Thomas J. West Music

There are a lot of very clever pieces of humor circulating social media right now about the Occupy Wall Street protests.  The image on this blog post was one I collected from Facebook this morning. It lampoons the #OWS slogan by stating a similarity in clas...

As part of a sequential curriculum in music education, my instrumental music performance students continually learn and practice written music notation. This begins with rote scale and arpeggio study (letter names before notation, learned in circle of fifths order), combined with improvisation on the pentatonic scale.

This year, I purchased Noteflight Classroom for my school as part of my professional development goal to create a fully

I often am contacted by website owners who ask me to share their articles with my readership. This particular article is quite appropriate, as it illustrates a modern application of masterful music composition. Take a moment to review 10 Most Masterful Mo...

This past week, a few things happened that created the perfect storm for some original creativity on my part. First, I opened a SoundCloud account. Second, I bought myself a Blue Snowball USB microphone. that combined with Mixcraft5 has led to some original a cappella samples. The new music is embedded on my Compositions page...

Over this past school year, I have been making a concerted effort to incorporate more music improvisation and composition into the curriculum of my performing music ensembles. Musical creativity is an often-neglected part of traditional public school performing programs because 95% of available class time is spent learning and mastering music for the next publ...

Now that my spring concert is over, my students are spending the remaining time in the final marking period in some really powerful (and essential) musicianship-building activities. We are beginning each class with drills on scales and tonic triad arpeggios. My middle scool students are performing from Ab major through E major for strings, ...

Contemporary a cappella singing is a hobby of mine. I was weaned on barbershop quartet music - my dad was involved with SPEBSQSA (now the Barbershop Harmony Society) as a singer, arranger, judge, and coach long before I was around. When I went to college, I sang in a 50's doo wop group that, during my ...

Since January 1st, 2008, Parry Gripp has been writing and performing one (sometimes two) songs a week and posting them on Parry Gripp dot com. He is the epitome of what I like to call the "21st Century Artist".  With the ability for any person to reach a...