School In Manhattan Research Articles

Carrie Koffman (review)

Reviewed by: Carrie Koffman Tom Caw Carrie Koffman. Carillon Sky. Impermanence Records IMP13 (2011), CD. Carrie Koffman teaches at The Hartt School, University of Hartford, and this compact disc is the result of her efforts to discover and record repertoire written for saxophone by women composers. Koffman writes in her notes that she studied only one work written by a woman for saxophone in her student days, and she could [End Page 872] count the number of works she had performed that were written by women on one hand until she began formulating this recording project. She discovered some of the pieces included here, commissioned others, arranged one piece, and had others arrange the rest, with the intention of raising awareness of what women have contributed and are contributing in the areas of composition and saxophone performance. Roshanne Etezady’s Glint (2007), a “fiendishly difficult showpiece for clarinet and alto saxophone” according to the composer, gets the proceedings off to an energetic start. Koffman is joined by clarinetist Alan Kay, who is on faculty at The Juilliard School, the Manhattan School of Music, and Stony Brook University, and they both do a masterful job of alternating tone and timbre in rapid succession, switching from muted to bright and back again as they reel off their intertwining lines. Augusta Read Thomas originally composed Carillon Sky (2009) for solo violin and small ensemble, and later agreed to develop this version with solo saxophone, which Koffman premiered. The liner notes include what Thomas envisioned when stimulated to compose this music—a fantasized image “of a sky full of very soft tinkling and flickering bells as well as very clamorous pealing, ringing, resonant bells, through which one floats.” The ensemble, under the direction of Glen Adsit, Director of Bands and Associate Director of Instrumental Studies at The Hartt School, deftly crafts the sky of Thomas’s imagination, in which Koffman soars and explores. Koffman sounds as if she is enjoying the freedom to move through the sky as she pleases. This version of the piece seems a likely choice for being programmed by other saxophonists. The original version of Cindy McTee’s Timepiece was commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for its 100th Anniversary Season in 2000, but the version heard on this disc is one recast into a piece for electronics and solo saxophone by Kathryn Swanson-Ellis, another of Koffman’s colleagues at The Hartt School. Koffman’s performance is that of the human element couched within a soundscape produced by machines, although the machines in this case are firmly under the control of Swanson-Ellis. The percussive tick tocks that recur drive home a literal sense of the title, drawing attention to what every listener knows but perhaps forgets on occasion: music is a time-based art. Ben Toth, percussion professor at The Hartt School, joins Koffman in performing Shulamit Ran’s “Song and Dance” (2007), a work that has no words and no consistent pulse that would facilitate dancing of a social variety. Toth’s part is played primarily on mallet percussion instruments so he is able to contribute both rhythmic and melodic interplay to Koffman’s phrasing. Koffman plays both alto and soprano saxophones on the piece, and displays an impressive control over her vibrato, applying it to notes mid-phrase and then moving back into straight tones. The piece is episodic, without having defined movements. The motivic expressions include enough augmented second intervals to lend the work a Middle Eastern flavor. Marguerite Roesgen-Champion (1894–1976) was a Swiss harpsichordist, pianist, teacher, and composer, and her Concert no. 2 (1945) for saxophone, bassoon, and harpsichord, is the musical outlier in this collection of otherwise contemporary music. Koffman’s rationale for including it on this disc is that it is one of the few pieces she had played prior to undertaking her project. She is joined by two more fellow faculty members from The Hartt School— David Westfall on harpsichord, and Marc Goldberg on bassoon—with the harpsi-chord providing an icy and spiky contrast to the warm and smooth blend of bassoon and saxophone. The cumulative effect is delightfully disorienting, in terms of aurally locating the era of...

Gunther Schuller: a life in pursuit of music and beauty

Simultaneously the memoir of a famed composer, conductor, and music educator, and an important historical sourcebook on the American musical scene during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the autobiography of Gunther Schuller chronicles the first thirty-five years of this multifaceted and expansive figure's life and work. Schuller began composing music at an early age and joined the Cincinnati Symphony as its principal French horn player at seventeen. Since then he has written for many major orchestras and his work has earned him a MacArthur Foundation genius grant and the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his large-scale orchestral piece Of Reminiscences and Reflections. Perhaps most famously, Schuller contributed to a new stylistic blend between progressive factions of jazz and classical music, for which he coined the term Third Stream, and collaborated with John Lewis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and others in the development of this style. In this exquisitely detailed reflection on his early influences, experiences of good fortune, and powers of curiosity, as well as firsthand recounting of critical cultural and social moments and major movers of the jazz world, Schuller here beautifully and honestly narrates a life lived beyond limits. Gunther Schuller has been on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music and Yale University; he was, for many years, head of contemporary music activities (succeeding Aaron Copland) and director of the Tanglewood Music Center, and served as president of the New England Conservatory. He is the author of The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945; Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development; The Compleat Conductor, and many other books.

