] ways to create digital compositions as a means to
- Learn and develop musical and technological skills;
- Showcase accumulated knowledge acquired through courses such as music history, music theory, ensembles, and applied lessons;
- Consider the pedagogical ramifications of technology as a music-making and music-learning tool; and
- Create our own musical destinies determined by the learners rather than their teacher.
Prior to Coronavirus, I did not include digital composition in the syllabus as a curricular focus of SGMM. However, the absence of face-to-face education required making a project that can be completed in solitude or in small groups using internet technology. It may be bold of me to state that COVID-19 has its benefits, but in the case of my curriculum, the virus has compelled me to think carefully about what it is that learners will need to be able to know and demonstrate in certain and uncertain times. Digital composition, something my public-school colleagues use regularly, can be part of a beautifully complex constellation of music-making experiences inclusive of ensembles and classroom music-making that might be enjoyed by many learners of all ages.
Adjustments—Each Zoom Lesson during these past two weeks has begun with some form of “Hi! So, how are you doing?”, and most of the responses I’ve been hearing have to do with adjustments. My students are ALL obviously making huge adjustments in their lives and in how their studies take place. It’s also clear that for many of them, some of the ideas they shared or that they heard in our first group Studio Class last week—strategies for staying positive and productive while their world is upended—have been helpful, or have served as good starting points.
Last week we all made adjustments to our Zoom audio settings, and discovered that some laptops and some WIFI set-ups distort tone more than others—so we also adjusted our expectations for the sound we might hear on line. Some apartments have better natural acoustics than others, some students have concerns about disturbing their neighbors, and some needed to create a special practice space, minimizing distractions. Many have made adjustments like rolling back a rug to create better acoustics for Zoom Studio Classes and lessons, or hanging blankets on walls and blocking the space under apartment doors with towels to reduce the amount of sound their neighbors will hear when they practice. Several students (especially in small apartments) have started to cover bookshelves or TVs, or block the view of their kitchen area while practicing, to more closely resemble the feeling of the practice rooms they’re used to at school, with no distractions during those blocks of dedicated time. Adjustments… Shopping for food and necessities, sleep schedules, contact with family and friends online, and strategies for getting exercise—outdoors if possible—have all undergone major adjustments. A few have left Boston this week, so we adjusted our Studio Class time from morning to evening (Boston time), so we could continue to meet as one big “studio family” at a time that’s reasonable in the four time zones occupied by Taiwan, Colombia, California, and Massachusetts. Several lesson times also needed to be adjusted. (My husband also adjusted his computer use and television viewing during the time I’m on Zoom, since those activities proved to interfere with the quality of the Zoom connection over our home’s limited WIFI set-up. He gets extra points for that!) Some of my students and I had started to share close up views of bow hands and left hand set-up & finger action from angles that aren’t practical or even possible in person, briefly adjusting the angle and placement of our laptops and where we stand in relation to them, and a few issues that had been long-term projects were actually clarified by these creative adjustments.
Of course, there are so many very important things that just can’t happen when we aren’t in the same room together. But we’re all discovering that with imagination and flexibility, making some adjustments can lead to much greater productivity than anticipated, and unexpected discoveries are sometimes made that can carry over into the time when we eventually emerge and recover from this upheaval to our lives.
(The camera adds 10 pounds…)
Gabriel Langfur Lecturer in Music, Bass Trombone
I am finding week two more challenging in many ways than week one was. That’s not to say I’m not settling into a routine; I am, but it’s all the more apparent to me that this is not an ideal routine by a long shot. The technology of Zoom is great for some things (including the bicoastal family meeting I set up on the occasion of what would have been my grandmother’s 102nd birthday), but even with finding ways to hear sound with some accuracy, internet connectivity issues cause other strange problems, including times when audio seems to speed up to catch up to video. Sigh. I have a feeling I will move to a hybrid of synchronous and asynchronous methods in coming weeks.
