Portraits of the Passion

SKU: HL.35031862

ISBN 9781540006769. UPC: 888680713317. 5.0x5.0x0.077 inches.

Portraits in Grace is a musical gallery of faith displaying the life, ministry and passion of Jesus. Through scripture, narration and song, the backdrop is created for the reflections of the Lenten season, particularly during Holy Week. As the cantata moves through Christ's extraordinary life, each song displays the sacred beauty of the Savior, and lingers with His many graceful acts of love. The work ends with Christ's death on the cross and the bittersweet beauty of this redemptive gift to the world. With options that include the visual arts, the presentation can be expanded to include more members of your congregation, taking the cantata beyond the loft. A small consort of instruments is available, as well. Songs include: Prelude; Portrait; Fairest Lord Jesus; The Healer; Behold the King; We Remember; A Sacred Garden; Let Us Gather in the Shadow of the Cross; Portrait of the Cross, Recessional of Shadows. Score and Parts (fl, cl, hn, hp, pno, vn, vc) available as a Printed Editional and as a digital download.

SKU: GI.G-10452

ISBN 9781622775576.

Contributors: Jill Gagliardi, Elise Hackl, Meghan Hickey, Mary Jensen, Jessica Kwasny, Andrew M. Ladendorf, Brandon Larsen, Sandra Lewis, Darlene Machacon, Rachel Manchur, Bobby Olson, Michael J. West, and William Winters This book showcases the inspiring stories and innovative ideas of music educators who are implementing Social Emotional Learning (SEL) instruction with intentionality in their classrooms at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. By utilizing and adapting materials in Scott N. Edgar’s pioneering first book, Music Education and Social Emotional Learning, these teachers—representing all areas of music education—share their real-world challenges and triumphs with SEL instruction, along with many tips, activities, lesson plans, and suggestions for embedding SEL in a way that is musical, intentional, and meaningful. Importantly, Portraits of Music Education and Social Emotional Learning approaches SEL from a culturally relevant and equitable lens, accounting for the ways in which SEL instruction interacts with culture, race, background, and uniqueness, therefore making it a powerful tool for embracing social justice and student empowerment. At its core, SEL gives students the ability to have difficult conversations, cope with stress, and navigate challenges. And while each teacher presents their unique approach to SEL, they come to the same conclusion: SEL is critical to the success of their students and programs. Scott N. Edgar is Associate Professor of Music at Lake Forest College. He is the author of Music Education and Social Emotional Learning: The Heart of Teaching Music and is an internationally sought-after clinician on the topic. Dr. Edgar serves as Director of Practice and Research for The Center for Arts Education and Social Emotional Learning (www.artsedsel.org). Dr. Edgar is a Music for All Educational Consultant, a Conn-Selmer Educational Clinician, and VH1 Save the Music Foundation Educational Consultant.   Finally, the go-to book for music educators who have intuitively and intentionally created classrooms where music and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) are seamlessly aligned. These practical ideas of how to teach music at all levels, grounded in the practices of SEL, will inspire all educators to not only teach from the heart, but to lead with empathy and compassion. —Pamela Randall-Garner, Ed.D.     Senior Staff Advisor     CASEL: Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning   This book is a must-read as well as a compelling study. Wisely, Dr. Scott Edgar brought together an amazing group of remarkable educators who share their own experiences as they avail their students to the immeasurable value of the Social Emotional Learning landscape. Be prepared to be challenged, educated, and enlightened. You have in your hands a rare gift bearing benefits to everyone traversing the educational highway. We are all indebted to this great team of first-class authors and educators. BRAVO! —Tim Lautzenheiser In this new publication, Scott Edgar continues to provide teachers with rich insights and practical suggestions for understanding and implementing Social Emotional Learning (SEL) into music education classes, from elementary through high school grades. Practicing music educators share pragmatic ideas for successful embedding of SEL into their teaching. A must-read for any music teacher wishing to better understand and promote well-being in their students. —John M. Feierabend.

SKU: PR.11441690S

UPC: 680160626021. 9 x 12 inches.

Ran's third string quartet was written for the Pacifica Quartet, who are featuring it in numerous performances from May 2014 through February 2016, across the country and abroad. Their blog page dedicated to the work also features the composer's notes, for more indepth insight. ...impassioned solos emerge from ominous quiet, and high arpeggios in the violins quiver alongside the earthy cello. Ms. Ran skillfully deploys these extremes of color, volume and pitch, yet the overall somewhat chilly impression is one of poise. -- Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times.
My third string quartet was composed at the invitation of the Pacifica Quartet, whose music-making I have come to know closely and admire hugely as resident artists at the University of Chicago.  Already in our early conversations Pacifica proposed that this quartet might, in some manner, refer to the visual arts as a point of germination.  Probing further, I found out that the quartet members had special interest in art created during the earlier part of the 20th century, perhaps between the two world wars.  It was my good fortune to have met, a short while later, while in residence at the American Academy in Rome in the fall of 2011, art conservationist Albert Albano who steered me to the work of Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944), a German-Jewish painter who, like so many others, perished in the Holocaust at a young age, and who left some powerful, deeply moving art that spoke to the life that was unraveling around him. The title of my string quartet takes its inspiration from a major exhibit devoted to art by German artists of the period of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) titled “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s”, first shown at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006-07.  Nussbaum would have been a bit too young to be included in this exhibit.  His most noteworthy art was created in the last very few years of his short life.  The exhibit’s evocative title, however, suggested to me the idea of “Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory” as a way of framing a possible musical composition that would be an homage to his life and art, and to that of so many others like him during that era.  Knowing that their days were numbered, yet intent on leaving a mark, a legacy, a memory, their art is triumph of the human spirit over annihilation. Parallel to my wish to compose a string quartet that, typically for this genre, would exist as “pure music”, independent of a narrative, was my desire to effect an awareness in my listener of matters which are, to me, of great human concern.  To my mind there is no contradiction between the two goals.  As in several other works composed since 1969, this is my way of saying ‘do not forget’, something that, I believe, can be done through music with special power and poignancy.    The individual titles of the quartet’s four movements give an indication of some of the emotional strands this work explores. 1) “That which happened” (das was geschah) – is how the poet Paul Celan referred to the Shoah – the Holocaust.  These simple words served for me, in the first movement, as a metaphor for the way in which an “ordinary” life, with its daily flow and its sense of sweet normalcy, was shockingly, inhumanely, inexplicably shattered. 2) “Menace” is a shorter movement, mimicking a Scherzo.  It is also machine-like, incessant, with an occasional, recurring, waltz-like little tune – perhaps the chilling grimace we recognize from the executioner’s guillotine mask.  Like the death machine it alludes to, it gathers momentum as it goes, and is unstoppable. 3) ”If I must perish - do not let my paintings die”; these words are by Felix Nussbaum who, knowing what was ahead, nonetheless continued painting till his death in Auschwitz in 1944.  If the heart of the first movement is the shuddering interruption of life as we know it, the third movement tries to capture something of what I can only imagine to be the conflicting states of mind that would have made it possible, and essential, to continue to live and practice one’s art – bearing witness to the events.  Creating must have been, for Nussbaum and for so many others, a way of maintaining sanity, both a struggle and a catharsis – an act of defiance and salvation all at the same time. 4) “Shards, Memory” is a direct reference to my quartet’s title.  Only shards are left.  And memory.  The memory is of things large and small, of unspeakable tragedy, but also of the song and the dance, the smile, the hopes.  All things human.  As we remember, in the face of death’s silence, we restore dignity to those who are gone.—Shulamit Ran .