Another week, another blog entry!

So what does a group of girls performing as part of a rock band camp, a garage band, and the American Legion Band from Tonawanda have in common?

If you guessed that all the people involved in the aforementioned examples love Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Pizza, you would be sadly mistaken.

However, if you guess that these are all different and fabulously diverse examples of different settings of community music making, you would be right! Some difficulty abounded for the class in categorizing these instances of CM, so to make our lives easier, each member of the class received a sheet that helped us categorize these examples of CM. The worksheet included questions that helped us identify the region involved, the ages of those involved, and how the activity may have been funded.

The class scrutinized over this worksheet; we decided that spaces for different comments needed to be left to account for any miscellaneous information. Some information on the sheet may have been too general, also. For example, sizes of a CM group on the sheet were listed as “small,” “medium,” and “large.” What exactly qualifies these different amounts? Some updates are being made to this worksheet.

We briefly recapped out podcast from last week, which included discussions of the characteristics of CM, and ultimately, an attempt at the discussion of what makes a community. This week, our podcast centered on a comparison and contrast of different types of CM around the world. The countries that were mentioned in our podcast include Brazil, Scandinavia, Japan, North America, and Ireland. Each member of the class touched upon the different types of CM that exists within these countries. To compare all of the countries listed, the following similarities came up multiple times within the podcast:

· A variety of Community Music activities exists within all of these countries

· One main purpose was to better the welfare of the countries citizens; outreach programs are common.

· Some of the activities were publicly funded; some were funded by the government.

Following the podcast, class discussion was a little closer to home; we discussed handbell choirs and different community choirs that are functional in the Western New York area.

For next week we have a reading on community choirs and need to be ready for a podcast on the topic “What is community?”

Don Dohr
Mary Olenen