Hello Everyone!

Since I'm a bit late to class so to speak, I wanted to introduce myself to you all. For those of you who haven't met me yet, my name is Will Stackpole and I'll be the teaching assistant for HMU310. What this means essentially is that I'll be acting as the moderator for our blog. A bit about me: I graduated from Stevens in 2012 with a BA in Music & Technology. I'm a guitarist originally but have been addicted to composition since my sophomore year of college. My interest for the most part during college and since has been in composition of orchestral and chamber music. Since Stevens, I have worked as a commercial composer for television and theater and am now back in school pursuing an MM in classical composition.

 My goal over the course of the semester is to initiate and catalyze our conversations about your compositions and assignments as you upload them. I'm really excited to see the sorts of things you all come up with. I know sometimes assignments can seem like just an exercise in understanding form or something else, but I hope that everyone can still take advantage of the opportunity to create something unique and well-crafted in this context. I'm also hoping to share things I come across in my travels that you all will find interesting/ relevant and maybe even share a little of what I'm working on.

 As I mentioned before, I'm really hoping this can be more like a conversation than simply a series of responses to your submissions, so please do reply if you have something to share or add! Feedback between peers is always a good idea (as long as we remember to keep it positive and constructive). Since this is formatted as a blog, it would be great if everyone could subscribe to it so that you receive alerts when a new post is created. This way we can actually communicate in somewhat real time instead of just seeing a giant pile of new posts once a week when things get uploaded. You should be able to sign up for email alerts and/ or add the rss feed to Feedly or another reader like that.

 Some quick house keeping: please make the links in your posts clickable; it'll be much more accessible for everyone if we don't have to copy/paste a link. Also, I've been thinking of making a soundcloud account for the class that we can all link to instead of streaming from google drive and taking up your precious cloud storage. What do you think? Would that be at all easier for you? Let me know in the comments!

(I'm sorry this has turned into a book. Future posts will be more succinct, I promise!)

 Finally, if any of you have any questions during the semester please feel free to contact me via the blog or email me (willstackpole@gmail.com).