Music

If You’re Teaching Shakespeare, You Might Want to Start with Duke Ellington

In 1957, jazz legend Duke Ellington released his album Such Sweet Thunder, which is a collection of songs written in…

You ever notice how schools and learning are portrayed in music? It’s seldom well. Someone needs to analyze that. I’m…

I remember when reading Oliver Sack’s Musicophilia years ago being struck by one of the stories he told. He described…

Want an educational jolt? Watch the first four minutes of Yo-Yo Ma’s Tiny Desk performance, where he follows up his…

File this under “D” for “didn’t know I needed this in my life until I saw it.” OK Go, who…

When Black Thought performed his epic freestyle on Hot 97, the video hit 1M+ views within a day. I myself…

Love for teachers takes many forms, including the kind of fast-paced, twisted, and misogynistic kind of love doled out by…

You might not think much of classroom music instruments, but give them to the Roots and Metallica and watch what…

Better than school, Einstein writes, is for a child to become engulfed in the joy of doing something he loves.…

I used to do a project with my 9th grade English students where they’d rap literary critiques of Chaucer’s Canterbury…

Different rappers have different composition processes. Some proudly don’t write anything down (Jay-Z, for example) and others are always scribbling…

In this interview with jazz legend John Coltrane, we gain brief insight into his practicing habits and how he views…

The great Chuck Berry performed his classic song on television in 1958. To assist in your inevitable urge to karaoke,…

The great trumpeter talks beautifully about the problem of competition in education, the value of historical understanding, and why music…