Welcome Back!
NEW LOOK!
Welcome back! I am so excited about this newly designed website (AND BRANDING!) for our studio. Laura Viola Maccarone, piano mother and Owner/Creative Director of Rizbee Design Studio, did everything from creating a mood board (designing the identity) to setting up the wireframe and moving over hundreds of student recordings from their former recording pages on WordPress to this current website using Squarespace. For the first time, I will be able to host web pages that incorporate my conference lecture and publishing work. We also now have a place to share music that has come from our collaboration with studios and composers from around the world. I am thrilled that this website will be more functional for all users, whether you want to contact the studio for lessons or inquire about professional presentations for educational speaking engagements. It will also be great for our current students and families, letting them keep up with all the creative music projects produced by our innovative students.
We are a project-based studio. Every year, with input from students, I choose a unifying theme that begins in September and ends in June. Our work, whether it is in music theory, music history, or new music and performing, relate in some way back to the major theme of the year. The most important part of the annual project each year is our Practice for Fundraising. Students find a sponsor for several pennies per minute of practice time, and we keep track over a 6-week period. We always surprise ourselves with how much money we raise through practicing for a cause related to our music. This fundraising project gives our students “agency”, or the ability to use their music studies to make our world a better place. Our studio motto, “Changing the World One Key at a Time”, sums up how we think about our music. Here, music is alive, current, relevant, and communicative. Our students love it! Our project theme for the 2021-2022 studio year is “From Bach to Black*: Rediscovering Underrepresented Music by Composers of Color”. It is my hope that our students will learn that through the centuries, Black composers have written music and continue to do so, in all genres.
*I am quoting Rochelle Sennet who gave a wonderful presentation at NCKP, 2021.