The Jensen Studio

I just returned from a week at MAT Camp 2009, and it has been an incredible whirlwind experience of learning, creating, and performing.  The camp takes place every summer in Evanston, Wyoming; I first attended in 2007 and loved it.  This year, I was able to return as a teacher, “specializing in media.”  From July 20-24, I taught four classes, team teaching the last 3 with Joe Jensen (the other half of TubaTronix.)  I also performed with the Concert Band and the Symphony Orchestra in the Friday night concert, and with TubaTronix in the Wednesday night Faculty Concert!

My class schedule went like this:

• 10:00 Concert Band
• 11:00 Web Design
  The class focused on blogging, with an introduction to HTML the last few days.  On Friday, we also had a great discussion about possible improvements for the MAT Camp website, which is about to be redesigned.
• 1:00 Symphony Orchestra
• 2:00 Everything Makes Music (with Joe Jensen)
  Our class for third- through fifth-graders.  We focused on some of the fundamentals of sound and music:  Instrument design, vibration and resonance, rhythm, and pitch.  We also spent some time listening, and had a jam session on some of my electronic setup!
• 3:00 Cobra Ensemble (with Joe Jensen)
  We got to teach a whole class about Cobra!  We had two saxophones, two tubas, a clarinet, and a string bass.  We were a little short on performers, so we tweaked the Guerrilla rules a little to accommodate.  We performed the piece on Friday afternoon, in between the Intermediate Strings and the Western Wyoming Fiddlers, for an extra shocking performance…
• 4:00 Advanced Electronic Music (with Joe Jensen)
  In this class, we used Ableton Live to create some short songs.  We mostly worked with loops, but we also got into beat-mapping and remixing.  There was a great call-and-response mashup of a Linkin Park song, for example!  We also talked a little bit about recording into the software, and performing live.

A note to all of you that subscribe by email: Sorry about the other, nonsensical post that arrived earlier this week.  On Monday, I was having technical problems in my Web Design class so I did some live editing on my site as a demonstration.  Probably a bad idea, but whatever!  :P

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