Praise for Tune Toolkit
Found in: Composition & Improvisation
Unmani U., Australia
Reviewing Tune Toolkit ready to start some students. As I get my head around it and feel my enthusiasm building I want to say a couple of things. I like the rich cross pollination to core SM and the enormous help this program will be to the Comp & Improv students who are unsure, with whom I have found it so difficult to empathize and therefore teach well. I love the playful and useful use of teaching language. And I really love that Mark’s gifts of incredible dig-in-there logical detail combined with enormous creativity has found expression in our SM community.
Laurie Richards, Nebraska
I think it’s also cool that you can play through playlist songs and identify the tools from the first several projects in Tune Toolkit. e.g. Dreams is entirely peaks, valleys, and skip 1s. Same with Night Storm with the addition of one skip 2. Mark mentions how Ode to Joy (L1) is made up entirely of peaks, valleys, and plateaus, pointing out that even some hugely famous pieces use only simple tools. I really think that is an eye-opener for many students.
Mark M., New York
I felt strongly that it would be valuable to draw out these connections, so that improv/comp and the rest of the curriculum could have as much opportunity as possible to cross-pollinate and benefit each other, even when we might never actually use any particular phrases/passages from curriculum pieces. To see that all the same principles/elements are used in all these different ways, I think you can end up with a deeper sense of pattern recognition that can benefit everything students do, whether creating original music or otherwise. And I think it’s so helpful to see how simple some really brilliant music actually is. That, along with the strong amount of guidance provided by the tools themselves, can really help reduce creativity pressure for students.
Jacqui G., Canada
I like to point out to mu students that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven used the same building blocks of music that we do.