I<span class="small-caps">nterview</span>

ELEANOR CORY ELEANOR CORY: This is a lovely occasion. Many names are coming to mind as I have been thinking about Perspectives. I wish we could all see each other. RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Yes, I can imagine. It has been fun and interesting talking to everyone, and then corresponding about our conversations afterward. So many people keep thinking of things; people or articles pop into their minds after our conversations. . . . It has also been nice to hear that the actual conversing about PNM has brought out new thoughts and ideas about the journal for some people. CORY: I have been jotting down people and ideas that I had not thought about in a long time. VANDAGRIFF: Would you be willing to share with me when and how you first encountered Perspectives of New Music? 148 History of Perspectives CORY: Sure. It started in graduate school in the early 70s. I was in the Columbia DMA program where Charles Wuorinen was my composition teacher, and Ben Boretz was one of my teachers for theory and analysis. Both were writing articles in Perspectives. My fellow students and I looked forward to new issues of Perspectives which connected with what we were learning in class. I felt like we were part of a very serious conversation about music. At New England Conservatory I had studied Schenker analysis with Ernst Oster, Schoenberg String Quartets with Rudolf Kolisch, and taken an in-depth course on Stravinsky taught by John Heiss, all of which had made me very excited about analyzing music. I read Perspectives articles, went to class, and studied scores. I was interested in how music theory was elucidating atonal music, and how that process was changing a larger musical climate. The work was completely new to me and very interesting. Perspectives was also very important for my own music. As I searched for a compositional language, I began to write some articles. In Perspectives I wrote an analysis of a Martin Boykan String Quartet. There were two views of the piece; the other was by John Harbison (Harbison and Cory 1973). In the Musical Quarterly I wrote analyses of string quartets by Martin Boykan and Elaine Barkin and a record review of solo piano music including pieces by Wuorinen, Wolpe, Wyner, Perle, Moss, and others (These articles appeared respectively in vol. 61, no.2 (1975) and vol. 62, no.4 (1976)). I also wrote a book review of George Perle’s Twelve-Tone Tonality in Theory and Practice (vol. 4, no. 1 (1979): 30–36). The common motivation was my fascination with compositional processes. I also assumed I was going to graduate and get a teaching job. Articles were part of what composers were ‘supposed to do’ in order to get and keep jobs. They also helped me think through ideas for my own music. I went to Music Theory conferences and became part of the academic music world. VANDAGRIFF: It sounds like something happened next, or you ended up not staying a part of that world. . . . CORY: Yes, it was interesting. Perspectives went in other directions, and I went in other directions. One of the directions I went was totally personal: I got married (to another composer, Joel Gressel) and eventually had two children. After teaching full-time at Baruch College, CUNY, and Yale (a non-tenure track) for ten years, I taught part-time at Manhattan School of Music, Sarah Lawrence, Hofstra, Brooklyn College , and the New School (not all at the same time). I didn’t have time to do anything but write music, teach, and raise my children. VANDAGRIFF: And you probably did not have time to do all of that! Eleanor Cory 149 CORY: Yes, and I did not have time to do all of that! That was sort of a startling chapter in my life, actually. . . . I did not read or write articles. Also, at around that time, it seemed to me, Perspectives was going in a more experimental direction, and I did not subscribe after a while. Sometimes I would see individual articles. Later there was Open Space. I read some of the articles and listened to the CDs while following the scores, some of which were...