My students are settling into different kinds of routines. My two sophomores may very well be benefiting the most from this period of enforced reflection. They have now both been in college long enough to have a very good sense of what they need to accomplish to advance their playing, and I’m proud to report that they are both going after it, making progress in a way that’s difficult with the daily demands of ensembles, traveling between classes, and everything else that fills up our days at more normal times. One has set up an Instagram account specifically for posting short practice videos, and he is posting one every day, ranging from technical exercises to snippets of music he’s working on. It’s all good work, and I can hear how he is improving. The other is finding that the simple act of setting up a camera and taking video (none of which he has posted anywhere yet) is helping him focus.
Some of our trombone students at BU are facing quite a bit of difficulty practicing in their living situations, and for them I’m afraid the best they can do is what another student I talked with this week is doing: expanding their knowledge of the repertoire by taking deep dives. One is listening to all the symphonies by Mozart, Beethoven, and Mahler. Another student who can practice only limited hours is using some of that time for a fun project she has wanted to do for a long time but felt she could never prioritize, playing with recordings of some favorite music that has no trombone parts: cello parts of piano trios, woodwind parts of symphonic repertoire, etc.
For my own playing, I’m continuing to play Bach, sight reading a little every day, and taking on a difficult concerto that I’ve wanted to learn for a long time. I’m working slowly and methodically – which is good – but the flipside is that there is no sense of urgency that comes with an upcoming performance.
I wish I felt more positive right now, but my reality at the moment is that this feels like a time to be endured. I’ve decided to pay no attention to predictions of what our field will look like on the other side of this, mostly because they only make me sad. All I can do is endure this, keep making art, and let that take care of me the way it always has.
Emily Ranii Academic Program Head, BU Summer Theatre Institute
Teaching the Opera Institute class on Friday 3/20 was a world away from teaching Opera Theatre on Monday 3/16. The university had announced its extension of online teaching through the remainder of the semester and the news was increasingly pointing towards even longer timelines. The students expressed a greater sense of loss and their humor was more cynical. But there was still humor, and lots of it. For example, their proposals for radical and innovative approaches to opera in the time of COVID included the operatic equivalents of Drunk History and Shitfaced Shakespeare, or transforming opera stories into formats accessible for children (I love this last idea!). They felt pulled between either using this time to innovate/create virtual content or to learn new skills to expand their future live performance practice. Those in the innovate camp believed that audience engagement is key to replicating the live communal experience through virtual mediums (using the chat function so that audience members can share their response with other audience members in real time, or for performers to receive song requests from their audience). All had been finding solace in individual creative projects–rediscovering the pure joy of singing, creative writing/blogging, pursuing conducting, baking.
Returning to Opera Theatre on Monday 3/23, Allison Voth launched the class with a lively discussion (1 full hour of bubblings up and hand raising!) of all the different Met Opera Streams everyone had watched in the previous week. For next Monday, we are experimenting with the entire class watching the same Met Opera Stream (Das Rheingold) to further facilitate a unified discussion. Next, we ventured into monologue coachings, which were surprisingly possible via Zoom. We used “Speaker View” to focus on the actor while the performing was working and switched over to “Gallery View” for the feedback/discussion portion.
So far, beyond our regular student attendance, we have had a few cats, dogs, bunnies, and one child in our opera classes. The more, the merrier!
Justin D. Casinghino Lecturer in Music, Composition and Music Theory
I suppose one thing that comes to mind in reflection of this past week is that I never expected working from home to feel quite so hectic. With a four-course load at BU, Spring 2 of the BU Online Education program getting into full swing (somewhat ironically), classes with two other schools, a wife dealing with how to approach online learning for a public middle school orchestra program, and four daughters ages 3-11 engaging with digital learning and online ballet lessons, my life has felt like its Zoom, Zoom, and more Zoom! The other reflection I have looking back on this week is how impressed I’ve been with the collaborative pedagogical spirit in figuring this all out. The creativity and comradery I’ve witnessed and been part of to ensure that arts education continues in these challenging times has been simply fantastic. I found myself video conferencing with students in Korea at the same time as students just a few miles down the street, sharing ideas and tips with colleagues both current and past, and considering how to better navigate the online teaching world in lessons with both a nine-year-old and ninety-year old. To say the least, it has been a powerful week of preparation, planning, teaching and learning.
