TED Talk Thursday – Michael Tilson Thomas: Music and emotion through time

by | Jun 28, 2012 | Music, TED Talks, Video

According to ted.com: “In this epic overview, Michael Tilson Thomas traces the development of classical music through the development of written notation, the record, and the re-mix.”

“As a conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas might be best known for his interpretation of the emotionally charged music of Gustav Mahler. But his legacy won’t stop at his Grammy-winning recordings of the complete Mahler symphony cycle with his home orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony. He’s also the founder of the New World Symphony, an orchestra that helps to educate young and gifted musicians as obsessed with their craft as he. Since its establishment in 1987, New World Symphony has launched the careers of more than 700 young musicians, and in its new Miami Beach concert hall designed by Frank Gehry, it’s bringing well-played classical music to a truly popular audience.”

“He’s the guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra — and the artistic director of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra (YTSO), a 96-member ensemble selected from online video auditions. Tilson Thomas conducted the YTSO at Carnegie Hall in 2009 and in 2011 in Sydney, Australia. And he’s the creator of the Keeping Score education program for public schools, which uses PBS TV, web, radio and DVDs, and a K-12 curriculum to make classical music more accessible. In 2010, Tilson Thomas was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists by the US government.”

Whether you like classical music or not, I think you will enjoy this talk.

For those of you not familiar with TED Talks here is a brief summery from www.ted.com:

“TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize”

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I look forward to your thoughts and comments!

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TED Talks Thursday – Bobby McFerrin Hacks Your Brain with Music

by | Feb 10, 2011 | Music, TED Talks, Video

According to TED.com: For those of you not familiar with TED Talks here is a brief summery of them from www.ted.com:

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize.

For the next few weeks I want to concentrate on talks that focus on the creative arts, music, dance, etc. In today’s Talk, one of the Best of the Web series at TED (http://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_mcferrin_hacks_your_brain_with_music.html), in a 3-min performance from the World Science Festival, musician Bobby McFerrin uses the pentatonic scale to reveal one surprising result of the way our brains are wired. Having been a music teacher earlier in my life, I remember being taught that all children, in all cultures show this interesting phenomena, of using the notes of pentatonic scale in their first songs. (For those of you unfamiliar with the pentatonic scale, think of a scale made up of only 5 notes and those notes being the same as the black keys on a piano). To demonstate, remember being a child and teasing a friend by chanting  something like “Johnny’s got a girl friend.” Do you hear a tune that you would have sung that to? Most of you will and it will be made up of the notes of the pentatonic scale. We all seem to be hard wired with this scale. I have no idea why, but find it fascinating.

Remember as you watch this that this was happening at the World Science Festival. The audience were not musicians, but they all seemed naturally to be able to follow Bobby in creating a tune based on the pentatonic scale.

Fascinating, isn’t it? Makes you wonder in what other ways we are hard wired for the creative arts.

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I look forward to your thoughts and comments!

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