SKU: GI.G-5960

English. Text by Catherine Bell Robertson.

A Guide for Your First Year of Teaching From fundraisers to irate parents, from meeting other teachers to measuring for new marching band uniforms, your teaching methods class never covered this territory! In Confessions of a First-Year Maestro, author Catherine Bell Robertson takes readers along as she rides the roller coaster of first year teaching! Centered on journal entries written during her first year as director of all bands, choirs, and ensembles at a parochial high school, this book captures the surprises, joys, and woes of her hectic year. As a survivor and now veteran teacher, she also looks back on this challenging time and offers insightful reflections. Robertson's journal and commentary are filled with lessons that every future teacher should read, especially those who will teach music. But while offering inspiration and a few warnings for education students, the humorous and often touching stories in this book also offer encouragement and understanding for teachers in their own first year, as well as a trip down memory lane for many veterans. A delightful and sincere look into the world of a first-year teacher as she begins her real education! Kate Robertson teaches at Arrowhead High School in Hartland, Wisconsin (not the school described in this book). She graduated with highest honors from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse with a Bachelor of Science in Music Education and has been teaching for four years. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, hiking, gardening, cross-country skiing, and spending time with her husband, Cal, and their dog, Jake. Currently, Ms. Robertson is pursuing a Master's Degree in Education and is beginning work on her follow-up book to Confessions of a First-Year Maestro, entitled More Confessions: A Fellowship of Teaching Strategies, Stories, and Ideas. For more information, or to contribute to this collective book, please contact Ms. Robertson at teacherconfessions@yahoo.com.

SKU: HL.14022440

ISBN 9788759811320. Danish.

'The music around us' (Book) - This book aims to provide music teachers with a basic knowledge of music from Turkey, Pakistan and Morocco. These three countries represent each one corner of the North Africa-Middle East-West Asian region, which is next door to Europe and with which we have long historical relationships. Moreover, all three represent significant music historical tradition, at the same time related, while clearly different from each other. This justifies these musical culture's placement in Danish music education. In addition all three countries have supplied Denmark with immigrants from 1960 onwards. In this context, the book therefore also makes musicteachers able to teach music in relation to the three immigrant groups. At the same time the book hopefully makes teachers able to insert the music that immigrants from those countries are carrying with them, the music the young people with that background are listening to, and what teachers may experience themselves in these countries, into a broader perspective. Therefore the book is not only about the small musical universe that migrants and migrant youth actually are engaged in in this country. The Danish conditions only play a minor role. This choice should be seen as an attempt to challenge the very unfortunate tendency in the Danish public wherethe immigrants are made ??the primary reason to engage other cultures in our (music) education. It is unfortunate because there are many other and far more important reasons to expand the musical horizons. The resident migrants from the three countries often give a very one-sided and narrow view of the (music) culture in their countries of origin. This is mainly because of the immigrant's backgrounds, both geographically and socially. In order to increase understanding and respect for other parts of the world, it is important that we all understand that the culture of these countries, including the music, is part of a long historical development and part of a varied mosaic of contemporary trends.

SKU: PE.EP72822

ISBN 9790577011769. 232 x 303mm inches. English.

I have only visited Damascus once, twenty years ago, on the way to Palmyra.  I had a purpose (I was writing music for a play about Palmyra’s Queen Zenobia) but essentially I was a tourist.  Like any visitor, I was thrilled to step out of the noisy modern city into the magical ancient world of the walled Old City, its vibrant souk leading to the magnificent mosque, and a labyrinth of winding, narrow streets filled with the smell of unleavened bread.

In Palmyra, I was met with extraordinary kindness everywhere.  On one occasion, a little Bedouin boy noticed that I was risking sunstroke wandering bare-headed among the spectacular ruins: he showed me how to tie a turban, then took me to have tea with his family in their tent.

Since then, I have watched helplessly as these places of wonder have been devastated and their inhabitants scattered and killed.  When the Sacconi Quartet suggested that I might choose a Syrian poet for our collaboration, I welcomed the idea.

I searched for a long time to find a contemporary poet whose work might gain from any music I could imagine.  I felt it was important to find first-hand accounts of the Syrian experience – but, of course, I was always reading them in translation.  In an anthology called Syria Speaks, I was astonished to read something that looked like prose, but was full of poetry.  It was Anne-Marie McManus’s fine translation of Ali Safar’s A Black Cloud in a Leaden White Sky – an eloquent, thoughtful, contained yet vivid account of life in a war-torn country, all the more moving for its restraint.

In setting these words, I have not attempted to imitate Syrian music.  However, there is what might be called a linguistic accommodation in my choice of scale, or mode.  Several movements are in a mode that I first discovered while writing a cantata commemorating the First World War: it has a tuning that I associate with war, its violence and desolation.  This eight-note mode is similar to scales found in Syrian music.  I did not choose it in the abstract: it emerged from the harmonies I was exploring in the earlier work, and emerged again as I was looking for the right musical colours to set Ali Safar’s words.  In this work, its Arabic aspect is more prominent. - Jonathan Dove