Category: Breaking News

What? Can you believe it’s been fifteen years? It’s a little hard to say, but wow have we come a long way in that time. To celebrate, we’re having an Open House on January 11 from 3-5pm.

MTMS is excited to be opening up the house for everyone. We’ve scheduled a raffle with great prizes, live music from staff and students, as well as activities and tours of our space.

Tickets for the raffle will be handed out to everyone who walks in the door – even babies. Signing up with reception gets more tickets and even more will be available for purchase. Prizes include a grand prize of one year of lessons at 2010 prices as well as free trial lessons, free one-month samplers, MTMS shirts and music books.

Live music from the staff and students will be a lovely background and a tribute to our commitment to music. Enjoy their skills and their passion for their instruments while you peruse our office.

If you enroll and pay during the event, you get $15 off every month for your first year of lessons. It’s a pretty amazing deal. Plus you’d get raffle tickets and the opportunity to play fun games and hear great music. The possibilities are endless. Can’t wait to see you there!

Percussion includes instruments that are struck, scraped, stirred, shaken, or spun. While the first thing that pops into my head is a drum, the above definition covers so many instruments I cannot name them all. Consider a xylophone, tambourine, maraca, as well as any style of drum.

Here is a cute quiz with several different percussion instruments. Plus there are more electronic beats on the opposite axis. Many percussion beats are made electronically these days.

Challenge for your student: look around the house and find your own percussion sounds. Actually, it’s so fun you might want to join in. My son told me tap dance is drumming with his feet – so let those beats come out.

MTMS has been investing in our community since we were established. It’s more than just music, though we do love music! Our charity of choice is GRIN – Gahanna Residents In Need.

We have two upcoming opportunities to help GRIN through MTMS. First, we have Lesson Samplers in November that will benefit GRIN. Second, we 0have our Winter Benefit Concert on February 1 where the entrance fee is one non-perishable food item for GRIN.

November Lesson Samplers are a great gift during the upcoming season. Give your loved ones a sampler and 50% goes to GRIN. Lesson Samplers are focused on a single instrument, a four-week course with one 40-minute lesson and lab session each week. A sampler is a great way to explore lessons for the first time or a new instrument. Bonus, if you continue lessons afterward we will waive the enrollment fee.

Another cool thing about a Lesson Sampler is that you can get it as a gift certificate for your favorite musician-in-training. The gift certificate can be redeemed on any instrument.

The Winter Benefit Concert will be held on 1 February. Students must sign up starting 2 January. All the non-perishable food items donated for attending the concert will be donated to GRIN. Earlier this year we donated 184.5 pounds of food! Plus it’s an amazing concert of our students showing off their skills and love of music.

Join us for both of these events and know we’re supporting our local community as well as our students’ music. We can’t wait to see you.

Every month, the music lab teachers select a theme for the Music Technology and Learning Lab. Students explore the theme in the Music History, Composition, and Listening Stations during their scheduled music lessons. The topic for the month of October is Jazz.

Jazz began with African American musicians in the early 1900s. Despite some less reputable beginnings, this mix of European, Latin, and African American musical styles led to many of the popular music genres today, like R&B and rock and roll. Jazz is an American classical music genre.

As you can hear, jazz music creates complicated melodies and rhythms. It’s difficult to define but you learn to know it when you hear it. It also has heavy lean into improvisation and syncopation, which leads to its unique sounds. Because of those two qualities, jazz isn’t meant to be read on a page of music but experienced live.

The ‘Roaring 20s,’ also known as the Jazz Age, are long past, but jazz is still very alive and very American. Below is the playlist for our students to learn more about jazz.