Interview

ELEANOR CORY ELEANOR CORY: This is a lovely occasion. Many names are coming to mind as I have been thinking about Perspectives. I wish we could all see each other. RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Yes, I can imagine. It has been fun and interesting talking to everyone, and then corresponding about our conversations afterward. So many people keep thinking of things; people or articles pop into their minds after our conversations. . . . It has also been nice to hear that the actual conversing about PNM has brought out new thoughts and ideas about the journal for some people. CORY: I have been jotting down people and ideas that I had not thought about in a long time. VANDAGRIFF: Would you be willing to share with me when and how you first encountered Perspectives of New Music? 148 History of Perspectives CORY: Sure. It started in graduate school in the early 70s. I was in the Columbia DMA program where Charles Wuorinen was my composition teacher, and Ben Boretz was one of my teachers for theory and analysis. Both were writing articles in Perspectives. My fellow students and I looked forward to new issues of Perspectives which connected with what we were learning in class. I felt like we were part of a very serious conversation about music. At New England Conservatory I had studied Schenker analysis with Ernst Oster, Schoenberg String Quartets with Rudolf Kolisch, and taken an in-depth course on Stravinsky taught by John Heiss, all of which had made me very excited about analyzing music. I read Perspectives articles, went to class, and studied scores. I was interested in how music theory was elucidating atonal music, and how that process was changing a larger musical climate. The work was completely new to me and very interesting. Perspectives was also very important for my own music. As I searched for a compositional language, I began to write some articles. In Perspectives I wrote an analysis of a Martin Boykan String Quartet. There were two views of the piece; the other was by John Harbison (Harbison and Cory 1973). In the Musical Quarterly I wrote analyses of string quartets by Martin Boykan and Elaine Barkin and a record review of solo piano music including pieces by Wuorinen, Wolpe, Wyner, Perle, Moss, and others (These articles appeared respectively in vol. 61, no.2 (1975) and vol. 62, no.4 (1976)). I also wrote a book review of George Perle’s Twelve-Tone Tonality in Theory and Practice (vol. 4, no. 1 (1979): 30–36). The common motivation was my fascination with compositional processes. I also assumed I was going to graduate and get a teaching job. Articles were part of what composers were ‘supposed to do’ in order to get and keep jobs. They also helped me think through ideas for my own music. I went to Music Theory conferences and became part of the academic music world. VANDAGRIFF: It sounds like something happened next, or you ended up not staying a part of that world. . . . CORY: Yes, it was interesting. Perspectives went in other directions, and I went in other directions. One of the directions I went was totally personal: I got married (to another composer, Joel Gressel) and eventually had two children. After teaching full-time at Baruch College, CUNY, and Yale (a non-tenure track) for ten years, I taught part-time at Manhattan School of Music, Sarah Lawrence, Hofstra, Brooklyn College , and the New School (not all at the same time). I didn’t have time to do anything but write music, teach, and raise my children. VANDAGRIFF: And you probably did not have time to do all of that! Eleanor Cory 149 CORY: Yes, and I did not have time to do all of that! That was sort of a startling chapter in my life, actually. . . . I did not read or write articles. Also, at around that time, it seemed to me, Perspectives was going in a more experimental direction, and I did not subscribe after a while. Sometimes I would see individual articles. Later there was Open Space. I read some of the articles and listened to the CDs while following the scores, some of which were...

