Tonight in the town of Colchester, Vermont, one of my all-time favorite musical events is taking place - the annual Opus Concert presented by Music COMP - and this concert is their 40th - an extremely impressive feat. While I cannot be there in person this year, MusicFirst continues to serve as the Program Sponsor. I have said it before, and I’ll continue to say it to anyone who will listen - this organization and this event is hands down my favorite example of the use of technology in music education. Students from around the state, and around the country, go through an iterative draft>edit>revise process of music composition with an assigned mentor to learn how to compose. The Opus Concert is an annual event where a specific musical group - this year it’s a music ensemble named TURNmusic- with a specific instrumentation - will perform compositions by those same students in Grades 3 through 12. While the mentoring all takes place online using tools offered by MusicFirst, the culminating event is a LIVE performance of the student work. It is truly magical to see when students hear their pieces played by real musicians for the first time. I have been to many of these concerts in the past and they always renew my enthusiasm for music education, music students, and our future.

Yesterday, I read the sad news about the passing of one of the all-time great conductors, Michael Tilson Thomas, affectionately known as MTT. It is a huge loss for the musical world - specifically classical music. When I read about his passing, I immediately thought back to one of the numerous times I saw him conduct. It was a concert at Carnegie Hall that happened almost exactly 17 years ago. It was billed as the YouTube Symphony, and it was one of the most memorable concerts that I ever attended. I remembered that I was so inspired by the event that when I got home, I immediately wrote a review of it on my blog. This morning I looked through the Wayback Machine to see if I could find it, and lo and behold, I did! In memory of MTT, I thought I would repost it here, along with videos of the complete performance, many years later. Rest in peace, Maestro.

Back when I was teaching instrumental music at the middle school level, I had the pleasure of teaching a Jazz Ensemble. It was the most fun aspect of my job - hands down. The students in the ensemble were among the best and brightest in the school, the music we played was engaging and exciting to perform, and I even ran a series of Jazz Night concerts for 10 years, inviting some of NYC’s finest jazz musicians to perform on our middle school stage, with my ensemble serving as the opening act. The very first of those concerts featured a dear friend of mine, and exceptional musician, Erik Lawrence. Erik is the son of famed jazz saxophonist, Arnie Lawrence - who founded the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in 1986. My only real weakness as a jazz ensemble director was that I had a very difficult time teaching improvisation. My students simply read the written solos rather than even trying to improvise. The main reason for this was that I, as a tuba player, knew how to improvise bass lines from playing tons of gigs that had no music to read off of, but melodic improvisation was something that I simply didn’t do. Might sound crazy, but it’s true. When I was creating content for the MusicFirst Classroom, I tried to help out other music educators who might be experiencing the same difficulty, so I commissioned Erik to write a course on how to teach students to improvise - from the very first note.

I am always on the lookout for high quality resources for music educators - especially when they are either free or low-cost. One such resource that I recently stumbled upon is an amazing YouTube channel titled Dr. Selfridge Music: Learn How to Band, created by a music educator from Pennsylvania, Dr. Steve Selfridge. If you have spent any time looking for practical, student-friendly content online, you know how rare it is to find something that is both high-quality and immediately usable in a band classroom. That’s why I’ve decided to highlight this incredible FREE resource

There’s a lot being said about Generative AI right now, and if you’re a music teacher, it can feel like you’re being told you need to figure it all out immediately. Most of the conversations I hear are either too technical or too abstract to be useful in a real classroom. That’s why I created my new course, AI in Music Education: An Overview of GenAI for Music Teacher, on the newly relaunched MusicFirst Academy. It’s an online, asynchronous course with 5 ½ hours of video content that I created just for music teachers. I didn’t design this course for tech experts, so you won’t find lots of confusing jargon and boring code-speak. I designed it for music teachers who are curious, and maybe a little skeptical, and want to understand what this actually means for their students and their teaching. The focus of this course is simple. What is AI, what can it do, and how can it help you?

