Power of Music Debut
Oct 27th, 2014
I am proud to announce that The Power of Music, a project I’ve been working on since June, has finally launched.
The Power of Music is an eight-part, multimedia, professional development course for music educators. The video series and website provide an introduction to El Sistema, the pioneering approach to music education and illuminate the ways it’s being adapted for teaching music in the U.S.
The website was developed for WNET/Thirteen public television with support from the Annenberg foundation. It features over 45 videos and 3 interactive applications. The website’s graphic design was done by Michael Pinto of vm.com with additional graphics by Gwen Singley.
About El Sistema
Founded in 1975 by Dr. José Antonio Abreu in Venezuela, El Sistema has been described as a movement of music education for social change. Ideas of community and citizenship are central to El Sistema-inspired teaching. Students progress through peer to peer learning in ensembles and orchestras. [ Video: How to make a paper violin ].
About the k5music website project
The Power of Music is a static HTML website generated from an instance of WordPress I built on my development server. This enabled Thirteen’s content producers to compose and edit pages, upload and manage images and video easily. I used the Blankslate boilerplate theme which made it easy to modify the design to accommodate the content as the team became familiar with it.
To export the site to Annenberg’s webserver, Learner.org, I wrote a series of custom unix shell scripts that grabbed the generated pages, munged the URLs and added include commands that generate the common header and footer sections.
This website was a joy to build. The people at WNET/Thirteen were wonderful to work with and the content they created was inspiring.