Media Review: Teaching Musicians: A Photographer's View

Griliches, Diane Asseo. Teaching Musicians: A Photographer's View. Bunker Hill Publishing, New Hampshire, 2008, ISBN 10-1-59373060-8, 143 pages, $35.00. Griliches seems to be passionate about capturing exceptional images in what some might consider ordinary settings. Her previous books include: Library: The Drama Within (University of New Mexico Press, 1996), and An Appalachian Farmer's Story: Portrait of An Extraordinary Common Man (Mercer University Press, 2007). Teaching Musicians: A Photographer's View is a work that continues in this vein of revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Dedicating the book to her past music teachers, Griliches graciously writes, am so grateful to all the fine teaching musicians and their students who welcomed me into their inner sanctums to capture and run away with their images. Before entering the professional world of photography, Griliches was a musical theater director in community and high schools, and also the founder and director of Kids & Co. Musical Theatre in Newton, Massachusetts. Exhibitions of Diane Asseo Griliches's photographs have been held in the Library of Congress, Tanglewood Music Center, and the Boston Public Library. In Teaching Musicians, Griliches presents music teaching and learning through the lens of a camera. The reader/viewer will find black and white photographs of fifty-seven professional musicians and their students of classical, jazz, and world musics. The musicians, ten women and forty-six men, include Ravi Shankar, Sir James Galway, Dorothy DeLay, Bobby McFerrin, and Yo-Yo Ma. Using a hand-held Leica CLS camera and ambient light, she shot images in classrooms and studios at fifteen locations including New England Conservatory, Juilliard School, University of Minnesota, Ali Akbar College, Manhattan School of Music, and East Harlem Public School, as well as the private home studios of seven musicians. Acknowledgements and preface sections by the author, as well as a foreword by Richard Ortner, president of The Boston Conservatory, precede the photographs of each musician teacher. Organized alphabetically by teacher from Pablo Ablanedo to Jacques Zoon, these felicitous encounters as Griliches describes them, are presented full-page with a brief biographical sketch of the musician and quoted remarks from the either student or musician on an accompanying page. Students are typically not identified in the photographs with the exception of students who may already be known as successful professional musicians such as Anoushka Shankar and Ariana Ghez. At times the reader may deduce that the name of the student quoted may also be the student in the photograph, but it is not clear. Griliches succeeds in choosing authentic moments of teaching and learning. One way to study the photographs is to view them from the role the viewer plays or may have played in music learning. Although Bunker Hill publishing suggests that the book appeals to all music lovers (http://bunkerhill publishing.com/), I believe the average music lover would prefer images of great performances or images in exotic, historic, or prestigious settings. However, any musician from amateur to professional, and any music teacher from novice to master, will likely enjoy this visual celebration of great pedagogues and talented students. What the viewer will likely notice first is the intimacy of settings, expressions, and body language. Most striking are the photographs of one teacher and one student. These photographs more readily catch the eye in artistic photographic composition. In a photograph of pianist Russell Sherman and his student, we see the student concentrating while Sherman appears to be giving instruction during her playing. We imagine the musical sounds are passionate from the blurred motion caught in the student's right hand and Sherman's closed eyes. …

The “Adventures and Battles” of Vladimir Dukelsky (a.k.a. Vernon Duke)

Research Article| October 01 2010 The “Adventures and Battles” of Vladimir Dukelsky (a.k.a. Vernon Duke) SCOTT HOLDEN SCOTT HOLDEN Scott Holden holds music degrees from the University of Michigan, Manhattan School of Music, the Juilliard School, and Budapest’s Liszt Academy where he was as a Fulbright Scholar. He has performed in thirty-two different American states, and a dozen countries in Europe and Asia. His recording of piano works by Vladimir Dukelsky is to be released by Tantara Records. He is currently the department chair of piano and organ studies at Brigham Young University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2010) 28 (3): 297–319. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.28.3.0297 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation SCOTT HOLDEN; The “Adventures and Battles” of Vladimir Dukelsky (a.k.a. Vernon Duke). American Music 1 January 2010; 28 (3): 297–319. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.28.3.0297 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Manga High: literacy, identity, and coming of age in an urban high school

Based on a four-year study, Manga explores the convergence of literacy, creativity, social development, and personal identity in one of New York City s largest high schools. Since 2004, students at Martin Luther King, Jr., High School in Manhattan have been creating manga Japanese comic books. They write the stories, design the characters, and publish their works in print and on the Internet. These students African-American and Latino teenagers are more than interested in the art and medium of manga. They have become completely engrossed in Japanese language, culture, and society. Manga is highlighted by reproductions and content analysis of students original art and writing. An appendix includes guidelines for educators on starting a comic book club.

