Jan
06
2007

Origins News Fall 2006

SPECIAL NOTICE FOR EDUCATORS

In case I missed you at the IAC showcase in Springfield… It took me two days to get home as a result of the massive ice storm! I hope to hear from you regarding performances and residencies for 2007-2008 . I’m ready to go to work on our grant proposals (due at IAC mid Feb). Here’s what’s been going on with me.

ORIGINS WINTER 2006.

THE ORIGINS OF MUSIC RESIDENCIES, WORKSHOPS & COMMISSIONS
News from David Stocker at Dijeridoo Productions

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Thanks to sleuths at Baker who helped me locate my missing conch shells. I knew from Frank’s info that the conch shells must have stowed away home in an unusual container…lo and behold the shells are now recovered from the depths of my studio where they had been packed with…oops! Chordophones!!!. Luke and I trumpeted for an hour that eve, we were so happy.

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Ian and I are making an overland trek to FLA this winter and will pick up still more conch shells as many friends and teachers have expressed interest in acquiring conchs and other instruments. These will become part of the new WORLD MUSIC BASKET offered to classrooms this year. (more info at www,davidstocker.net) The Florida tour includes a concert at KOA Sugarloaf Key on Dec 26 & 28 and a house concert in ORLANDO on New Years Eve with Haitian songwriter Jan Sebon! An early September tour with ONE DRUM took us to Duke University and Summit School in Winston Salem, NC. We also returned to the International Day of Peace Celebration with 700 student musicians on Sept 21.

These last weeks I wrapped up fall term residencies at Schiesher School in Lisle, Tibbott School in Bollingbroke, and Baker Demonstration School in Evanston.. where we built almost a thousand instruments with our own hands this Autumn. Interestingly, these residencies and performances were return events at each of these schools. I worked with some kids I’ve known for six years now. I logged 5000 miles on my minivan. It was an intricate 10 week dance moving parts, tools, the Sound Exploratorium and myself between three locations. Special thanks to point people Heather Ampel, Lisa Olsen, MIke Gnutek, Nancy Staszak, Arlene Leonard, Linda Kotalik, Anna Wilson and Doris Jackson. These events do not happen without special dedicated people on task many months ahead of the game. Parents, teachers, administrators, students, I have enjoyed meeting and playing with all…seeing us grow. Now I come up for air at the end of a million sequential details that were these weeks. With your feedback, each year this Origins of Music residency gets a little bit tastier and more fun for all. I’m grateful to have been with you again. “Sound izzzzz vibration!!!!”

 

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A short residency returning to St Edwards School in Racine, WI takes me into December and my 8th annual Holiday Program with the teens at Dolan Education Center in Durand, IL. Early in the Spring, I will be spending time building a music curriculum and 400 instruments at Valeska-Hinton Early Ed Center in Peoria and will spend a month at Hinkley & Big Rock Schools also with an Origins of Music residency. I will finish out the school year with a return to Spring Creek School in Rockford and Beaubien School in Chicago. These residency programs throughout the year receive significant Illinois Arts Council co-sponsorship as I enter my tenth year with state funded grant partnerships.

It is now open courting season for 2007-2008 grants till mid February. If you or anyone you know has an idea for a school assembly event, workshop or residency and wish to include my Origins of Music programs with the IAC grants, PLEASE GET IN TOUCH SOON.
 You can download grant application pdfs at:
www.state.il.us/agency/iac

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This month, work is complete on the Hopewell Panpipe commission for the Field Museum in Chicago. This was an amazing project to recreate a 2000 year old flute based on an artifact that was discovered in a burial mound in Ohio in 1893. Friends started collecting turkey bones for prototypes just over a year ago. The journey took us to Kewanagh Penninsula in Northern Michigan where our Native American ancestors have been mining and annealing glacial float copper for more than 6 millennia! The flute replication made of Heron wing bones and hammered copper along with sound recordings that emerged these past nine months will be part of the new Ancient Americas Exhibit at the Field Museum opening March 2007. The opening ceremonies will include a March 10 kids workshop with me on making panpipes. As part of the opening, ONE DRUM will present a concert on May 26. These events are open to the public. I hope to see you there! I am booking guided school tours to the Ancient Americas exhibit at this time.

Endings…Beginnings. You are remarkable communities of beautiful people in this remarkable and beautiful world. I am more and more aware of how the years fly by us all. Peace.

