Many thanks to all the parents who have gone the extra mile to help our students pursue excellence through music during the 2010 school year. Without your help, El Molino’s music department would not be able to perform at music festivals, purchase costumes, sheet music, fix instruments, provide scholarships and countless other small expenses that help make a music department successful.
Unfortunately, some of our most active parents are graduating and we are in need new Friends of Music members to volunteer. Please consider attending a Friends of Music meeting held on the first Monday of the month throughout the school year or volunteering at a music department event. We cannot support the music department without you!
If you would like more information on how you can get involved, email Amy Koman.
Twenty-two students from the El Molino Jazz Ensemble returned from the Santa Cruz Jazz Festival a little more tan and happy last Saturday. They scored a 2, an excellent rating in the March 26 and 27 Cabrillo College competition. The ensembles were judged on 10 different aspects such as tone quality and balance, presentation, and jazz and swing principlas.
The festival has over 63 big bands, 23 jazz combos and 16 jazz vocal groups and brings in over 2,500 participants plus their families, friends and fans for 2 days and 2 nights of jazz on six performance stages. These jazz groups represent the best of middle school, high school, community college and university jazz bands from the western United States.
The Jazz Ensemble students stayed at the Santa Cruz youth hostel which overlooks the Pacific. Along with strolling along the boardwalk and riding the Giant Dipper roller coaster, students watched a special concert featuring a wonderful jazz choral group and trumpeter, Al Vizzutti, who was simply awesome. The students also attended clinics and watched other groups perform. Check out the photos below:
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It is a dark time for education in California. In an environment of chaotic and devastating budget cutbacks, we are grateful to our district administration that we still have a basic music program in place. Arts and music programs are being sacrificed in our county and across the state because they are deemed “less important,” than the “3 R’s.” However, new research is confirming what educators and people who have been involved in music have suspected all along: music is highly beneficial.
For example, in an article by Robert Hotz of the Los Angeles Times, Study: Music improves Brain, Disorders may be repaired,” he reports findings from a presentation of the Society for Neuroscience in Los Angeles: “The newest findings…underscore how music-as an almost universal language of mood, emotion, and desire-orchestrates a wide variety of neural systems to cast its evocative spell…Music is biologically part of human life, just as music is aesthetically part of human life…Music can stimulate parts of the brain in certain disorders…we could retrain the brain…Overall music seems to involve the brain at almost every level.”
We need to be on our guard to keep our music programs thriving, because indeed, “Music Is Key.”
If you have great photos of El Molino music events (72 dpi jpegs only), please email them to Amy Koman. Thanks!