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Art Music

Summer Students Create Collaborate Video Project

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Teen students in our Summer 2017 Residential Music & Art program worked together to create a fun short film, each utilizing their specific skills and talents to produce the piece. See the video here!

The students were involved in the Clarinet Academy, Percussion Academy, Music Composition, JumpstART Studio, Trumpet Academy and Music Recording programs. They conceived the concept, created and recorded the art/ set pieces, wrote the music, played the music and recorded the music! The Residential program RA Jeremy Killeen guided the students’ work in the evening hours after the regular day’s program was completed.

Project credits:
Art Design/ Animation: Chinonye Khagha
Music Composition, Performance and Recording: Claire Bassett, Teresa Jenkins, Samuel Oxford, Katelyn Proffitt, Christian Reynolds, Max Rosner, Matt Vice, and Jack Yagerline

 

 

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Community Outreach Music

International Teaching Scholar Featured in Mason News

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Mason Music graduate Krista Pack was recently featured in Mason’s newsletter “The George”, highlighting her work and experiences with the recent International Teaching Scholars’ trip to Costa Rica last May. The project is co-sponsored by Potomac Arts Academy’s Instruments in the Attic outreach program.

“It was a successful first year for the program and we’re still planning the program’s future,” Academy Director Libby Curtis said. “We all know there will be something next. But it may look a little different every year.” 

 

READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN MASON NEWS

 

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Community Outreach

Volunteering Hits A High Note for Chloe Lewis

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Tenth grader and piano student Chloe Lewis has been an official Volunteer with the Academy, lending a hand with several activities and events for Fall 2016, Spring 2017 and Summer 2017. After a full year of volunteering, Chloe shared some of her thoughts and experiences with us.

 

Academy: How/ when did you get involved with Mason’s Potomac Arts Academy?

CLewis: My family started taking lessons at Potomac Arts Academy in the spring of 2015. We had relocated back to Northern Virginia the year before and still had not found instrument teachers who were the right fit for us. My mom discovered PAA through their website, and then had musician friends highly recommend the instructors there. I started private piano lessons with Michelle Richardson along with my sister, and my brother started in the Violin Beginnings 1 class.

 

Academy: Why did you want to volunteer with the Academy?

CLewis: I wanted to volunteer in a place that had two things I love – kids and music.

 

Academy: What volunteer duties/ responsibilities with the Academy did you have during the last year?

CLewis: In the Fall, I helped at Acting for Young People‘s Winter Showcase. Over three days, I helped with many aspects of their program – such as supervising kids, assisting with costumes, selling tickets, and helping with set up.
In the Spring, I helped address postcards for a large promotional mailing, I assisted the instructor with a kids’ art class, and I helped with the Spotlight on the Arts Music Recital.
I have worked for three weeks this Summer assisting the Piano Adventures camps for young children. I assembled music folders for the students, played duets with the students, and worked one-on-one with them under the guidance of the instructor, Miss Michelle.

 

Volunteer Chloe Lewis helping a piano student

 

Academy: What was your favorite part about your volunteer experience at the Academy?

CLewis: My favorite part has been helping with the summer piano camps. I enjoy sharing my love for music and experiencing teaching piano firsthand. It has been fun getting to know the children and working with them.

 

Academy: How would you say that your volunteer work and experience at the Academy has helped you prepare for the future?

CLewis: I was really thankful to work with Michelle Richardson in the piano camps. She is an amazing role model, musician, and teacher. She has taught me a lot about making the lessons fun and accessible, while still keeping the students calm and focused. I hope to work with beginner students on my own later in high school.

 

Academy: What are your future plans?

CLewis: I have been studying piano for 11 years. I hope to study education in college, with a minor in music.

 

Thank you Chloe for all of your hard work and dedication this past year, and best of luck for the coming school year and beyond!

 

If you are a high school student who would like to find out more about volunteer opportunities at the Academy, please contact staffer Matt Geske at 703-993-9889 or email potomac@gmu.edu .