Today I am SO proud to announce the relaunch of the MusicFirst Academy. We originally created this online professional development site for music teachers about 10 years ago, and with this relaunch, we are taking a BIG step forward in how music teachers can access meaningful, practical professional development. We brought on an amazing music educator, customer success expert and experienced online learning designer, Dr. Giovanna Cruz Pifano, this past Fall, and she has been building this amazing new platform ever since. It is built on the same philosophy that drives MusicFirst - tools created by music educators for music educators. The MusicFirst Academy focuses on helping teachers improve what they do every day in the classroom, not just explore ideas in theory. There are numerous courses on the various software titles we offer through the MusicFirst Classroom, as well as a course that I authored on Generative AI. Most of our courses are FREE! Many more courses are in the works, and we hope to become the go-to online platform for all aspects of music education.

Each April, Jazz Appreciation Month gives us a chance to introduce students to a style of truly American music that is rich with creativity, history, and personality. With music students in particular, the challenge is making that history feel real and engaging. One resource that can help do exactly that is the Jazz Map by Village Preservation. Believe it or not, I found out about this wonderful resource on my TV local news. After clicking through the map and finding out lots of new things about the city I’ve grown up in, I think its a great resource for all music teachers and their students.

Sometimes the simplest tools are also the most useful. Perhaps the single most impactful thing that I ever did with my band students was to record them. Whenever I recorded a snippet of a rehearsal and then played it back for them, it was the easiest way to demonstrate things like balance, intonation, blend, tone, and more. I once took a lesson from the beloved tuba player, Sam Pilafian. At that lesson, Sam told me that the single most important thing that I could do to improve as a tuba player was to record myself. He took nearly the entire hour of my lesson to explain why it was so important. If you ever want to be instantly humbled as a musician - record yourself and listen back to it. For those of you who have, am I right? When dealing with students, the same principle applies. That’s why I designed a built-in audio recorder into every MusicFirst Classroom subscription. It is a very simple interface, and students can access and record into it at any time. To access the recorder, simply click on the Software tab at the top of any MusicFirst Classroom subscription, and select MusicFirst Recorder.

I recently read an article in the The New York Times article on “Chromebook remorse,” and it reinforces something that I’ve been predicting for a while one. The article - titled “Chromebook Remorse: Tech Backlash at Schools Extends Beyond Phones” written by Natasha Singer, illustrates that while schools are not abandoning technology, they are starting to rethink how often and in what ways it is used. Instead of devices being open and available all the time, many classrooms are shifting toward a more deliberate approach in which technology is used only when it directly supports the learning goal.

About a month ago, a good friend of mine asked whether I had checked out the new Claude Chrome Extension. He was so enthusiastic about it, I knew I had to check it out. I went to the Chrome Web Store and immediately downloaded and installed it. This extension is a perfect example of Agentic AI - the type of GenAI tool that helps you do tasks that you may not want to do. It does require a paid Claude account, which will cost you $20/month, so read on before you enter your credit card details. To get started, here’s a great video that demonstrates everything that the Claude Chrome extension can do. Brace yourself.

If you’ve been following the headlines lately, you’ve probably seen a shift in how people are talking about social media. With the recent lawsuits that revolve around Meta, TikTok, SnapChat and YouTube knowingly investing in and creating features that keep young students addicted to their products, I think it’s an important inflection point for all educational technologies used in schools. What used to be framed as engaging or fun is now being described in courtrooms and legislation as something far more concerning: addictive by design. These recent lawsuits have focused on design elements like infinite scroll and autoplay, features that were intentionally built to keep users on the platform for as long as possible . And now, the flood gates are open. Thousands of similar lawsuits are now in motion, and lawmakers are beginning to require warning labels for platforms that use these kinds of “predatory” features with minors . On a personal note, I couldn’t be happier about this turn of events. I know that I am addicted to my phone, and so is everyone else in my family. If you teach children, you know that they are too. I am SO thankful that my own children grew spent their first few years device free. It makes me so sad to see kids everywhere I go with their eyes glued to screens. I believe that this moment really matters for educators. But more importantly, it gives us a chance to step back and ask a simple question: What should educational technology be designed to do?

Yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times about how the New York City Public Schools are guiding teachers on how to properly utilize AI tools in their classrooms - the first guidance from the NYC DOE - modeled after other large urban school districts across the country - including Chicago and Denver. NYC teachers are being encouraged to use AI only to generate lesson ideas, support research, and even help draft classroom materials, but it cannot be used to grade student work or handle discipline. I think that this is a really important line in the sand, and frankly, I couldn’t agree more with that guidance. For the last few years, the conversation around AI in education has swung between two extremes. On one side, some startups and venture capitalists are extolling that AI is the future of everything. On the other side, it’s something to block, ban, or fear. What New York City is doing instead is much more practical. They are treating AI as a tool for teachers, not a replacement for teachers. And in my opinion, that’s exactly how music educators should be thinking about it.

Today I am thrilled to announce that we launched one of the most all-time requested features in the MusicFirst Classroom last week - the Assessment Library. This new feature allows teachers to save and pull questions from a question bank - something we’ve called the Assessment Library. That means that rather than writing new questions from scratch every time OR re-using a previous assessment, you’ll be able to pull any questions from the library into your new assessment - saving you TONS of time. To access this new feature, click on the Grading tab from the left menu, and then select Assessment Library. Once there you can Create a new assessment template and add questions to it. After you’ve saved that assessment, the full assessment and/or the individual questions will be available in the Assessment Library to use in any future assessment you create.

For the past few weeks, I have been authoring a new course for the soon to be relaunched MusicFirst Academy. This new course is titled AI in the Music Classroom: GenAI for Music Teachers. It has been a HUGE amount of work, but I think that the music educators who sign up for it will gain a deep understanding of the many ways that GenAI can be utilized in and out of the music classroom. As part of the research that I did for the construction of the course, I discovered that Suno - one of the GenAI music creation tools that you’ve probably read about in the news - added a digital audio workstation (DAW) back in September of 2025. At first glance, it seems very similar to the AI Studio feature found in Moises- allowing users to record ideas and integrate their prompt-based music creations with their own recorded ideas. If you already use a DAW - like Soundtrap, YuStudio, Logic Pro, GarageBand or Ableton, you already understand the basic workflow. What makes Suno Studio different is that it combines the Sunowe already knew - an AI-powered music creation platform that allows users to generate full songs with vocals, lyrics, and instrumentation simply by typing a prompt - with a more familiar production environment, including multitrack editing, stem separation, and even MIDI export. Before diving in any further, I want to fully disclose that I have not upgraded my own free Suno account to kick the tires myself. No way am I going to pay $24 a month to a company that literally steals music from creators and then fails to give them credit. Sorry not sorry. To create this review of this new product, I simply did a lot of reading and watching tutorial videos. I haven’t used it myself. Here’s one of those videos:

Technology has become a constant presence in modern classrooms. Devices are everywhere. Students read on screens, watch videos, complete assignments online, and often move from one digital platform to another throughout the day. For years, the assumption behind this shift has been simple. More technology means better learning. Two recent pieces of writing challenge that assumption in important ways, and as an academic at heart, I LOVE reading books and articles like this. It is SO important to challenge norms in schools to ensure that the students in our classrooms are getting the best possible education they can. One of those books, which I recently read cover to cover, is Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath’s book The Digital Delusion. The other is a recent New York Times article about growing concern among parents over the amount of screen time students experience during the school day. Together they raise a fundamental question for educators. If technology is so widespread in schools, is it actually helping students learn? Have we reached the ed tech tipping point - one where the benefits are outweighed by the drawbacks?