I’ve spent the week coming to know more and more of the nuances in Zoom. I found that the “On Hold” feature truly helped the flow of one-on-one sessions, where I could send out a single link to a class, and as students signed in at their scheduled times, I need not have both “in the room”. This was particularly important in teaching Electronic Music I & II, where the one-on-one sessions allow me to help each student get the conferencing software and the software we are studying to work most effectively with their home equipment. Our unlimited Google drive storage at BU has also been extremely helpful in facilitating quick back-and-forth sharing of large working sessions in audio software. While I found the need to schedule these meetings longer than I would in person, factoring in time for technical glitches, it was well worth it to make sure that each student was individually set up to accomplish our artistic learning goals. The other technological facet that I dove into this week was the posting of videos. I recorded videos of both lecture material, and classes on Zoom, where settings allow you to record both your video camera and the shared screen, i.e. scores and the whiteboard. The recorded lecture material is meant to allow students to easily review on their own time, when it may be difficult to touch base directly, and the posted class material is particularly beneficial to students who have returned to their homes far from the local time zone. While I created all videos in Zoom, rather than sharing them via this platform, I recorded them directly to my computer, and then uploaded them to BU’s MyMedia page, from where they can be directly embedded on the course Blackboard site (once videos are uploaded to your MyMedia page, go to “Kultura Media” under “Build Content”). Sharing the videos this way allows you to turn off all download and sharing capabilities, as requested by the university, with students of the course needing to log directly into the Blackboard page to view them. Most importantly, while I think I’ve probably started every class I’ve ever taught with something along the lines of, “Hi everybody – how’s everyone doing today?”, this week, I made sure to ask every student, “How are you?” I found that they were all happy to be asked.
Michael Reynolds Professor of Music, Cello
We had our first studio class a few days ago via Zoom, and we were all quite pleased with how seamless it turned out to be. I also invited several students who had been accepted to BU (and my high school students) so that they could play and observe my class in action. Lots of discussion (praise, positive criticism, etc.). Everyone seems to be very happy to play and engage in this way; I think that the studio Zoom format works well to keep everyone connected and focused. I also reminded everyone to get outside, walk, move, take online yoga classes, meditate—anything that can keep them moving. (Addendum: One of my students was using an external microphone, which boosted sound quality immensely; we all agreed to research and try to pick up these mics that plug into your computer.)
Gregory Melchor-Barz Director, School of Music; Professor of Music, Musicology/Ethnomusicology
This past week has been chock full of logistics. Attend to this! Fix that! Address this! Find solutions! And yet, many (many!) of the issues, concerns, and questions posed by students are difficult ones. They are emotionally charged. Close to the surface of the presented issues are fears and uncertainties. The dad in me (I am a father to a college freshman as well as a recent college grad), wants to swoop in and solve any and all of these issues. But, the school director in me negotiates and leads people to solutions. I fully realize that there are no rules for engagement regarding with how we proceed from Week ONE to Week TWO in our institutionalized responses to COVID-19 (and Week THREE is just around the corner), but I do take solace in the community of colleagues, students, and friends in which I live where the sharing of best practices, suggestions, and encouragement is the norm rather than the exception.
[1] For example, see Wise, S. (2016). Secondary school teachers’ approaches to teaching composition using digital technology. British Journal of Music Education, 33(3), 283–295. doi: 10.1017/S0265051716000309
[2] Disney Imaginations (n.d.). About Imagineering. https://disneyimaginations.com/about-imaginations/about-imagineering/