RFH Teacher in Published Music Magazine

A message from Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School:

Bill Grillo, ’s Instrumental music teacher, was published in the January 2012 issue of TEMPO, the New Jersey Music Educators Association professional journal.

His article focused on recording technologies and how to synthesize musical concepts in performance, strengthening their music skills with technology as the means. 

An avid composer and performer himself, Mr. Grillo has brought his love of recording and skilled knowledge to students in his Songwriting and Recording class, but insists that performance be the goal for the students. Ultimately, using performance to assess the students “is authentic and promotes musicality” of the students – exactly what music classes are about, says Grillo.  His program at RFH embeds music theory and recording technology in a class where the students first write their music (all genres are explored) and then they use the recording technologies to best create an artifact of that performance.

Grillo’s TEMPO article shares a number of lesson ideas with the music teaching community for establishing a solid relationship between the music and the recording technology, keeping the goals creative and skill-based simultaneously.  He introduces cross-disciplinary ideas as well as projects grounded in the principles of music. Mr. Grillo’s aim was to avoid the pitfalls of music technology courses that may default “to just sticking a kid in front of a computer and figuring out how to use a computer program”. He went on to say that “students are intuitive and most can figure out how to interface with a new piece of software. What can be lost is the reason they are recording, that the music is there first.”

Bill Grillo’s article in TEMPO magazine can be viewed by all online:  http://issuu.com/njmea/docs/january2012tempo