Henric Lindström, Moderator
5:00 - Harmonies of Heart: Encouraging Jazz and Pop Student Acts for Senior Care Facilities
5:30 - Mitigating the Brazilian Imperceptible Weakness: The Music and Entertainment Business Education and Research Center
Harmonies of Heart: Encouraging Jazz and Pop Student Acts for Senior Care Facilities Brian Wansink, Cornell University (retired)Background:
A few years ago, an old friend had to move to a memory unit in a no-frills retirement home. This rural retirement home didn’t have the budget to have musical programming, so every couple weeks I would visit and take one of my teen daughters to play a song or two for him on the cello or flute. Before long, they had expanded this to performing background dinner music for the whole facility, and then to other no-frills retirement homes. In helping them do this, we also learned a lot about set lists, gear, crowd interaction, set up, and performance – skills that would be useful to a wide range of student musicians who want out-of-school entertainment experience.
Presentation Objectives: The objective for this presentation is to present ideas that MEIEA educators can adapt to encourage students – soloists or combos of any genre of music – to share their music with seniors in a way that brings joy to everyone. This will provide educators with the following:
- The rationale as to why a student should consider such a stretch
- Insights on helping them build solo acts or combos for most genres
- Sample letters and scripts on how to approach senior care facilities
- One-page tip sheets for set up, performance, and crowd interaction
Rationale: First, there is a need for music in memory care units – and retirement homes in general – it breaks monotony, sparks memories, builds community, and brings joy. This is especially true with the facilities that do not otherwise have a budget for music or programming. When I mentioned my old friend in memory unit, only two things made his face brighten up: ice cream and music. Second, guiding student solo acts or combos to perform in these retirement homes will help them become better prepared for the performance industry. They should become comfortable at performing different music in different situations and to bring happiness or joy to others when they play. This is a tremendous “feel good” way for a young person to grow as a musician and as a caring person.
Mitigating the Brazilian Imperceptible Weakness: The Music and Entertainment Business Education and Research Center Fábio Sabetta-Morales, Souza Lima College-Conservatory of Music (São Paulo, SP, Brazil)Recent research focused on cultural and creative industries (CCI) provides evidence that knowledge ecosystems will lead to business ecosystems through which individuals, groups and organizations will be mutually complementary and will realize competitive advantage. As argued by the literature, a local CCI Knowledge Ecosystem must consider three different but complementary dimensions of knowledge: symbolic, synthetic and analytical. First, the symbolic knowledge is based on cultural value and on contextual conditions as cultural identity and community belonging. From cultural value derive social and economic values that must be capable of promoting legacy, well-being, join and sustainable economic development in the long term. Second, the synthetic knowledge is generated with low or no investment in research, through new uses of available technologies, focused on the development of solutions applied to everyday market issues, often in a collaborative way. In this sense, bricolage and the entrepreneurial lifestyle emerged as social mechanisms for disseminating knowledge, alongside cultural and creative management models conceived by private organizations as their own collective capability. Finally, the analytical knowledge, provided by research and formal education, which has been highlighted in the context of technology hotspots. In fact, there are evidence that creative clusters are solid where public policy nurtures the development of analytical knowledge as a contextual capability. Further, as one of the three CCI Knowledge Ecosystem components, analytical knowledge leads to business ecosystems as well as promotes innovation and increases the visibility of creative sectors and organizations for financial support mechanisms.
Using case study as its research method, this paper aims to report and discuss one recent educational project that has been developed to mitigate the so-called imperceptible weakness of analytical knowledge and, consequently, of the Knowledge Ecosystem in the Brazilian music industries. The first section is an exposition of the current context of the music industries in Brazil in terms of identity, community, education, technology, market and financial support. The second section argues about existent social mechanisms in terms of the individual and collective levels and sheds light to the lack of music and entertainment business education. The third section provides comparisons of context and social mechanisms between Brazil and other countries. Based on the inductive method, the fourth section refers to the research methodology, with the application of a questionnaire related to the Knowledge Ecosystem in the Brazilian music industries for data collection, and content analysis and multivariate statistics to bring out the study results. The fifth section presents the design, development and implementation of the Music and Entertainment Business Education and Research Center (MEBE Center) at the Souza Lima College Music in the city of São Paulo, SP, Brazil, the first initiative of its kind in the whole country. The last section brings relevant discussion about this research and the MEBE Center.