 

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Events Music

Violin/ Viola Workshop With Dr. Cora Cooper

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This August, Potomac Arts Academy is excited to host two incredibly special experiences for violin and viola teachers and their students this summer. A Teacher Workshop and Violin Masterclass featuring Dr. Cora Cooper – Violin Professor at Kansas State University – will focus on repertoire at various levels – all composed by female composers!

Dr. Cora Cooper, compiler of the Violin Music by Women and Viola Music by Women graded anthologies, will be teaching a workshop for violin and viola teachers and also a masterclass that will feature several violin students from the Academy.

 

Claire Allen, Violin teacher

Claire Allen, a Teaching Artist of Violin at Mason’s Potomac Arts Academy [pictured above], will co-teach the workshop. We sat down with both of them learn more about these special opportunities for the string community!

 

Q: What inspired you to create this workshop and masterclass?

C. Allen: During my first year teaching, my student Hannah (then age 6), looked at me in the middle of a lesson and asked, “Why are all the composers I learn about men?” I didn’t have a good answer for her. That night, I went home and Googled, “Violin Music By Women” and was ecstatic to discover Cora’s amazing anthologies. I instantly ordered all of them. I then poured my feelings into a blogpost, someone told Cora about it, and we connected on Facebook!

Fast forward to a year later, when my students and I hosted a recital entirely of music by women and Cora attended! These workshops are the next step for both of us – to empower other teachers with the tools to integrate this repertoire into their teaching curriculum and to become aware of implicit gender bias in the way classical music is taught.

C. Cooper: To spread the word! I hope that teachers will be excited by the potential for musical growth, as well as equity, that the anthologies offer. When people see how seamless and practical it can be to integrate these pieces into the standard teaching canon (largely thanks to Claire’s great pedagogical mind), and hear what wonderful performance vehicles they are, they no longer “fear the unknown”– in fact, the enthusiasm for the material is amazing!

 

Q: What is important about having easily accessible repertoire by female composers?

C. Cooper: There’s been a lot of talk in recent days about “normalizing” certain behaviors, generally in terms of those behaviors being undesirable. In the case of teaching music by women composers, we do want to normalize that as a behavior! Since the deck is so stacked in favor of compositions by men in our teaching repertoire, it would never happen unless music by women is easily accessible. It is harder to find, no question, particularly to find suitable pieces for every level of student. Much of the music used in the anthologies was out of print, or previously unpublished, but now it’s readily available.

C. Allen: In classical music, the tradition is an important part of what we do. However, it can be very easy to teach the same set of pieces in the same order to every student who comes through your door! Exploring these anthologies and needing to see how they work with real students has meant that my students get to play different pieces from each other. And, the more they hear the different pieces, the more they look forward to the day when they get to play it! Having these anthologies readily available, with repertoire in a variety of levels, made it easy for me to add the pieces into the modified-Suzuki curriculum that I already use. It makes it a normal part of our learning in my studio. One of the easily forgotten things about tradition is that it’s constantly evolving, and I’m so excited to add the music of these little-known composers to the tradition that I teach.

 

Q: What is your favorite thing about teaching people about this repertoire?

C. Cooper: I love to see the looks on people’s faces when they hear the music and realize how fresh, fun, and useful it is from a teaching standpoint. It’s not a chore to add it to your teaching rep; instead, it can be revitalizing. I’ve had a number of Suzuki teachers tell me that it saved their sanity! The variety in style, historical period, tempos and character can be a welcome break from all the minuets and bourrees. The enthusiasm from teachers has been extremely rewarding, and I think it’s been eye-opening for them to “meet” all these women composers they didn’t know existed.

C. Allen: It has DEFINITELY saved my sanity! It makes studio recitals so much more interesting, and I love that I can introduce 20th and 21st century music to my students at a much earlier stage. I think my favorite thing, though, is that learning music written by women is a normal thing for my students of both genders. The mind-blowing “WHAT? There are female composers?” revelation that I had, isn’t something that will ever happen for my students. They’re growing up in a world where playing music by women is just a thing that happens.

 

Q: Why is integrating this repertoire into a sequential violin method important for today’s world?

