Dr. Steve Bingham Sends a Message from Music Conference in Greece

July 19, 2012

Hello everyone,

This email is coming to you all from Thessaloniki, Greece where I am attending the 30th Bi-annual International Society of Music Educators conference. Santa Fe College has been well represented here due to the fact that I have once again partnered with Dr. Don DeVito from Sidney Lanier Center for the physically and emotionally challenged student.

Dr. DeVito was invited to bring his students to three events held by Santa Fe College last year and his students played at those events with the Santa Fe Big Band. We used the three performances to help prepare Dr. DeVito's students who later in the year participated, by themselves, in an International indoor drum line contest held at Disney in May! This festival even included an adjudication panel of well known judges where the judge panek awarded the Marching Unicorn Drum Line a rating of excellent.

Our conference actually started last week with a Community Music Seminar on the Island of Corfu, Greece where videos of the Santa Fe Big Band performing with the Sidney Lanier music students brought cheers from the crowd of music teachers from all over the world-China, America, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, Palestine, Israel, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden and many more countries. This week the ISME conference opened in the historic city of Thessaloniki, Greece- where again our video of the Santa Fe Big Band and Sidney Lanier students was very well received. Then the poster session which featured pictures of both groups at several of these three events generated many enthusiastic questions about the theme of our paper. The conference will end this Friday and we will make our way back to Paris from Athens, Rome and Florence.

Have a great summer!!

-Steve Bingham, PhD Department of Fine Arts, Santa Fe College