Overnight Summer Music Camp and the Impact on its Youth: A Case Study

This qualitative case study explores an overnight music camp, Camp Encore Coda. The purpose is to gain an understanding of the environment, uncovering the unique ways it impacts the social and musical developments of its participating youth while contrasting it to that of the traditional classroom. Framed by the concept of multidimensional growth, data were collected using surveys, interviews, focus group, and observations. The study uncovered exorbitant levels of social and musical growth among the youth; all directly linked to isolation from technology, communal living, and musical immersion in a community of practice. There lacks a significant amount of music education research attempting to explore and provide an initial evaluation of the learning opportunities unique to overnight music camps. This is particularly significant for music educators who strive to continue the advancement of the field through positive impact on students inside and outside of the school classroom.

Loose Ends

Loose Ends is a collection of lyric and narrative poems that explores the multiple terrains of identity—individual, cultural, and historical. The poems embrace the essential incoherence of the self, resisting monolithic identity in favor of a multi-faceted, historically complex, imagistic rendering of the inner life. At its heart, the collection seeks to grapple with the gravitas of living: the continual assault of history and nature on human agency, the staggering context of the universe as a backdrop for communal and individual struggle. While single poems may only touch briefly or incompletely on these themes, the collection as a whole presents an admittedly inchoate picture of contemporary American identity.