After months of deadly trench warfare, on Dec. 24, 1914, German and British soldiers in Belgium suddenly ceased hostilities and, through the singing of carols, celebrated Christmas together. This film documents their spontaneous musical truce with eyewitness reports, proving that "people who make music together cannot be enemies, at least not while the music lasts" (Hindemith). 
The Christmas Truce DVD, available from Music in Motion, documents this incredible event, when music transcended the ravages of war to unite foes in a spirit of common  humanity to discover true meaning of Christmas.

American folk singer John McCutcheon immortalized the 1914 Christmas truce in his moving ballad, “Christmas in the Trenches”:

I heartily recommend the following illustrated book for children, which tells the true story of the Christmas Truce in a language children can understand:

In Flanders Field

By Norma Jorgensen and Brian Harrison-Lever. On Christmas morning, the guns stop firing. A robin is caught in the barbed wire of no-man’s land on the front. The soldier makes a choice that transforms into a peaceful moment of sharing Silent Night across enemy lines. The famous World War I title poem of John McCrae is a fitting conclusion to this illustrated book for children.
Hardback 2496  $16.95 (available at Music in Motion)

Also recommended is The Story of Silent Night DVD. It recounts the history of the carol Silent Night and includes a re-enactment of a spontaneous World War II music-induced Christmas Day truce between the Germans and Americans, similar to the WWI Christmas truce at Flanders Field:

The Story of Silent Night DVD

A live-action retelling of how the best-loved carol was written on a snowy night in 1818, and how it has affected generations since. Filmed in an Austrian winter wonderland, it features the Vienna Boys Choir.
The transcendent power of music is revealed in a deeply moving (and true) episode on Christmas Eve during World War II. American and German soldiers lay down their arms for a shared moment of peace, uniting their voices in this universal carol. For all ages! 80 min. DVD 5491  (avail. at Music in Motion)

Personal Note: My young nephew just shipped to Afghanistan. My thoughts and prayers are with him and all the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and wherever lives are at risk in battle. May the spirit of the “Silent Night” Christmas truce be with them. "People who make music together cannot be enemies, at least not while the music lasts" (Hindemith). (Oppressive dictators have always known this, which is why music is often banned in times of repression, as it was under Taliban rule of Afghanistan and during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China.)

Born Sept. 5, 1912 in Los Angeles, California
Died Aug. 11, 1992 in Manhattan, New York

“There are two things that don’t have to mean anything;
one is music, and the other is laughter.”
- John Cage, paraphrasing Immanuel Kant. (Cage agreed with Kant that music and laughter don’t have to mean anything in order to give us deep pleasure.)

Avant garde composer, writer, artist, and philosopher, John Cage was a unique figure whose influence on 20th century music, art, and dance was perhaps even more important than his own artistic output. In fact, his most famous work was 4’33”, a piece composed for piano (or any other instruments!) that consisted of
4 minutes and 33 seconds of absolute silence, divided into 3 movements. So obviously this minimalist loved a good laugh, and the joke doesn’t stop there: 4’33”  has even been included on several CD collections! Cage shared a lifelong partnership, both personally and professionally, with choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the two of them made a lasting impact on contemporary dance. As an artist and printmaker himself, Cage also influenced fellow artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and others in the art world.

Cage studied with Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, radical composers in their own right.  He taught experimental music at Wesleyan University, where he was affiliated until his death in 1992.  He also taught at Mills College, UCLA, the Cornish College of the Arts, and The New School. Cage was influenced by Indian philosophy, Zen Buddhism, and I Ching, the Chinese classical text on changing events, which he used as a tool for composing chance or aleatory music. As a minimalist composer, he also experimented with found sounds, electronic music, and “prepared” piano (which consisted of sticking nuts, bolts, rubber, plates, etc. between the strings of the piano to create the effect of an entire percussion orchestra). Prepared piano often produced exotic effects resembling mbiras, marimbas, bells, gamelan, wood blocks and other percussion. Listen to Cage’s Sonata for Prepared Piano:

John Cage’s Sonata X for Prepared Piano

Now meet the humorous, iconic John Cage near the end of his life, as he expresses his thoughts about listening, music, sounds. . . and silences:

Don’t underestimate the power of either sports or music when it comes to exciting a crowd. Even as a tormented composer writing under the harsh restrictions and demands of Communism, in his 1929 ballet  The Golden Age big-time soccer fan and sometime soccer referee Shostakovich recreated a soccer match. In this ballet, a communist soccer team travels to the West to compete against the evil “capitalists” (real boiler-plate geo-political plot!).  Listen to his brilliant recreation of a fast-paced soccer match:

I would love to have seen this ballet scene. Wonder if the choreographer was a soccer fan too? Probably so. . .