As any teacher knows, March 14th of each school year is known as “Pi Day”, relating to the first three digits of Pi. The number Pi (π) if you recall from your math classes in school, is a mathematical constant, approximately equal to 3.14159, that is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. When I was teaching, I didn’t want to be left out of the Pi Day celebrations. Because music and mathematics are so closely related in many ways, I always did some type of creative music making activity on March 14th. I have posted one of those lesson ideas that I blogged about a few years ago. As Pi Day is on a Saturday this year, I thought I would post a few more lesson ideas that you can do with your students. The concepts are pretty straightforward. Using π (Pi) to generate music is a great cross-curricular activity that blends math, creativity, and technology. It works especially well with middle and high school students because it gives them a rule-based system for composing, which removes the “blank page” problem. Below are five lesson ideas that could work well in a music classroom, especially with notation tools like Flat or DAWs like Soundtrap and YuStudio. I hope you find the useful!

A friend of mine sent me the video above a few days ago. He knows that I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to how computers can help enhance music education. The video is from 1986 and it shows a teacher using a computer connected to a synthesizer to help students compose music at a typical middle school in the UK. It is a wonderful time capsule, and illustrates how a teacher could integrate a single computer into a music lesson. When I first started using tech in my music classroom, I had one computer and no way of projecting it. I love how the video demonstrates how students can experiment with sounds, build musical ideas, and hear their compositions instantly played back by even the most primitive music software. At the time this was revolutionary. The computer even boasts “46 prerecorded sounds of its own,” which seemed impressive enough to warrant mention on the BBC. Watching it today, forty years later, it is hard not to smile. The technology looks primitive. The screen graphics are basic. The sounds are limited. And yet the educational ideas behind the demonstration are remarkably modern. The core concept is simple. Technology can remove barriers so students can focus on musical creativity.

For the last ten years, Soundtrap has been one of the most accessible ways for students and creators to make music online. The browser based digital audio workstation (DAW) makes it possible to record vocals, build beats, and collaborate with others without installing complicated software - all running in the browser. MusicFirst is very proud to be a Soundtrap partner, bringing this amazing software to tens of thousands of music teachers and students around the world. Yesterday, I saw a post from them announcing that they had released the newest version of their software. I immediately launched it from the MusicFirst Classroom, and I have to say - this new release is really impressive. It feels like a genuine glow up. The platform looks cleaner, works faster, and introduces several features that make producing music easier for beginners while still offering depth for more experienced creators. If you already use Soundtrap with students, or if you have been curious about browser based music production tools, the new version is worth another look.

When you first land on the Wind Repertory Project website you might not know exactly what to expect. As I like to say, it does exactly what it says on the tin. What you find on the site is a carefully constructed resource, built over many years by directors, educators, and conductors for exactly the person who is reading my post today: the band director. The Wind Repertory Project exists as a living database of wind literature and ensemble music, and it stands alongside resources like ChoralWiki, BandMusicPDF and Musopen as one of the most substantial online repositories dedicated to music for winds and percussion. The purpose of this website/project is simple. It helps users gather and organize information about compositions written for wind band and wind ensemble. For every band director who has spent hours hunting for reliable instrumentation details, program notes, instrument breakdowns, or performance history, the site answers a real professional need. The idea for the site started from a dissertation by Dr. Nikk Pilato, who currently serves as Director of Bands at Northern Kentucky University’s School of the Arts. The goal of the site is not to replace your library or publisher resources but to give you something different: broadened context and easily searchable knowledge about repertoire that matters to your program. In my opinion, it is the perfect resource to use alongside your sheet music provider. Find it on this site, buy it from whoever you usually purchase your music from.

If you have been following the rapid evolution of AI music tools, you already know that the landscape is shifting almost monthly. New platforms appear, features expand, and policies change. For music educators, the real question is not which tool is “best,” but how each one works and what kind of musical thinking it encourages. A few months ago I signed up to a waiting list for access to the newest of these tools - this one from Google - called Producer.ai. I finally got in over the weekend, and I must say - it’s really impressive - not only from a feature perspective, but also from the output. Producer.ai has a particularly unique design philosophy. To understand it clearly, it helps to compare it with other well-known generative music platforms such as Suno and Udio. All three allow users to generate music from prompts. All three can produce surprisingly polished results. But the differences in workflow, control, types of output and classroom implications are what sets it apart for me.