Culture Days at CMC

The Canadian Music Centre BC is participating in the Canada wide Culture Days.

We are hosting a number of events at the BC Creative Hub (our performance space) @ 837 Davie St (between Howe and Hornby). Vancouver BC

CMC BC Open House on Friday September 30th, 2011 from 1:00pm to 5:00pm;

A Weekend Score Reading Club on Saturday October 1st, 2011 from 10:00am to 12:00pm; and

from 1:00pm to 3:30pm on Saturday October 1st, 2011 a Panel discussion with the Composers and Choreographers participating in the upcoming 10x10x10 show (on October 12-15 at the Dance Centre)

Please see the attached releases for more information or check out our blog at www.bccreativehub.com or Facebook: BC Creative Hub.

Culture Days:
SCORE READING CLUB
WHEN: October 1st, 2011, from 10am to 12pm
WHERE: CMC BC Region,
837 Davie Street, Vancouver, BC
FREE for all to attend!
 
A Special Weekend Edition of the Score Reading Club for Culture Days 2011!
As usual, the Score Reading Club is FREE to attend, and this meeting will feature
FOUR distinguished presenters.
Discover gems you may not know, hear something new, and engage in dialogue
about the works.
Composer Jennifer Butler will present a classic Canadian work, R. Murray
Schafer's And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon. Composer Michael Conway Baker
will present Swiss composer Frank Martin's Petite Symphonie Concertante, a
wonderful work for the unusual combination of piano, harpsichord, harp and string
orchestra. Also featured will be two works to be presented by the Vancouver Inter-
Cultural Orchestra (VICO) and Orchestra Armonia at their October 16th concert.
VICO Co-Artistic Directors Mark Armanini and Moshe Denburg will present
Baban Variations by Lan Tung, and Mark Armanini's Night Bird Singing.
At the SRC, we collectively look at scores, listen to the music and discuss the
works. Please note that no music-reading skills are necessary to enjoy the
session. Everyone is welcome!

Choruses Lead the Way!

This is a fabulous clip from CBS Sunday Morning about the impact that singing in a chorus has on not just singers, but everyone in their community.

How Can Inter-Organizational Collaboratives Build Trust?

Here is an article from Charity Village Research about how organizations can work to build inte-rorganizational  collaboaratives.  By Joan Roberts, Septebmer 19, 2011

You hear it all the time. For a collaborative to become successful there needs to be a high level of trust amongst its members. I agree. Trust is needed for collaborative members to share important and relevant information and work out issues that cross their organizational boundaries. But what exactly is trust? It can be an elusive concept. Trust is an emotion or a feeling held by an individual based on observations, facts and gut instinct that tells you that you can rely on a person, product or process to do what it is supposed to do. In a collaborative we are relying on each other to do what we are supposed to do. And if we can't deliver on our commitments then we need to talk about why and then figure out how to the task done.
Yet you must often compete with other collaborative members for funding or profile — so how you can trust a competitor? This often is the crux of the problem.

Despite being competitors, private and nonprofit sector organizations often find ways to work together. It is the only way industry standards ever develop. Private sector competitors join together in industry associations to work together on common causes like industry standards and regulatory frameworks. Nonprofits cooperate in a similar manner in sector organizations that advocate on behalf of their members.
Read more »

Top 10 Things to Look for in New Board Members

From Gail Perry's Blog


Here is Gail Perry's list of top qualities to look for in Board members for non-profit organizations (warning – it may not be a politically correct list!):

1. A person of influence and connections. 
Above all, I like to have people who know other people and can make things happen. My favorite board member is someone who can pick up the phone and help us make a key connection. This type of board member can open new doors for us and help us network at a new level. They know people with resources, and people who can influence others on our behalf.

2. Deep passion for our work.
Do they have the passion and care for our mission? If they do not, they may bring a clinical approach to our work and miss the heart of what we do.

3. Time and willingness.
Some of the most wonderful people simply don’t have the time. Even if they are wildly passionate, they may be on the road all the time or stacked up with family and work commitments. Even the most passionate board member is unhappy if they feel that they are not fulfilling their commitment to the organization. So be sure they have the time.
Read more »

Musicians Hear Better into Old Age

Canadian researchers find playing a musical instrument delays the onset of age-related hearing decline

.Musicians retain the ability to distinguish speech in noisy conditions far longer than non-musicians. That’s the key finding of a just-published study by two Canadian researchers, who report playing music seems to delay the decay in an aging brain’s central auditory processing system.

“This finding suggests that continued practice throughout life may alleviate some of the age-related decline in speech perception often experienced by older adults,” Benjamin Rich Zendel and Claude Alain of the Rotman Research Centre and University of Toronto report in the journal Psychology and Aging.