Tips for Music Teachers:

1. Play this musical soccer match for your students, and see how many can guess what sport is being depicted. 

2. Ask students to guess why the composer chose to include this work in a ballet, rather than a symphony, opera, or choral work.

3. Ask students to choreograph & perform in teams their own interpretation of Shostakovich’s soccer match.

4. Ask students to research other examples where composers have depicted sports events in their music (and share them with us!).

5. Ask students to describe what music and sports have in common.

6. Show students the vuvuzela, the obnoxiously loud, monotone horn used at this year’s World Cup.  This is a great seque to open the discussion on noise pollution and hearing protection! (Hope they ban the horn for the next World Cup!)

Since 1998, the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra has performed on musical instruments they make from fresh vegetables. (I couldn’t make this up.) They shop for veggies at the local produce market, spend a few hours making their vegetable instruments, then after their concert, they throw them into the pot and serve up vegetable soup. Contrary to the old adage “don’t play with your food,” they do play with their food, and quite musically I might add. You’ll have to see it to believe it:

If you thought boomwhackers were just for kids, think again.
Better still, listen to the percussion group Plastik Musik in their astounding Boomwhacker performance:

The first time I met Craig Ramsell, creator of the Boomwhackers, was  in Phoenix, Arizona, about 15 years ago at a music education conference.  At the time, I knew his newly created pitched plastic tubes called Boomwhackers would be destined for a big role in music classrooms. In fact, it took the music education world by storm, and there is scarcely a music classroom anywhere today in the USA without a set of Boomwhackers.  A whole new wave of Boomwhackers educational materials soon flooded the market, including books, games, musicals, and CDs, boosting the popularity of these colorful pitched instrument tubes.

  The Boomwhackers boom was further inspired by the popularity of the off-Broadway percussion sensation called STOMP (who used rubber tubes in one of their famous routines).  Like STOMP, which is still going strong in New York and on worldwide tours, the Boomwhackers craze continues to invade the planet.

But if you are one of the few people on earth without a set of Boomwhackers, mention the PromoCode “Boom” when you order any set of Boomwhackers and/or related Boomwhacker materials at www.musicmotion.com for a 15% discount (offer good through July 15).  Don’t miss Music in Motion’s Boomwhacker Flashcards: For Movement, Singing, Ear Training, and Pre-Reading Games, which I created for building musicianship, movement, and reading skills.

How musical is a bonsai? Let me count the ways. . .

In the words of the composer/performer Diego Stocco:

“I always liked bonsai trees, and I was curious to try the approach I used for "Music from a Tree" on a smaller scale, so I bought a bonsai and recorded this little experimental piece.
To determine the key I used the lowest note I could play and recorded the rest around it.
Besides playing the leaves, I used bows of different sizes, a piano hammer and a paint brush.
As far as microphones I used my Røde NT6, a customized stethoscope and tiny MEAS piezo transducers.
I played all the sounds and rhythms only with the bonsai, I didn’t use any synthesizer or samplers to create or modify the sounds. I hope you’ll like it.”
                                                                                                                     –Diego Stocco

See and hear for yourself the musical renderings of a bonsai:

Find out more about sound designer and composer Diego Stocco

Lindley Armstrong “Spike” Jones

Born December 14, 1911 in Long Beach, California
Died May 1, 1965 in Los Angeles, California

If you’re too young to remember him  then it’s time for an introduction.  As a musician and band leader, Spike Jones was one of a kind. In the 1940’s and 50’s Spike and his City Slickers recorded and toured throughout the U.S. and Canada as “The Musical Depreciation Revue.”  He was a radio star (1945-49) who successfully transitioned into a television star with his own weekly shows (1954-61).  He was a trailblazer mixing music and found sounds (burps, hiccups, fog horns, gun shots, etc.) paving the way for Stomp, Blast, PDQ Bach, Monty Python,  Frank Zappa, the Beatles, “Weird Al” Yankovic & others.  As the son of a Southern Pacific Railroad agent, young Spike was initiated into “kitchen music” by a railroad chef who showed him  how to play pots and pans, knives and spoons. His musical parodies of classical, as well as pop, rock, and other genres of music, were legendary. Nothing was too serious to be spared his satirical touch. Spike even took on Hitler in 1942 with his famous “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” which Disney later used in a wartime Donald Duck cartoon parody (which won the 1943 Oscar for Best Animated Short Film).

