Music Copyright Lesson

Last week I presented a lesson on music copyright to my classmates at UB. I also gave myself the opportunity to teach this lesson to my Jazz Band students at school the same day. I think overall, they both went about the same way. There were some good moments and outcomes but it was basically uninteresting and definitely not my best work.

My first thought when I was assigned the topic was, "are you kidding? I don't even know anything about copyright... And, how am I going to make that a hands-on, engaging learning experience?" First of all, I knew more than enough about copyright to teach a basic lesson, and I don't think I stretched enough creatively to make the lesson engaging.

For the future, I don't think my objective(s) would change (students have an understanding of what copyright is, and how it protects artists), but the approach would definitely. I spoke way too much... I had some visuals and hands-on items for the students to see copyright logos, I played a fun example of Vanilla Ice back to back with Queen/Bowie's "Under Pressure" using Who Sampled and had the students become a jury to decide whether or not Vanilla was guilty... Need I say, it was a unanimous vote.

In my Jazz Band classroom, the best outcome was that the students were getting excited about recent lawsuits, and asking questions to the class while googling for results (Is it OK to use someone's name in a song title? What if you didn't realize that you stole a song?) - I was happy with this, but I'm not certain that the students know any more than they did prior.

In revising this lesson, I want to get students creating. Perhaps I can have them write a short musical composition and "steal" a student's work, write it on the board and say how proud I am to have written it. I hope that kid would call me out - no kid wants to be copied from! Maybe that would catch their attention... Maybe this lesson wouldn't necessarily deal with a hands-on musical approach, but something with copying in general. I think getting the kids fired up about it could be risky, but powerful and engaging.