C. Cooper: If you look at most violin/viola studios, the population is predominantly female. But when you examine the repertoire, it’s about 99% composed by men. What does that tell these young women? This summer there have been a number of interesting articles about the “Women Woman” movie. My favorite, an op ed in the June 5 NY Times, by Jessica Bennett entitled “If Wonder Woman Can Do It, She Can Too” says: “…so much of the messaging we receive about who can do what in the world is subliminal — the absence of what’s missing more even than what is there.” In other words, “you can’t be what you can’t see.” If all students grow up with music written by both male and female composers, then there’s no exclusion. Anyone can do it, and again, that’s an expectation we want to normalize.

C. Allen: My students are growing up in a world where the same opportunities are open to women and men, and it’s important to me that none of them feel like their options are limited because of their gender. When giving dress codes for concerts, I consciously avoid the use of gender pronouns. I assign repertoire from the Violin Music By Women anthologies with the same care and gravity that I do pieces from any other book. I try to honor the musical ideas and the emotions of all my students, and to focus on their musical accomplishments and intrinsic worth as human beings without letting conscious or unconscious bias based on gender, race, or any other label make me see them differently.

 

The Violin/Viola Teacher Workshop will be an engaging introduction to several of the pieces from the Violin Music By Women anthologies and will provide a suggested sequence of repertoire, in addition to teaching points and practice methods for each of the pieces.

The Violin Masterclass will give students, parents, and teachers the opportunity to observe Dr. Cooper teaching intermediate and advanced violin students who are performing repertoire from the anthology.

The Gipsy Fiddler, by Eve Hungerford

Ivy Xu, violin

Kansas Memories Suite, by Hannah Bartel

I. Rainy Daze

II. Green Tomatoes

     Emilia Grabowski, violin

III. ‘Lil Blue

IV. The Ice Skating Pond

    Lindsey Gibson, violin

Romanze, by Wendy Ireland

     Henry Wolfe, viola

Tanglefoot’s Mad Chase, by Florence Morey

     Hannah Liu, violin

A Sketch, by Rosalind Ellicott

     Lauren Powell, violin

Knees-Up Mambo, by Claire Scholes

     Ethan Hemmings, violin

 

You may also be interested in our Summer Violin Bootcamp!

 

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Music

Faculty Feature: Jeremy Killeen

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Trombone Junior Instructor Jeremy Killeen just graduated from Mason, and he will be presenting a recital performance on Thursday, July 20th on the university campus. Starting this fall, he will be serving the United States Navy Fleet Band after going through bootcamp training. Faculty Coordinator Claire Allen recently interviewed him to find out more about this up and coming musician.

 

CAllen: What is special about teaching for the Academy?

JKilleen: When students are enrolled in the Academy for lessons, they get opportunities to perform  – and being able to see the joy of a student after they have successfully completed a performance is extremely rewarding.

 

CAllen: How did you first fall in love with music?

JKilleen: When I was 13, I got to go see the Chicago Symphony orchestra for the first time, and when I heard the brass section play, I was mesmerized. I went home and started listening to as much classical music as I could.

 

CAllen: Tell me about an especially memorable teaching moment.

JKilleen: My most memorable moment teaching was when I had my 7 year old student, who had only been playing for 8 months at the time, come in to a lesson and play an excerpt from the New World Symphony. He played it so beautifully that it almost brought me to tears. He played with so much passion and emotion along with not missing any notes, I was blown away.

 

CAllen: Do you have any pets?

JKilleen: I have a three-legged cat named Tree. [see photo below]

 

Jeremy Killeen's cat

 

TROMBONE RECITAL PERFORMANCE

Mr. Killeen will be performing a recital of solo and chamber works, accompanied by colleagues from the Mason community. This recital is FREE and open to the public, and all are invited!

WHEN: Thursday, July 20th at 8PM
WHERE: De Laski Performing Arts Building on the Mason Fairfax Campus (Room 3001)
PARKING: Visitors will need to park in the Mason Pond Parking Deck     See Map

 

We wish Jeremy all the best in his future endeavors!

 

The Academy will be closed for Spring Break beginning Monday, March 25 and will re-open on Monday, April 1. We will be operating with limited hours. For any urgent requests, please call 703-993-9889.

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