Are you a member of any of the music organizations listed below? Maybe you can recommend a group that’s not on the list. Is there an organization, whether national or local, that you especially like (or dislike)? Please feel free to tell us, by adding a comment at the end of this article; we’d all appreciate hearing about your experiences.

Music teachers and performers are necessarily people-oriented, and yet many are freelancers, running their own teaching studios, and spend precious time alone practicing, listening, composing, arranging, preparing materials.

Bringing them together is the goal of professional music organizations, which offer networking opportunities, educational workshops and conferences, publications, grants, awards, competitions, insurance, websites, with annual dues ranging from $35 to $120.

Before listing some organizations and their websites, I must confess that the reason I first joined a national music organization was to get half-price instrument insurance. (more…)

In a previous post, we told you of a site where you can download all of Mozart’s music for free.

Well, here is another site that offers a more limited, but still free selection of sheet music downloads from various composers, from Bach to Stravinsky. The scores are public domain editions of the music, which are out of copyright and are therefore free. (more…)

You may have noticed various websites popping up to match people up–some are for dating, of course, but others are for matching artists and performance venues, such as www.matchbook.org in New England, and others are for helping students and teachers find each other.

I checked out a few of these student-teacher services to review and describe a bit about how they work, how much they cost, etc. One seems a bit better organized than others, so that’s the one I’ll discuss this week. It was started a little over a year ago, and is called Click For Lessons.

Based in San Diego, the site has grown tremendously. It matches students with potential teachers not only in music, but also in dance, singing, languages, acting, and art. A lot of the categories are musical instruments, so at first I assumed the main use of the site was for music, but the site’s blog has an article listing the most popular lessons requested in 2006, and many of them were for dancing.

The site’s most popular lesson requests last year were, in order: (more…)

How would you like to get all of the music Mozart ever wrote, for free?

The Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum has made publicly available an entire search-able library of Mozart’s works. You can search for his pieces by listing, category, key signature, editor, and then print them out for personal use. The website is (more…)

As we all know, the internet is an amazing resource, although you sometimes need a keen eye to distinguish the quality sites from the hype and fluff.

I saw one music site with amazing free services but the site was peppered with advertisements, and downloading its free software then required other special software.  There’s that uncomfortable feeling of installing someone’s free software–you wonder who’s trying to put what on your computer. Then there’s that other uncomfortable suspicion, that “free” services loaded with ads are likely to cost more ads and even spam emails.

One site had some intriguing music teaching games but it soon became clear these were hooks for joining the site, which primarily offered web advertising for private teaching. Since private teaching is generally a local activity, and the web is international, it seems odd to pay top dollar for web advertising that’s intended for a local market. Of course, it makes sense to be able to put up local flyers or weblinks which connect to a studio website, but then Music Teacher’s Helper provides that, plus all the services we use in working with our students.

In any case, after sifting some of the sites, I thought I’d highlight the following sites that are of special interest to music teachers– (more…)

A recent study published in the Oxford Journals confirms that young children who take music lessons have improved memory functions over children who do not. That’s not a huge surprise, and we’ve all heard studies like this before done on slightly older children. One interesting difference here, however, is that this is the first study to actually identify the effects on brain measurements in young children.

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