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David

www.davidstocker.net www.onedrum.net 815-519-7599 DIJERIDOO@AOL.COM

By David Stocker | Posted in Blog | Comments (2)
Sep
07
2006

Letter to President Bush from David Stocker

Dear President Bush,

I wish the war were over. I wish you would stop it. You could, you know. Every time I see another photo of a dead child, dead by our bombs…every sad twisted story of our army… another army gone wrong…I think: Today, there will be even more people who hate us in the world. I want all those people in Palestine and Iraq and everywhere to know that I don’t like what you are doing. It is near impossible to trust you and most of your associates in government. Your vision is not one of democracy. It is not even one of fairness or kindness. Our ancestors are dishonored. Our children’s lives will be burdened with repairing this mess.

We would all be better off if you had sought treatment, had never run for office, had not thought yourself good enough, had not seized power, nor assembled your greedy team and ordered all this killing. How will you take responsibility for all the hatred and sorrow you have brought into the world? Other dictators are being brought to justice, who stole elections, who persecuted, who ordered massacres, who let children be murdered, who lined their friends’ pockets with the people’s gold, who lied and misused the terrible power of armies. You too will face judgement.

You want us to believe your vision is still good. It is rotten. The money wasted in warfare will never be spent on education, healthcare, and environmental reforms needed to sustain and improve human life on this planet. The victims of global weather catastrophies struggle, the meaning of 9/11 is ignored, children are bombed, the rest of the world begs us to stop… meanwhile, your friends at Halliburton, Raytheon, KBR, Bechtel and Carlyle line up again and again to suck the marrow from our nation’s bones. I can see that we have become the real evil-doers. We build the bombs, we blow it up, we rebuild it, we build more bombs, we blow it up again…endlessly, shamelessly, repeating. AND at every turn of the wheel, the American people must pay these friends of yours.

So may your friends also stand and face judgment in this horror.

Rice: oil tycoon, co-owner of Exxon, wealthier with every gas increase.

Cheney: greedy energy cost manipulator, war profiteer like no other in history.

Rumsfeld: avoided military service, arms trader, Saddam’s old friend, lied to start war.

Gonzales: author of the writs of torture, presiding over mass deportations

Wolfowitz: architect of the war, destroyer of world economics. et al…

Do not wave the Holy Bible in our face any more. Decent people are offended by your smug smile, by your jokes, your media cheer leaders and your apologists. We feel sorry for you. Watching you on live TV, it is painful to see your thoughts jam and hear your words falter and…a pause… You search for the most appealing yet insubstantial words to say, to a soldier without legs, to the homeless of New Orleans, to elders, to America’s urban poor. In another part of your mind you are busy dropping bombs, cutting taxes for the rich, denying benefits, slashing pensions, and choking education. Your liar’s pathology will not let you be so glib about what you are up to. Your mind is also seeing the images of poverty, death and destruction. In those searching seconds of silence, decent people all over this planet see the distance between good and evil in your soul, as the leader of the free world unmasks a terrible insanity.

And as the proportion of dispossessed, widowed and wounded grows in our land, you are your own undoing. Only 28% of our nation is still in the denial that allows them to support you. The other 72% are people of different economic backgrounds, ages, colors, and spiritualities. Yet we form a group of likeminded people. You see, we believe that it is not human to turn away from other people’s suffering, not human to ruin the air and the water for corporate profits, not human to preside over the destruction of innocent peoples’ lives and livelihoods here or in other lands. We feel there is something wrong with the accumulation of private wealth that exceeds the GDP of some nations. We think the dream of America has been hijacked as surely as planes on 9/11. Daily we pray together as one. We pray for our deliverance from vicious extremists like you.

I wish the war were over. I wish you would stop it. You could, you know. You could have an amazing epiphany, like John Newton the slave trader, and you could turn this ship around! It would be the single most momentous event in the history of humankind.

Are you there? Hello…?

David Stocker
Is a musician in Illinois
dijeridoo [at] aol.com

By David Stocker | Posted in Blog, Politics | Comments (1)
Apr
07
2006

Medicine Wheel

by David Stocker

Yellow is the Sun that rises in the East
White is the Dream that lives in the South
Black is the Night as She rides to the West
and Red is in the North, Red is in the North
Green is the Earth that lies beneath my Feet
Blue is the Sky and it’s clear UP above
Deep are the Feelings that grow in my Heart
This Song is ALL of Love
Oh I am so in LOVE with YOU.

By David Stocker | Posted in Blog, Lyrics, Music | Comments Off on Medicine Wheel