Reflections: Intellectual Trajectories: Why People Study What they Do

ReflectionsIntellectual Trajectories: Why People Study What they Do David Brion Davis (bio) Based on a talk given at Yale’s Koerner Center, October 13, 2004. The connections between what a scholar chooses to write about and teach and the rather winding path of his or her personal life are cloudy and somewhat obscure. Yet there surely are many such connections, and I’ll try at least to dredge up some of them in my talk. Growing up in the 1930s—I don’t know how it is now—there was the perennial question every child got, again, and again, and again. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” My answer always was, “a scientist, a scientist.” I had a passion for collecting minerals, and I had a big butterfly collection, and above all, loved fossils. I had brachiopods and even some dinosaur bones. And then by the age of twelve, I had a small chemistry lab in the basement and was doing all kinds of experiments with flasks and retorts, following a high school or college text. Once a flask broke and chlorine gas went all over the floor, and my mother had to come and help sweep it down the drain. But my dad was a reporter, a journalist, before he became a successful independent novelist. As a reporter he interviewed an endocrinologist in Buffalo, New York, and he was immensely impressed with what he thought would be an exceedingly important and vital field for health and human improvement in the future. So, after hearing him talk so much about that, when people asked me the big question, I’d say, “Well, I want to be an endocrinologist.” In high school I was not especially interested in history courses. I loved English and the study of literature, and I very much liked chemistry, physics, and biology. Yet the very mention of high school evokes the terrible crisis I faced at age sixteen, when I nearly lost out on any chance of attending college. Since my career has been focused on the Ivy League of Dartmouth, Harvard, Cornell, and Yale, it’s crucially important to recall the winds of fortuity that shape and threaten us all. My father, Clyde Brion Davis, was a wholly self-educated but quite successful novelist. His first novels, The Anointed (1937) and “The Great American Novel” [End Page 148] (1938) received rave reviews and were Book-of-the-Month-Club selections. But some of his next eighteen books did not do so well (my favorite, Shadow of a Tiger, was published posthumously in 1963); and his career required moves in 1942 and 1943 from upstate New York to Hollywood and then to Manhattan. Accordingly, I ended up going to five high schools. After doing well in ninth grade in Hamburg, New York (where I was elected student president of the junior high school) and then spending tenth grade at Beverly Hills High School, I finally, in September 1943, landed in the Straubenmuller Textile High School in Manhattan—because it was one of the few schools that still taught German, which I had already begun studying, and it was not far from our Riverside Drive apartment. After several weeks, both my parents and the school realized this was a mistake (the school did not prepare students for college), so I took and passed the test for Bronx High School of Science. But when I arrived at Bronx Science, I was already far, far behind in the rigorous classes in math and physics. Classrooms were so jammed that in two of them I had to sit on a radiator in the back of the room. I grew so depressed that one day I traveled to the midtown headquarters of the U.S. Marines, where I stood outside debating whether to lie about my age and go in and enlist. If I had done so, I would certainly have soon been in the South Pacific. When I was threatened with failure toward the end of the term (and thus with being barred from most colleges), my mother discovered McBurney College Prep, a private day school with small classes run by the YMCA at 15...

Jean Sammet: Programming Language Contributor and Historian, and ACM President

Jean E. Sammet was born on 23 March 1928, in New York City. Her parents, Harry and Ruth Sammet, were both lawyers. Harry’s legal practice included wills and estates; Ruth stopped working when she married. Jean and her younger sister, Helen, attended public elementary schools in Manhattan. Jean’s interest in mathematics surfaced at a very young age but she could not attend the Bronx High School of Science because it didn’t accept girls. Instead, Jean went to Julia Richman High School, an all-girls’ public school, where she took every available math course. After examining a number of college catalogs from women’s colleges, Jean chose Mount Holyoke on the strength of its mathematics program. Jean majored in mathematics and took enough education courses to be certified to teach high school mathematics in New York; she minored in political science. After graduation, Jean pursued graduate studies at the University of Illinois, receiving her MA in 1949. She was a teaching assistant in the Mathematics department from 1948 to 1951 while taking courses toward a PhD. In 1951, Jean began looking for a teaching position. New York City was not hiring new high school teachers [3B2-8] man2009010076.3d 12/2/09 14:3 Page 76

Early NYC High School Physics and Development of the Science Magnet School

The Bronx High School of Science opened in 1938 and is often considered the premier science magnet school in the country. While Bronx High may be one of the most successful science magnet schools, it was not the first such school even in New York City. It owes its existence almost entirely to the development of the science magnet program in an earlier New York City school, Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, and in particular to one of its early principals, physicist Dr. Ernest R. von Nardroff (1864–1938).

