A while back I was approached by Evan Tobias, an extremely progressive NYC-based music educator (and actually the very first person I met at college), about doing a collaborative project with students in one of his general music classes at Willow Grove Middle School. The idea was that students would compose short motifs, which I would then record and send back to them via the wonder of the internet. Next, the students would take my recordings, mix and remix them, and create their own derivative works based on their original motifs and my interpretation of them (notation would be left open-ended so some students might choose to represent their music graphically or simply with words).

Our talks about the project have finally come to fruition in the form of Be Moved!, a project-in-progress in which students use music to express the various ways they have been moved or challenged physically, emotionally, and intellectually. One of the more exciting aspects about Be Moved! is that the creative process will be entirely transparent. Evan’s set up a project blog, where everything including our initial discussions, conversations between myself and his students, exchange of feedback, and sharing of music files will be available to the online community. It should be interesting to watch the project take shape and hear the final result.