Omayra, a 7th grader at Cornelia Connelly Middle School has been awarded the Respira/Luz Scholarship for Dance, Spring 2012.  Thanks to the generosity of Martha Tornay at the East Village Dance Project’s Ave. C Studio, she will participate in both Ballet and Modern dance classes twice a week.  Omayra is an outstanding student, confident, and articulate.  She hopes to attend LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts.

Martha Tornay is a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and a recipient of the Fine Arts Award in Dance Technique and Choreography.  Martha has over 3 decades of intensive classical ballet studies with masters such as Mme. Gabriela Darvash, Gretchen Ward Warren, and Robert Brassel.  After performing for over 18 years as a soloist with regional and international ballet and modern companies including Newport News Ballet, Israel Ballet, and the Robert Kovich Company, she founded the East Village Dance Project.  In addition, she teaches dance at New York University’s Experimental Theater department.

Connelly Middle School 7th graders perform Adele at the end of their first semester of piano class.

The Musicworks crew perform for seniors at the 80th Street Residence this past weekend.

Rebecca and Emily, 7th graders at the Connelly Middle School in NYC’s East Village have received the Respira/Luz Scholarship for Music, Spring 2012.  From January through June, they will have weekly lessons after school, and can bring their saxophones to and from school to practice.  

Their instructor, Lauren Hecker, is completing her Master’s Degree in Music Education from the City University of New York’s Hunter College.  In addition to saxophone, Ms. Hecker teaches flute, clarinet, oboe, piano, and chorus, and has worked at the Arts and Technology High School, PS 212, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis High School, and Styvesant High School.

Both girls are excellent students, and role models for their peers for their upstanding moral character.  They are very excited to be learning the saxophone, and already can be found practicing their instruments during lunch…

Oren, Alex, and Jack rock out at rehearsal for our senior citizen performance this weekend.

“Carly has made it very clear that she sees herself as a normal child, locked in a body that does things that she has no control over…”

Watch this amazing story about a severely autistic child who makes contact with the world for the first time at age 11.

Classic beautiful singing and songwriting; Meshell Ndegeocello is the model of thoughtful restraint.

Music communicates to us emotionally through systematic violations of expectations.  These violations can occur in any domain—the domain of pitch, timbre, contour, rhythm, tempo, and so on—but occur them must.  Music is organized sound, but the organization has to involve some element of the unexpected or it is emotionally flat and robotic.  Too much organization may technically still be music, but it would be music that no one wants to listen to.

Effective music—groove—involves subtle violations of timing.  We know through culture and experience that music is not threatening, and our cognitive system interprets these violations as a source of pleasure and amusement.  This emotional response to groove occurs via the [reptilian brain and limbic system] rather than via [the cerebral cortex].  Our response to groove is largely pre- or unconscious because it goes through the cerebellum rather than the frontal lobes.  What is remarkable is that all these different pathways integrate into aour experience of a single song.

                

[check out http://jonimitchell.com/library/videolib.cfm for an amazing chronological cache of Joni’s videos]

Talk about putting your money where your mouth is!!!…  This story from Esquire’s Best of 2011 issue really puts into perspective what it means to support students.

(too bad these guys beat us to the punch…I was going to use this for our 2012 brochure cover)

Thanks to all who have helped us grow this year, and best wishes for the one to come!

Musicworks is proud to partner with the Brooklyn-Queens Conservatory of Music for a double weekend of workshops in Park Slope this summer, including:

SAT JULY 28:

• Inside the Band (ages 6-9)
• Songbuilding (ages 6-9)
• Storyhearing (ages 6-9)
• The Improvised Opera (all ages and family members!)

SUN JULY 29:

• Inside the Improvisation (full day workshop for teen jazz instrumentalists)

SAT AUGUST 4:

• Don’t Bully the Band! (ages 6-9)
• Music from Around the World (ages 6-9)
• The Improvised Opera (all ages and family members!)
• The Structure of Jazz (ages 10-13)

SUN AUGUST 5:

• Music at the Movies (ages 6-9 plus family members)
• Technology-live (ages 6-9 plus family members)
• Music in Film (ages 10-13 plus family members)
• Wired for Sound (ages 10-13 plus family members)

“Listening to and studying the masters is what informs me and inspires me to explore all the different possibilities of the drumset. Occaisionally I’ll hear someone say that they’ll never be able to perform as well as their idols do because they’re not gifted as their idols are. To those people I respond, “What’s the gift that those people have and you don’t?” Sure, some people are born with superior reflexes or perfect pitch, but those things are meaningless if not cultivated.

I think the gift our idols possess is really more of disposition than physical attributes. The gifted are the lucky few that have found something they are passionate about, so passionate in fact that they are compelled to investigate it whether anyone else is interested or not. Their temperment allows them to spend countless hours and years refining their craft, practicing the things they can’t do, simply because that process is the thing they find most enjoyable in life. That’s the gift.”

-drummer John Riley

Tomal decides that the best spot during music class is right up in the front. I’ll take it as a compliment.

92 and still tapping…talk about dedication to the arts!