Archived Featured Works

Alex Ruthmann is an Assistant Professor of Music Education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. A former middle school music teacher, his research focuses on composing curriculum and pedagogy, the use and development of online collaborative tools to support music learning and teaching, and non-traditional creativity- and technology-infused music and media courses in schools. Current projects involve NSF-funded Music Performamatics, online collaborative composing processes via Noteflight.com, and international collaborative art media performance via Jam2Jam. Dr. Ruthmann currently serves as Chair-Elect of the Society for Research in Music Education (SRME) Creativity SRIG and is Managing Editor for the open-access International Journal of Education & the Arts.

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Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948 and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. He has received a number of awards and grants, which include a Cintas grant, a Guggenheim fellowship and a Rappaport Prize. Morell is professor of Art at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, MA and is currently an artist-in-residence at the Yale University Art Gallery. He was recently featured in the first episode of acclaimed British TV series, The Genius of Photography, where his work with the camera obscura is shown alongside some of the most important founding fathers of photography. ********************************************************************************************************
Bob Pritchard is a composer with a specialty in interactive performance systems. He teaches theory and special topics at the University of British Columbia School of Music, and researches gesture-controlled speech and face synthesis at the Media And Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC). In 2007 Strength received a Unique Award of Merit from the Canadian Society of Cinematographers. ******************************************************************************************************** Michael Hayes’ research focuses on issues related to media and visual culture as forms of pedagogy. In particular he is developing a perspective on visual culture, media and education in a global society. He has been making documentary films on topics of social concern in a local and global context, including “My Town,” an examination of a controversy in Moscow, Idaho that is relevant to national “culture wars,” “With Hands Hearts and Bells,” a film on the Sacred Heart Mission Indian boarding school on the Coeur d’Alene reservation. ********************************************************************************************************

The music selections are performed by Susan Picard, from her Master of Arts Thesis in Teaching, Curriculum and Learning utilizing song as a methodology and means of representation. "Negotiating the Distance: Exploring the Tension between the Pedagogical Relationship and the Formal Curriculum" was nominated for the 2003 Governor General's Gold Medal Award for Outstanding Master's Thesis, University of Calgary.

The songs cannot just resonate with me, they must also resonate with those who have entered the conversation with me, but also any audience that I may encounter in the future. “This experienced solidity is precisely sustained by the continual encounter with others, with other embodied subjects, other centers of experience” (Abram, 1996, p.39). To simply write a thesis about the songs or using lyrics would deny what lies at the heart of the song as a work of art: a unique way of knowing within which perhaps lies a truth that could not be addressed in any other way (Gadamer in Jardine, P., 2000, p. 134).