Playing in the Classroom

On October 23, 2000 the headline on the bottom of the front page of The New York Times read: “No Time for Napping in Today’s Kindergarten” (Zernike, 2000). The article, which seems to capture one of the prevailing ideas in the country—that all children should be reading by age six—discusses the lengths to which school systems are going in order to teach “more” to their students, at the direct expense of playtime. This fall, while attending an information session for my soon-to-be three-year-old son’s nursery school, a director told us that in recent years the entire school schedule has been moved up so that the kindergarten curriculum of five years ago is now being taught in pre-kindergarten. In more school districts than not, the school day for kindergartners has been expanded from four hours a day to seven. One public school in Manhattan, mindful of the very real societal pressures to fit in more and more “real curriculum,” allocates twenty-five minutes a day out of seven hours to its kindergartners for recess. Children, exhausted from an over-scheduled day, get in the car to go home and fall asleep, or arrive home and put on their pajamas either to go to bed or to begin their homework. While there are myriad societal reasons for these disturbing trends, one of the chief ones is some version of the following idea: the more “formal curriculum” that is presented, the more and the earlier that children will learn, and the more that learning will translate into an advantage in later life. It seems that relatively few people in positions to influence educational policy-making are asking whether this emphasis on “formal curriculum” is beneficial to children’s development. In fact, there are very powerful arguments that the potential costs of removing children’s opportunities for play are in fact quite damaging to children’s abilities to learn, and that there are many children for whom this reconception of school presents just the opposite: the impairment of representational development and ultimately the reduction of opportunities to learn. In this paper, I shall argue that while there may be some superficial benefit to cramming a child’s day with “real learning,” the costs of removing playtime from the classroom can, and often do, outweigh this perceived benefit. I will use a case history of a child I taught in a fourth grade classroom at a private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to illustrate my understanding of how her ability to play helped her to learn and gave her an advantage that, in my estimation, far outweighed anything she would have attained from more formal instruction. It is worth noting that the school she attended was, and to the best of my knowledge still is, in the process of trying to determine its own stance on this very debate, while simultaneously Journal Issue Two r3 11/9/04 3:35 PM Page 89

Controversy and Conflict in the Henry Street Settlement Music School, 1927-1935

Controversy and Conflict in the Henry Street Settlement Music School, 1927–1935 Shannon L. Green (bio) In 1971 Helen Hall (1892-1982), the president of the National Federation of Settlements, published Unfinished Business in Neighborhood and Nation, memoirs of her tenure as Henry Street Settlement's second di-rector.1 The book relates many of the activities that took place at the settlement house, including those of its music school. Hall also describes with fondness many of Henry Street's staff members, including Grace Spofford, the second director of the settlement's music school. Curiously, Hall's book fails to make any mention of Hedi Katz, the music school's founder and first director, even though their terms at Henry Street overlapped by at least six months and Katz had led the school for its first eight years. Katz's peculiar absence is symptomatic of divisive opinions regarding the purpose of musical training within the social settlements during the years of the Great Depression. Beginning in the late 1880s and continuing well into the first half of the twentieth century, middle-class Progressivists founded settlement houses to alleviate the difficult living and working conditions of tenement neighborhoods.2 As urban community centers, social settlement houses in the large industrial cities of the United States were emblematic of the Progressive era in which they originated; many settlements, especially Hull-House in Chicago, were centers of the era's reform activities. Settlement leaders [End Page 73] were essential in the passage and implementation of laws involving child labor, the eight-hour workday, and improved safety in factories.3 Settlement workers, many of whom were "residents" living within the settlement houses, were for the most part middle-class white Protestant men and women. Many subscribed to Progressive philosophy, devoting their professional and personal lives to helping those deemed less fortunate in immediate and concrete ways. They brought educational opportunities to the tenements, offering an affordable means for the inhabitants to better their circumstances. In addition, settlements offered arts programs such as private music lessons, participation in choirs and other ensembles, and regular low-cost concerts to help tenement workers forget, if only temporarily, their deplorable living and working situations. After many years of offering various musical activities to the surrounding neighborhood, the directors at Henry Street Settlement, located on Henry Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan Island in New York City, organized a formal music school in 1928.4 The school quickly gained the committed support of such renowned musicians as Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, and Jascha Heifetz, all of whom were members of the school's advisory committee. The school also received aid from members of well-known business families such as the Marshall Field family. Director Lillian Wald chose Hedi Katz as the first director of the music school. A European-born violinist with impressive credentials, Katz had studied at the Royal Academy in Vienna and had been a pupil of Arnold Rosee, Emile Sauret, and Carl Flesch. For four years she served as a first violinist in the symphony orchestra in The Hague, Holland.5 Wald first made Katz's acquaintance, shortly after immigrating to the United States, through a mutual friend who had asked Wald to assist Katz with an "unfortunate" financial situation.6 Before making her final decision regarding who would lead the music school, Wald contacted Katz and asked her to write a plan for the school. Wald then asked three friends and experts to review Katz's plan: Janet Schenck, director of the Neighborhood Music School (later the Manhattan School of Music) in New York and a leader of the Music Division of the National Federation of Settlements, the conductor and composer Walter Damrosch, and Melzar Chaffee, associated with the Third Street Music School Settlement.7 After receiving their full approval of Katz and her plan, Wald hired her for the position. The school's first season began in the fall of 1928. As director, Katz was paid thirty-five hundred dollars for operating the school during eight months of the school year and for any necessary summer preparations. As for other settlement music school directors, her position was considered part-time, and Katz...

