Making Bach Accessible to Everyone Online

I know not everyone is a fan of classical music. I get it. But you don’t have to be a fan to recognize the impact that music written hundreds of years ago still has on musicians today.

Composers and songwriters still take inspiration from the melodies created by Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninov, and many more.

Think of the possibilities with your students if you had one place to access all the available performances of someone like Bach.

Now you do. Enter the “All of Bach” project.

Since the start of this unique project, more than 350 of the total of 1080 works by Johann Sebastian Bach have been performed and recorded in special ways. They include some remarkable highlights, such as the St Matthew Passion in the Grote Kerk, in Naarden, the Six Cello Suites at beautiful Amsterdam locations like the Concertgebouw and the Rijksmuseum, and Brandenburg Concerto no. 4 in Felix Meritis, in Amsterdam.

Informative texts, interesting facts and interviews with the performers provide a wealth of background information. All the works are performed by the Netherlands Bach Society and many guest musicians, and you can watch and listen to recordings of the complete works. In personal interviews, the musicians themselves talk about what touches them in the music or why they enjoy playing it so much. In order to keep close to Bach, the recordings are made at suitable venues, but we also look for unusual recording locations. Cantatas are filmed in a church, for instance, and chamber music at the musicians’ homes or at special locations in the Netherlands.

https://www.bachvereniging.nl/en/about-allofbach

Of course, these works are available for performance by anyone since they are part of the public domain, allowing new generations to experience the work of a master and be inspired to create their own masterpieces.

Changing Plans and The Future of This Site

low angle photography of metal building on grayscale
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Pexels.com

As I’ve mentioned previously, this site in one form or another has existed since 2006. Through multiple platform changes and changes in focus, I’ve shared thoughts and insights here for the past decade and a half.

As we all know, change is the only constant. With my job responsibilities and beginning my doctoral work, I knew I needed to find a better way to share my thoughts and things I find of interest that you might enjoy.

So, here’s my plan:

On Mondays and Fridays, I will share posts with links to things I’ve found that you may also find useful.

Tuesday – Thursday, I’ll be sharing links with my own commentary and hopefully making some connections with other sources. I may even have multiple posts these days.

I’m doing my best to build an online database of connected topics and thoughts that, I hope, will help me better formulate my own thinking around different subjects I’m passionate about.

Sometimes it will be education, sometimes technology, sometimes life. Whatever I find interesting is game for this blog.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll build something you’ll enjoy.



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Assorted Links for Monday, May 16, 2022

  1. Free sound effects for you to use in school projects from the fine folks at the BBC
  2. Explordle – watch a video clip and guess where the video was taken. Great for identifying context clues and environments
  3. Relationship Building with Dialogue Journals
  4. Three videos about the black hole at the center of the Milky Way

On Dealing with Fake News in Education

fake news
Photo by Nijwam Swargiary on Unsplash

Fake news. Disinformation. Misinformation. We see it all and so do our students.

We can choose to ignore it or we, as educators, can help students see what is real, what is fake, and what is somewhere in-between.

Kimberly Rues writes as she tries to get a better understanding of fake news herself:

Eating the proverbial elephant one bite at a time seems like a great place to begin, but which bite to take first? I would propose that we might begin by steeping ourselves in definitions that allow us to speak with clarity in regards to the types of misleading information. Developing a common vocabulary, if you will.

In my quest to deeply understand the elephant on the menu, I dug into this infographic from the European Association for Viewers Interests which took me on a tour of ten types of misleading news—propaganda, clickbait, sponsored content, satire and hoax, error, partisan, conspiracy theory, pseudoscience, misinformation and bogus information. Of course, I recognized those terms, but it allowed me to more clearly articulate the similarities and differences in text and images that fit these descriptions.

My first instinct is to keep bringing us all back to the subject of digital citizenship (which is just good citizenship in a digital world) but I know I’m still a small voice in a big world.

Also: here’s one of my favorite tools to help recognize media bias.