For 50 years Jean-Paul Despins has taught music and the means to transmit it to generations of students at Montreal’s Le Plateau school, Université Laval in Quebec City, and now at UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal). He is the embodiment of the ever-young professor: sparkling eyes, often teasing, communicative, and given to hearty laughter. One senses the fever to teach that continues to possess him, whether he’s convincing one person or a whole class of aspiring teachers–his mission being the need to rethink the basic premises of teaching music in elementary school. He’s extremely vocal about the problems he perceives in the educational system. For the last 20 years he has campaigned militantly to have neuroscience integrated into the teaching of music.

Emotion governs reason

Despins stresses the need to put emotion back into the vocabulary of musical education. “Teaching places too much emphasis on cognitive learning, without calling on emotion, despite the fact that we know emotion governs reason. People can’t learn on the basis of negative behaviour, and therefore of negative emotions. If I ask you to play a piano sonata movement that you’ve learned, you’ll play the one you like best. You’ll have forgotten the one you didn’t like. We have to throw off this constraint, this habit of intellectualizing everything without supplying any emotional input.”

In Despins’ view, the teacher’s primary mission is to transmit these emotions. “Children are a little like animals. They understand the teacher through their eyes. If the teacher doesn’t transmit any emotion, the child will always have problems.” However, learning situations aren’t designed to suit all children. Teachers can help them learn, but mustn’t force them. This is where the ability to read behaviour comes in–to be able to anticipate a student’s reactions, rather than simply react to them. (more…)

In the February 8 issue of The New Yorker, Alex Ross discusses the National Endowment for the Arts’ Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which indicates that the number of people who venture out to classical music performances in a given year has been declining for almost three decades. Some organisations now offer classical concerts in jazz venues or cafés, like the famous Poisson rouge in New York. Is this the solution?

It’s now official: you can now download your favourite Analekta music… directly on the Website of the label! Entirely secure, user friendly and state-of-the-art, ANALEKTA.COM offers a higher quality of downloadable music, plus of course Radio-Analekta and the possibility of browsing through the complete Analekta catalogue in streaming.

A few months ago, I told you a little bit about the FLAC format, a “lossless” format that gives you the possibility to compress music without loosing any sound quality. The FLAC files sold on the ANALEKTA.COM Website now gives you the possibility to get sound quality equal to or superior to that of a CD. For a recent recording, you will be listening to the sound equivalent to that heard by a sound engineer while recording!

You can now easily and quickly download music performed by the greatest Canadian artists, buy or offer prepaid packages, subscribe, collect Analekta points and exchange them for download credits. Plus, all music bought on ANALEKTA.COM remains accessible on your account, without term limitations.

François Mario Labbé, founder of the label, took this opportunity to talk about some of the upcoming releases, including one devoted to the Italian baroque composer Francesca Caccini. Shannon Mercer, Luc Beauséjour, Sylvain Bergeron and Amanda Keesmaat performed three excerpts from the recording. Stay tuned for more information on this album soon.

A very peaceful video, that features Nicolò Paganini‘s Cantabile for violin and guitar, performed by Angèle Dubeau and Alvaro Pierri.

The British conductor Kenneth Woods tells us what sets Das Lied von der Erde apart from other works by Mahler. Is it autobiography?

”The beloved earth everywhere blossoms and greens in springtime, anew. Everywhere and forever the distances brighten blue! Forever… forever… These were the last words Mahler ever set to music, and, unlike the rest of the Song of the Earth, they were not those of an ancient poet, but his own. Mahler, the master of contradiction and paradox, ends a work that is so universal in scope with just the briefest hint of autobiography- almost  a secret confession, hidden in this epic panorama.”

To read the article…

To listen to the work, as performed by the OSM under Kent Nagano…