THE SPIKE JONES STORY. This DVD documentary of Spike Jones’s  life and work is full of comic musical parodies from his TV shows, such as Cocktails for Two, Der Fuehrer’s Face, You Always Hurt the One You Love, All I Want for Music is My Two Front Teeth, 50’s rock and roll parodies and more. Enjoy interviews with those who knew him best, professionally and personally, including family. DVD 5015  $24.95 buy now

Hear Spike Jones’s “black and blue” rendition of Strauss’s The Blue Danube:

Can music encourage subway commuters to take the Piano Stairway instead of the escalator? Just when you thought you had seen it all, here comes the latest twist of the Fun Theory. This Volkswagon-sponsored experiment employs the “Fun Theory” to influence environmentally friendly, health-conscious consumer behavior. And what can be more fun than a keyboard stairway that plays  the notes of the scale as you race to catch the train! Compose with your feet as you roam up or down (or sideways on the chromatic black keys), and keep the pounds off too with the daily exercise of your musical commute.  Well, enough said. . .we all need a little more music and lots more exercise in our lives.

See and hear for yourself the Piano Keyboard Stairway in the Stockholm subway. Then you’ll understand why most folks opt for the sounds of their own “foot” music in the metro, and forget the “ho-hum” tunelessness of the escalator!

Teaching Tip: Challenge your students to come up with their own “Fun Theory” ideas for injecting fun into worthwhile endeavors. This could be a good cross-curricular project for the music and science teacher. Discuss the pros and cons of how music is used now in public spaces (such as that dreaded omnipresent Muzac). How can spontaneous or planned public music events or tools be used to inspire or uplift us in a noise-filled world? How can music make us really listen and not just deaden the noises of the environment? Post your students’ ideas on this blog, so we can share them with others.

Check out these other upbeat musical surprises in public places:

The Sound of Music in the Antwerp, Belgium train station. During rush hour, this planned musical event caught commuters by surprise, but they soon joined in singing and dancing “Do, a deer, a female deer, re, a drop of golden sun. . .”

Crazy Subway Music. This spontaneous outbreak of music had busy commuters raising their eyebrows and looking askance, until the infectious rhythms had them all joining in. Music is the tie that binds. . .even among normally indifferent and distracted commuters.

One of the more delightful oddities of nature is the musical mating practice of the mosquito. In order for such a romantic event to have a “happily ever after” ending, the male and female have to tune up and harmonize in the interval of a perfect fifth.  The male sound is roughly a D (600 Hz) and the female a G (400 Hz). When they adjust their tones to create a perfectly tuned 5th, then the overtone of the 3rd can be heard (making the major triad) and mating will take place. A less talented and musical male, who can’t perfectly tune with the female, quickly becomes a rejected suitor. (A diminished 5th would be the death of the relationship!)

So maybe mankind should credit the mosquito love duet for the sound of the perfect fifth, the most euphonious interval in music history since the days of Gregorian chant. The perfect fifth is also the foundation of chordal harmony and the pivot point for tonality (which is always a pull between the tonic (first degree of the scale) and the dominant (5th degree). (All music students have heard of the infamous “Circle of Fifths” but never knew of its unsavory origins.) Maybe the history of Western music owes a debt of gratitude to the courtship duo of the pesky mosquito.

I couldn’t make this stuff up. Read the NPR article for yourself: “Mosquito Duet Leads to Love.”

Teaching Tip: Try this acoustic experiment in the classroom to understand the physics behind the mosquito love duet. Have 3 children twirl three Whistling and Listening Tubes at 3 different speeds. One will twirl slowly to create the tonic  (first degree of the scale) representing the female mosquito, and the other twirl faster to create the dominant (5th degree of the scale) for the male mosquito. If the 3rd child can twirl even faster to get the next tone in the overtone series (the 3rd scale degree), you will hear a major chord,   signaling the finale of the  successful mosquito love duo.

Do monkeys respond emotionally to music? Well, maybe not to human music, but they respond with excitement or relaxation to species specific music  composed  just for them. David Teie, composer and cellist with the National Symphony Orchestra (who sometimes plays with the heavy metal band Metallica), composed  music  based on natural vocalizations of the monkeys in various emotional circumstances. The music, played and recorded on actual instruments, was then transposed 3 octaves higher with the tempo 8 times faster. The monkeys responded to the music physically and emotionally. In fact some of their natural vocalizations are in fact diatonic and in the Key of E flat, according to the composer. Makes one wonder who really invented music, man or monkey!

Listen to this NPR interview, along with some of the monkey-inspired music. Now the flip side of the question is, do humans respond to monkey music? Well, maybe not. But perhaps the bottom line of this experiment is, both humans and monkeys respond emotionally to their own kind of music. There’s just no accounting for musical tastes.

Hear some monkey musical improvisations when Patricia Gray–scientist, musician, and biomusic researcher from the National Academy of Sciences—discusses  music-making apes that have jammed in studio with Peter Gabriel and Paul McCartney.