Disabilities and Music

Hey all, I wanted to take a moment to talk about something I do that I think is fairly unique and how it can be applied beyond my specific instance. As a quick refresher, I teach a class called Beethoven's Buddies Clementi's Colorful Chimes Class (BB Chimes). In this class, kids play hand chimes that typically look like this. However, mine look like this What are those colors for you ask? Well I use the colors to help students recognize their note in relation to that color. For further example. My "scores" look something like this.  There are a couple things to notice beyond just the colors, so lets get those out of the way. First is the fact that the time signature is notated as a number over a quarter note instead of another number. This means of notation is common enough that we don't need to spend too much time on it. Next is the use of numbers inside of the colored Quarter Notes. The numbers directly correspond with the octave numbers ...

I want to take a moment to talk about something that has been extremely important to me. As you might be able to tell from the title, it is about the importance of setting a schedule and sticking to it. The reason that I have found a schedule so wonderful is that it honestly is liberating. It has been one of the toughest things in life for me to schedule gigs and lessons and events etc. This has actually lost me gigs and connections. I didn't respond fast enough, not because I missed the note, but because I simply did not want to schedule that far in advance. I was afraid I would say yes to one thing and miss out on something else that would be "better". As you can probably tell.... THIS IS NOT A WAY TO LIVE A FREELANCING LIFE. in fact, it has definitely burned me and kept me from being a freelancer like I so desire. Luckily, I am on my way to growing into freelancing and teaching. Honestly though, what has really pushed me to do this has been saying yes to g...