Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Peer-Reviewed Wellness Through The Lens Of A Medical Orchestra, Matthew J. Brooks

Music Faculty Publications

Stress and burnout afflict medical students and professionals at alarming rates, which has led institutions to invest in counseling services and other traditional wellness programming. However, the stigma of utilizing these services permeates the medical community. This narrative explores the founding of the Nebraska Medical Orchestra—an orchestra created as a nontraditional antidote to reduce stress and burnout among health care students and professionals—and also examines the concept of wellness through interactions between the orchestra’s director and health care-related musicians.

How A Medical Orchestra Cultivates Creativity, Joy, Empathy, And Connection, Roma Subramanian, Matthew J. Brooks

Music Faculty Publications

Background: Inspired by research indicating that exposure to humanities correlates with reduced burnout, the Nebraska Medical Orchestra was founded in 2018 as a collaboration between the University of Nebraska Medical Center and the University of Nebraska at Omaha School of Music.

Methods: Semistructured interviews about orchestra participants’ experiences were conducted with 9 musicians and recorded and transcribed. Transcripts were analyzed using the constant comparative method.

Results: The interviews suggested that participants are drawn to the orchestra to pursue a love of music, to be part of an ensemble, and to connect with others in an environment that provides a lighthearted, …

Reducing “Treble” With Performance Focused Music Programs In Medical School: A Student Driven Needs Assessment To Clarify Participation Barriers Amongst Undergraduate Medical Students, Alexander Tu, Tiffany Truong, Kristy J. Carlson, Matthew J. Brooks, Jayme R. Dowdall

Music Faculty Publications

Introduction: The beneficial impact of performing arts involvement within undergraduate medical education, such as music, has been studied, but support for the arts varies significantly by institution. Research has suggested that medical student involvement in the arts can help develop their identities as physicians and may reduce stress and burnout, an increasingly difficult problem within the medical student community.

Methods: We used a mixed-method cross-sectional study design, using a questionnaire and semi-structured interview designed amongst a team of music professionals and healthcare providers with music backgrounds. Out of 511 enrolled medical students, 93 students participated in the study for a …

Performer Action Modeling In Real-Time Notation, Seth Shafer

Music Faculty Publications

This paper discusses the application of action-based music notation, and in particular performer action modeling, to my real-time notation (RTN) work, Terraformation (2016– 17), which uses a combination of common practice notation (CPN), fingerboard tablature, and color gradients.

Terraformation: For Violin Or Viola And Computer, Seth Shafer

Music Faculty Publications

This paper introduces my real-time notation (RTN) work Terraformation (2016–17) for violin or viola and computer. Program notes, performance directions, and two score excerpts from violinist Florian Vlashi’s performance on May 25, 2017 at the Third International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation are included.

Relationships Between Pitch-Matching And Grade Level, Gender, Ethnicity, And Classroom Teachers’ Use Of Music In Grades K-3,, Shelly C. Cooper, Jere T. Humphreys

Music Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to examine relationships between pitch-matching and grade level, sex, ethnicity, and classroom teachers’ use of music among K-3 students (N = 289) taught by the same general music teacher. Portions of the data from a pitch-matching exercise that functioned as the music teacher’s roll-taking procedure during the 2005-06 school year were treated as pre- and posttests. There were no significant pretest differences between ethnic groups (Hispanic, White, Other). There were significant pretest differences among classes taught by different classroom teachers, as well as the female students scoring significantly higher than males. Covariance analysis (pretest …

Performance Practice Of Real-Time Notation, Seth Shafer

Music Faculty Publications

This paper addresses the performance practice issues encountered when the notation of a work loosens its bounds in the world of the fixed and knowable, and explores the realms of chance, spontaneity, and interactivity. Some of these performance practice issues include the problem of rehearsal, the problem of ensemble synchronization, the extreme limits of sight-reading, strategies for dealing with failure in performance, new freedoms for the performer and composer, and new opportunities offered by the ephemerality and multiplicity of real-time notation.

Minding The Tragic Gap: Conversations Of Invisibility In Early Childhood Music Education, Regina Carlow, Shelly C. Cooper, Julia Church Hoffman

Music Faculty Publications

During the last few decades, the music education profession has slowly begun to recognize the impact of music experiences in early childhood. Key publications in the 1970s drew attention to music education for young children (Greenberg 1976, Simons 1978, Zimmerman 1972). Articles focusing on young children's musical development appeared in the 1980s (Hargreaves, 1986; Peery, Peery, & Draper, 1987; Sloboda, 1985; Swanick & Tillman, 1986). MENC (now the NationalAssociation for Music Education-NafME) began to address early childhood music education through "focus days" attached to biennial national conferences and through the establishment of the Early Childhood Special Research Interest Group. Yet …

Vizscore: An On-Screen Notation Delivery System For Live Performance, Seth Shafer