Effects of Meditation on Music Performance Anxiety

This study investigated the effect of meditation on music performance anxiety. Participants were 19 students between the ages of 18 and 41 yrs, who were recruited from the Manhattan School of Music, Mannes College of Music, Yale University School of Music, and State University of New York at Purchase. The experimental group received a series of eight meditation classes, and the control group received no meditation training. After the 8-week training period, all performed in a concert. Pretests and post-tests of music performance anxiety were given and post-tests of state anxiety and of performance concentration. Performance anxiety decreased among participants in the meditation group, in contrast to participants in the control group, whose performance anxiety did not decrease. Differences in regard to post-test state anxiety and performance concentration were not significant. An additional benefit of meditation was a reported increase in relaxation pleasure even in the period immediately before the performance. Results indicate that meditation may be a useful tool for aiding performers to combat performance anxiety.

Donald Moore Palatucci, MD (1940–2002)

⇓Don Palatucci, a leading clinical neurologist and our esteemed colleague who made many contributions to the practice and teaching of neurology, died on November 8, 2002. Donald Moore Palatucci, MD In early November 2002, Don and his wife, Blanid, and my wife and I were having dinner at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, for old time’s sake he said. Don was quite ill but still able to push some food around on his plate and with great effort managed to down his entire martini, though it took more than an hour. As always, he was very talkative and had many stories to tell—he was delighted with how well his children were doing, still head over heels in love with Blanid, and proud of her courage in the face of daunting problems, and, as was his style, never spoke for a moment about his illness. He died peacefully at home in San Francisco 1 week later. Don was a New Yorker—loved San Francisco after 30 years—but a New Yorker at heart. He was born and raised in Pelham, went to parochial high school in Manhattan, and, as a teenager, spent many days shadowing his internist father in the office and on hospital rounds in the Bronx. Early on Don decided on a career in medicine, and he aspired to be as complete and …

Next-generation content representation, creation, and searching for new-media applications in education

Content creation, editing, and searching are extremely time-consuming tasks that often require substantial training and experience, especially when high-quality audio and video are involved. New media represents a new paradigm for multimedia information representation and processing, in which the emphasis is placed on the actual content. It thus brings the tasks of content creation and searching much closer to actual users and enables them to be active producers of audio-visual information rather than passive recipients. We discuss the state of the art and present next-generation techniques for content representation, searching, creation and editing. We discuss our experiences in developing a Web-based distributed compressed video editing and searching system (WebClip), a media-representation language (Flavor) and an object-based video authoring system (Zest) based on it, and a large image/video search engine for the World Wide Web (WebSEEk). We also present a case study of new media applications based on specific planned multimedia education experiments with the above systems in several K-12 schools in Manhattan, NY.

Comment on Andrea R. Halpern's Review of "Musical Perceptions"

In reviewing a book, the reviewer has two obligations: first, to read the book; second, to review it. To try to fulfill the second obligation without having adequately fulfilled the first one can only result in writing a deceiving review. This applies to Andrea Halpern's (1995) review of my edited volume Musical Perceptions ( Aiello, 1994), published in Music Perception. Professor Halpern claims that the preface of Musical Perceptions does not state the audience for whom the book is intended. Yet in the preface, write: I have tested the chapters that follow in my classes because they reflect the topics teach in my perception of music courses at the Juilliard School, the Manhattan School of Music, and in the department of psychology at New York University.... In addition to being used in psychology of music courses (be they offered in music or in psychology departments), this volume could also be used in courses in the philosophy and the aesthetics of music, music education, and music theory (p. vii). The reviewer continues by claiming that Musical Perceptions does not explicitly state the organizing theme of the book. Yet, on the first page of the book's preface, write: Undoubtedly, the question 'How do we perceive music?' is the main theme of this book. There is a also a second question, more difficult to answer, that underlines its intent: 'How does music perception give rise to musical meaning?' (p. vii). According to the reviewer, the relationship of chapters to one another is never explicitly stated. Yet the preface clearly states this:

