Program helps to play it by ear
8:22:21 PM CDT - Thursday, March 13, 2003
By Julie Rausch
Noting that it's becoming more important for musicians to cross over to various styles of music, John Harrison and others in the School of Music's string program are advocating improvisation as a continuing emphasis for music education majors.
And they're getting a little help from the Irish to do that this fall.
Harrison, assistant professor of violin, says the WSU string program is in its third year offering a string improvisation course, one of the first of its kind in the country.
Through the help of a global learning initiative grant from WSU, the program plans to incorporate a mini-department of string improvisation. Harrison and Jacque Dillon, assistant professor of string pedagogy, wrote the grant.
As part of the initiative, the string program got two new adjunct faculty this spring and a new Irish traditional fiddling course will be offered through the University of Limerick's Irish World Music Center this fall.
"Most improvisational techniques for string players stem from Irish folk music, so the next natural step is to incorporate such music into our program," Harrison says.
With the help of WSU, the Irish World Music Center is adding American popular music studies to its degree program and the center will share traditional Irish fiddling with WSU through Internet2 using video conferencing and Blackboard to share sound files and other course materials.
As a result, WSU is offering two new courses this spring. These courses will be taught in conjunction with the University of Limerick this fall. The fiddling course is open to anyone who can read music and play a string instrument. The other course is geared more toward American popular music.
Adjunct instructors are Rob Loren, a prominent fiddle player in the community who teaches with the Wichita Youth Symphony and also in the Wichita public schools, and Jon Vriesacker, who attended Berklee School of Music and has performed in various touring rock and popular music bands.
Harrison says teaching improvisation in the public schools has recently been made mandatory to meet national music standards. Even so, most high school and college students playing string instruments have been trained only to play what is on their sheet music. And, Harrison says, most college and university music schools don't have resources to teach improvisation to string players.
In January, WSU's string program had an improvisation day for more than 80 area high school students. Local clinicians and WSU faculty taught improvisation techniques. Also as part of the improvisation day, well-known BMG recording artist Tracy Silverman, who was in town to play as part of the Wichita Symphony's Blue Jeans Concert, performed at WSU for its students and the high school visitors.
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