Music Faculty Publications

VizScore is an open-source, on-screen notation delivery system designed with the performer’s strengths in mind. By harnessing a performer’s learned skills of reading traditional paper notation and practice of interpreting time from a conductor’s gestures, VizScore creates a notation environment that can integrate seamlessly into any performance situation and help musicians play in time with other instruments, live or computer-generated. The paper reviews some general design principles of on-screen notation as put forth by current experts in the field and offers a new model for on-screen notational display. The paper then assesses results from a comparative study between VizScore and …

Joining The Professoriate, Jeremy C. Baguyos

Music Faculty Publications

As someone who made the mid-career cutover from orchestral musician to music academic, I am often asked how one goes about becoming a college professor in the music discipline. Like many questions about pursuing a career in music, there is never a simple answer. I wish it were as simple as going to graduate school, earning an advanced degree, applying for listed jobs (in the Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/section/Jobs/6 l/, www.higheredjobs.com, or the College Music Society's Music Vacancy List http://music.org/cgibin/ showpage.pl), sending some applications, demos and letters of recommendation, and successfully completing an audition/interview. If this were the case, …

From The Editor's Desk, Jeremy C. Baguyos

Music Faculty Publications

With recent high-profile cutbacks in the arts making the news, I feel compelled to make some comments before I go on with my usual business as Editor of Bass World and OJBR. The recession has negatively impacted the professions where bassists exercise their art and make their Jiving. The arts have been through this before, and most artists always seem to come out of it OK. One thing we need to remember is that most media outlets are commercially driven, and as a result, they tend to focus their reports on gloom and doom in order to capture and hold …

Passing The Torch: An Interview With Andi Beckendorf And A Tribute To Her Service To The Isb, Jeremy C. Baguyos

Music Faculty Publications

Andi Beckendorf was appointed Associate Editor of Bass World in 2001 and worked alongside the celebrated Editor at that time, Joelle Morton. In 2005, Andi was tapped to assume the post of Editor, and for the past five years the readership has benefited from her professionalism, her precise editing, her astute content management, and her steady and watchful pursuit of the highest possible standards and values of the ISB and its journal. This issue of Bass World will be the first without Andi Beckendorf at the helm, but we are not going to bid farewell. Instead, we are going to …

From The Editor's Desk, Jeremy C. Baguyos

Music Faculty Publications

I first joined the ISB as a student member at the urging of Charles Hoag, one of my bass teachers when I was growing up in Kansas. For me, the most important benefit of TSB membership was the ISB's journal. Back in those days when the primary tools for research were card catalogs and the RILM Abstracts, I couldn't just do a Google search on the keywords "double bass" to learn more about my instrument and other bassists. The journal of the International Society of Bassists, presently titled Bass World, was my only link to the national and international double …

Literature And Performance Of Music For Double Bass And Tape, Jeremy C. Baguyos

Music Faculty Publications

Electroacoustic music for double bass can be classified into the following two types of repertoire: real-time/interactive computer music or tape music. Real-time/interactive computer music is the newer of the two types and involves the algorithmic generation of electronic sounds in live performance. Pre-recorded electronic sounds are usually avoided, and instead, the sound of live input is used as the source material for electronic sounds. A computer is used for capture, processing and synthesis, and the software is usually written in the MAX/MSP environment. The second category, tape music, is the older of the two types of electroacoustic music for the …

Synchronisms For Double Bass, Jeremy C. Baguyos

Music Faculty Publications

The Iowa State University of Science and Technology in Ames, Iowa, recently hosted the 2007 National Conference of the Society of Electro-acoustic Music In The United States (SEAMUS) from March 8th through the 10th. The annual SEAMUS conference brings together nationally recognized composers, performers, and researchers in the field of computer music for a half-week program of concerts and paper sessions. The 2007 conference featured the premier of Synchronisms No. 11 for Contrabass and Electronic Sounds by Mario Davidovsky (b. 1934). With coordination from SEAMUS, the work was commissioned by a consortium of various academic institutions. The work was composed …

Interactive Computer Music For Double Bass, Jeremy C. Baguyos

Music Faculty Publications

The rise of the academy as patron of art music, the philosophical underpinnings of "futurists" like Russolo and Busoni, the increasing power and cost-effectiveness of computer-based systems and the new compositional directions of the Post World War II avant-garde have all contributed to establishing the genre of electroacoustic music in the United States. Composers have increasingly turned to electronics for new source material and as a result, there is an entirely new repertoire that was generated to take advantage of the emerging technologies and aesthetics. For the double bass, this new repertoire included compositions like Jacob Druckman's Synapse/Valentine (1969), Charles …

Review Of Ojibway Music From Minnesota: Continuity And Change, Kenton Bales

Music Faculty Publications

According to an old Native American axiom cited by Jamake Highwater, "An ear of corn is a very complicated organism. But for the corn plant, it is simple." Likewise, much Native American music seems mysterious and exotic, since it comes from a culture vastly dissimilar to that of Anglo- and Afro-Americans. This book and the accompanying tape do a great deal to clarify the role of music among the organism we call the Ojibways.