Microstructural musical linguistics: composers' pulses are liked most by the best musicians

Western music is a combination of notated structure plus microstructure. Composers' pulses, as precise microstructural functions, were tested with five groups of subjects of graded musical proficiency: (1) 10 famous artists including Vladimir Ashkenazy, Yehudi Menuhin, Paul Badura-Skoda and others; (2) 14 Julliard School of Music graduate students; (3) 19 Manhattan School of Music graduate students; (4) 51 Australian conservatory students; and (5) 41 non-music students (total, 135 subjects). Composers' pulses consist of combined amplitude and timing warps specific to each composer - the composer's pulse matrix. Each subject listened to and scored 40 versions of 10 short music examples (not selected by the author) of eight bars each, composed by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Schubert, performed by computer, in which composers' pulses, as developed by Clynes (1983, 1985a,b, 1986, 1987), were incorporated in a two-level hierarchic pulse configuration, and interchanged. Each example was heard with the pulses of those four composers in turn, in quasi-random sequence, one performance thus incorporating the “right” pulse and three the “wrong” ones. Results show dramatically that the greater the musical proficiency, the more marked the preference for the “right” pulse ( p<.0001). Non-musicians as a group showed a similar tendency of preference, but typically to a considerably less pronounced degree. Further studies suggest that longer excerpts (32 bars) and repeated hearing would help non-musicians also to better understand composers' pulses. A theory of music as a double stream is introduced. The results suggest that the composers' pulse matrices posited by Clynes as a first approximation are in fact appropriately meaningful. Brain function aspects of the meaningful discrimination of such tiny time differences are discussed.

“l'animal qui fait oink! oink!”: Bilingual children's oral and written picture descriptions in English and French under varying instructions

How do children perform on four distinct picture description tasks in French, a language that has limited use in their lives? How does their performance on these tasks in the “limited use” language compare to the performance on the same tasks in English, the broader use language of their school and the society? And what are the effects of the children's home language environments on their performances both in French and in English? Fifty‐two 2nd‐ through 5th‐grade children at an independent school in Manhattan produced oral and written picture descriptions for a present audience (contextualized condition) and for an absent audience (decontextualized condition) in English and French. Descriptions were coded for measures of quantity, specificity, density, main theme, and narrativity. For the French tasks, children were most influenced by whether the task was written or oral. By contrast, in English, the instructions (contextualized vs. decontextualized) had a more powerful effect. Overall, English descripti...

REPORT CARDS: SOME SAY THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY

Despite decades of improvements in education, report cards have hardly changed; educators see them as necessary evils that add little to a student's education but fear. Increasingly, though, some schools are trying new ways of communicating with parents that can reduce violence at home and actually enhance learning. In Attleboro, report cards now include a warning to parents not to let their frustration over grades turn into violence. In Baltimore, middle-school students earn "improvement points" and compete against themselves, not their peers. Setting Their Own Goals A school in Manhattan, Kan., has replaced report cards with triangular parent-student-teacher conferences in which the children set their own educational goals and then assess how well they have done ... While scattered schools around the country are experimenting with alternatives to the report card—portfolios of work, evaluations by the teacher or parent conferences—report cards remain the most important communication between school and home in a vast majority of schools ... The biggest problems arise when parents overreact. Child advocates in several cities say that when report cards are issued, reports of child abuse go way up. The National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse, a group in Chicago, has a national awareness campaign, with advertisements that read, "Stop the Report Card Reflex."

Adolescent sexuality and peer pressure

It appears that adolescents are becoming sexually active at younger ages than in past generations. How much are they influenced by their peers to become sexually active? A study of 89 adolescent girls in a parochial high school in Manhattan showed that adolescent girls are influenced by their peers when they decide to become sexually active; however, they do not see themselves influenced by their peers. Adolescents appear to have internalized their peers opinions. If adolescents are becoming sexually active at younger ages, they need to be given adequate information to allow them to make informed decisions about their behavior; thus balancing the influence of peer groups.