Perspective

Happy New Year?

Well, 2020 is over. That pretty much sucked, didn’t it? I am so eager to say, “Happy New Year” and hope you all have glad tidings and wonderful months ahead, but I don’t want to jinx it. The year started out so good, so full of hope and promise with lots of exciting plans in front of me.

Good Riddance to 2020

Mercy, was the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade without marching bands just a big downer, or what? But I digress…

No Easy Answers

I don’t have any. This year sucks. It’s knocked the wind out of a lot of musicians, students, teachers, parents, and all things related. There is no national standard to follow, it’s a mess state by state times 50.

Take My Money…Or Not

The local marching band’s instruments are in bad shape. The small high school is, like so many music programs across the country, disadvantaged in many ways, with multiple inoperable and ancient instruments.

Tech Is Helping Keep Music Programs Alive

This month’s issue touches on several things that I hope will be helpful to our readers navigating the madness of reopening school music classes this year. First, I asked our associate editor Victoria Wasylak to interview an old friend of mine, Dr. Jim Frankel, who has been a pioneer in integrating technology into music instruction for well over two decades now.

Seeking Wise Counsel

Since 1996, my jobs have involved giving a voice to teachers, experts, and people who know far more about a subject than I do. Though I only wrote a couple, I published over 200 books and videos on music, audio production, music business, and technology. I seek out smart people and give them a vehicle.

Summertime, and the Living is Queasy

Well, remember when they were saying the summer heat would just about wipe this COVID-19 thing out because viruses don’t like heat? I guess none of the viruses in Florida and Texas got the message - or any of the other seasonally oppressively hot states, which is most of them. It’s a scorcher in Tennessee as I type, and we too are experiencing a surge in cases.

Fall Math, Science, English, History Classes Canceled

Now that I have your attention — I am appalled. Indeed, a tad ticked, frankly. Over the past five years or so that I have been editor of SBO, I have seen amazing music programs that inspire, from the smallest to the largest level of service to students in districts rich and poor. 

School’s Out Completely…

Out for summer

Out till fall

We might not come back at all

School’s out forever

School’s out for summer

School’s out with fever

School’s out completely

When Alice Cooper sang the words that every school kid in the 1970’s rejoiced in as their own personal triumphant end-of-spring anthem, they had no way of knowing just how the lyrics would apply some 48 years later. Yet, here we are. All across the world, and certainly all across the U.S.A., school is out with fever. Completely.

Music Educators as First Responders

I can’t believe my luck, last month talking about the Type A Flu I got coming home from TMEA (in my Choral Director editorial) and segueing into the need to make your program infectious, um, so to speak. Who saw this coming this severely and happening here?

Is it Contagious?

I have a quick couple of weeks in-between the TMEA show in San Antonio and the upcoming American Bandmasters Association meetings, which I had the misfortune of spending fending off Type A influenza, even though I had my vaccine.

Milestones for Music Ed Orgs

The year 2020 marks a special anniversary for a couple of organizations near and dear to me – namely, Technology in Music Education (TI:ME), which was organized 25 years ago this summer, and the Texas Music Educators Association, which celebrates its centennial.