Huntingdonshire Music School Association - Learn

Welcome to the Huntingdonshire Music School and Huntingdonshire Music School Association (HUMSA) - one of the Internet’s best kept secrets!

Whilst we may not brag very much, the school is very much a place of musical excellence where adults and children can learn an instrument and play with others in a relaxed and friendly setting.

We have an ‘open door’ policy so why not come in to see us on a Saturday morning and see what a few hundred people get up to in the name of music. We can’t promise that it will make you more attractive to the opposite sex or provide superhuman powers. We can, however, promise you fun and the ability to take up something that might very well change your life.

Sit back, relax and explore…

• Instruments Taught
• Groups, Ensembles & Orchestras
• A Typical Saturday Morning
• Travel with us and have fun

A snippet of the calendar

Taster Day, Saturday 23rd May

The music school are holding a taster day on Saturday 23rd May between 09:00 to 13:00 at the Huntingdonshire Regional College in Huntingdon.

Come and find out what happens. Have a try on various instruments and see if we can [pair you up with one. Ever fancied trying and instrument but never quite summoned up the courage? Don’t be put off - don’t let age or anything else stop you - just come and have a chat.

There will be lots of students of all ages and teachers to talk to you. You can listen to a band rehearsing (we’ll be practising for our Norfolk tour this summer). You can find out about the different ways of begging, borrowing, leasing or buying an instrument (and we should have some local suppliers on hand to provide expert advice). Come and see what we get up to when we’re not in the college - either by way of performing outside (e.g. 14th June at the Riverside Park in Huntingdon between 14:30 and 16:30) or travelling elsewhere.

It’s good fun, it’s very sociable and you’re never too old or too young to have a go.

Don’t put it off. This isn’t a dress rehearsal and it’s no good wondering ‘what if’ later on!

Encouragement

• BBC Play It Again - where famous celebrities, not exactly in their first flush of youth, learned to play an instrument and performed in the public eye
• Fun education site - good guide to instruments and learning music

The Open University (OU) was started in 1969 as a distance learning university with an open-access policy. Something around 180,000 students are enrolled.

Over the years it has developed in many ways and makes use of all the modern electrickery, string and technology in order to deliver education courses and content to anyone anywhere in the world.

A lot of the courses are paid-for but recently some free to learn options have been developed, including OpenLearn.

What is OpenLearn-ing?

OpenLearn is online learning that is open to anyone, anywhere in the world using materials taken from Open University courses. And it is completely free to use! Instead of attending classes, you study online in the LearningSpace, using materials that have been specially designed for distance learning.

OpenLearn does not:

• require you to be or become an Open University student grant degrees or award credits
• provide access to the services available to students registered on Open University courses, such as tutorial support

If you are interested in becoming an Open University student you might want to visit New to the OU.

OpenLearn is an opportunity for informal study – in your own time access materials in areas familiar or new to you, without the pressure of keeping to a timetable or sitting exams. Instead, assess your own progress by keeping an online learning journal, discussing the topics with other online learners in forums and completing self assessment exercises where you control when the answer is revealed. While OpenLearn isn’t exactly the same as studying at University, it gives real learning experiences taken from degree courses – and for free!

The sorts of courses relating to music include:-

• Creating Musical Sounds How do different instruments produce the sounds we classify as music? How do we decide whether something – a piano, a vacuum cleaner – is actually a musical instrument?
• Sound for Music Technology - An Introduction Whether you’re a professional musician, play music with your friends on the weekends or just like to listen to CDs, music technology affects your life. In this unit, you will learn some of the basics of music technology, starting with what sound ...
• Voice-Leading Analysis of Music 1: the foreground This unit introduces 'voice-leading' or 'Schenkerian' analysis, perhaps the most widely-used and discussed method of analysing tonal music. In this unit, this method is explained through the analysis of piano sonatas by Mozart. The unit ...

If anyone has any experience of these courses we’d be interested to know what they’re like - interesting? Useful? Any particular ones to be recommended?

Reference

• Open University - Wikipedia
• History of the OU - Open University