Tag Archives: teacher

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Music to heal by

Centrum Voiceworks last week. I did not get a wonderful photograph of the Reverend Robert B. Jones, Sr. He was moving and I did not want to use a flash! He did two classes a day, an am blues class and an afternoon gospel class. They wove together. He talked about how the pentatonic scale came with enslaved Africans and met the European music and produced spirituals, praise songs, the blues and gospel. He also spoke about how the early blues musicians were playing acoustic guitar in noisy places, so the guitar was rhythm, harmony and bass, all at once. He traced how the changes in circumstances is reflected in the changes in music in the United States and how musicians of all races and creeds influence each other. He talks about the history of music as healing.

I didn’t get a great photograph of him, but here is another student:

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And here is the teacher, engaged:

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Thank you, Reverend, for your amazing classes, singing, guitar playing and the final blues jam after the concert on Friday night!

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More Dawn

Here is one of the Voiceworks Classes with Dawn Pemberton. My biggest problem is I want to go to all five or six classes that are running simultaneously and then there are people playing music in the halls, on the porch, singing in the practice rooms!

And we’re on our feet practicing singing soul.

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Voiceworks!

This is the last day of Centrum’s Voiceworks. I am vacationing at home except that it feels like I’ve been transported to a land of song and music, for a whole week.

I don’t want it to end.

This is Dawn Pemberton, a British Columbia singer and choral director and teacher. Her classes have been on soul and an acapella chorus. From the Voiceworks pamphlet: “She  can be found tearing it up as vocalist, teacher, adjudicator and choir director.” She directs the Roots ‘n’ Wings Women’s Choir and teaches all over Canada.

Her classes have been an absolute joy and inspiration. Soul, acapella and yesterday a body rhythm and stomp class. I could do the body rhythm but when I started listening to it I was so mesmerized that I lost my place. Found it again, but I couldn’t do it and listen.

I ask Dawn if she plays near here, but she says it is very difficult to come in to the US from Canada to perform: borders again. I am very sad about that. I’ll have to go to Vancouver, BC to hear her and her chorus!

And here she is singing Say Something. And her choirs.

Thanks and shout out to Centrum and to all of the teachers and other students, about 170 people coming together for joyous noise!

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The introverted thinker walks away

We go to our first parent teacher conference for our daughter. Kindergarten.

“Your daughter is unusual.” says the teacher.

“Mmmm.” I say.

“She is unusual on the playground. At recess. She will play with the other girls. But not if they are mean to someone. Not if they start ganging up. And it doesn’t matter who it is. She will walk away and play by herself.”

“Good.” I say.

“The other kids are realizing that she won’t tolerate any mean talk or ganging up.”

We make appropriate appreciative parental noises.

“She is influencing them. She doesn’t argue, she doesn’t say anything, she just walks away.”