Zendel and Alain conducted a study of 74 musicians ranging in age from 19 to 91, and 89 non-musicians ranging in age from 18 to 86. The musicians had started training no later than age 16, had at least six years of formal music lessons, and were still practicing regularly. Non-musicians had no more than two years of musical training of any kind, and did not play an instrument.

Wearing earphones, the participants completed four auditory tests which measured different hearing-related skills. One assessed pure tone thresholds, the ability to detect sounds that grow increasingly quieter; another measured the ability to detect a short gap in an otherwise continuous sound; a third measured the ability to detect the relationship between different sound frequencies.

The fourth and final test measured the ability to hear speech in a noisy environment. Participants heard — or attempted to hear — a series of six sentences against varying levels of background noise. Those who identified more of the sentences’ key words were given higher scores.
Read more »

What if the Secret to Success is Failure?

An interesting article on education appeared this past week in the New York Times. Here is a brief excerpt and a link to the article on their website.

Dominic Randolph can seem a little out of place at Riverdale Country School — which is odd, because he’s the headmaster. Riverdale is one of New York City’s most prestigious private schools, with a 104-year-old campus that looks down grandly on Van Cortlandt Park from the top of a steep hill in the richest part of the Bronx. On the discussion boards of UrbanBaby.com, worked-up moms from the Upper East Side argue over whether Riverdale sends enough seniors to Harvard, Yale and Princeton to be considered truly “TT” (top-tier, in UrbanBabyese), or whether it is more accurately labeled “2T” (second-tier), but it is, certainly, part of the city’s private-school elite, a place members of the establishment send their kids to learn to be members of the establishment. Tuition starts at $38,500 a year, and that’s for prekindergarten.
Randolph, by contrast, comes across as an iconoclast, a disrupter, even a bit of an eccentric. He dresses for work every day in a black suit with a narrow tie, and the outfit, plus his cool demeanor and sweep of graying hair, makes you wonder, when you first meet him, if he might have played sax in a ska band in the ’80s. (The English accent helps.) He is a big thinker, always chasing new ideas, and a conversation with him can feel like a one-man TED conference, dotted with references to the latest work by behavioral psychologists and management gurus and design theorists. When he became headmaster in 2007, he swapped offices with his secretary, giving her the reclusive inner sanctum where previous headmasters sat and remodeling the small outer reception area into his own open-concept work space, its walls covered with whiteboard paint on which he sketches ideas and slogans. One day when I visited, one wall was bare except for a white sheet of paper. On it was printed a single black question mark.

Read more »

What Music Education does for you

What Can Music Education do for you?

Surrey Board of Trade Supports Non Profits

The Surrey Board of Trade participated in the Community Grant discussion process earlier this month in Surrey.  The following information comes from their website:

The Surrey Board of Trade's recommendations included the following points:
1.     Amend the Gaming Control Act to permit the General Manager to dedicate annually an amount equal to 30% of the gaming funds deposited to general revenue to qualified charities.
2.     Reinstitute the policy of three-year grants, which will reduce the administrative burden on both the charities and the Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch.
3.     The General Manager adjusts the local and provincial caps on the amount a charity can receive in accordance with the projected three year funding levels.  Right now there are Societies who will be experiencing a considerable cut to their gaming grant as the result of the $100,000 local cap and the $250,000 provincial cap.
4.     The Gaming Control Act be amended to permit the General Manager to dedicate annually an amount equal to 2% of the gaming funds deposited to general revenue to the development of social entrepreneurship and that this money be granted to “enp” (enterprising non profits), a portion to be for distribution to qualified not for profits to develop a social enterprise to provide sustainable income and a portion to provide educational programs to assist these charities in the development of a social enterprise.
We are also concerned about the section in the Gaming Control Act that permits the Minister to “issue written directives to the lottery corporation on matters of general policy.”  The provision to make these directives available through the Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch during business hours is not providing sufficient oversight.  The Regulations direct the General Manager to post these directives on the web site for 12 months.  We would suggest that these directives after the 12-month period be available for public consultation through an accessible archive section on the web site.
The Surrey Board of Trade recognizes not for profits not only for their good work but for their economic benefit as well.
The full report is available here for your perusal.

Last Weekend of Summer

Yes it is now September, where did the summer disappear to? Most of us will be back teaching next week with new school year starting on Tuesday. Many of our of our schools have new programs and classes being offered, so check out the various school websites to see what is up. Regular postings to the blog will resume in the coming weeks. Stay tuned and enjoy the last weekend of Summer!