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Inquiring minds are asking, “What kinds of classes will be available at the Nashville SONGPOSIUM event, July 25-28, 2005?” …

Click that link to see the full schedule, who’s coming to teach which classes on topics from networking in the music business to voice teachers, to songwriting (lyrics and music), marketing your songs, collaborating, and of course, the creative process, all sponsored by the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI).

As for us, below are the write-ups for our classes at the event:

Career Path Patterns and Team Tools
Instructor: JoAnn Braheny
Dates/Times: Tuesday (July 26) / 9:00 AM
Four basic career paths are explored, identifying what motivates and rewards you. If your path doesn’t feel comfortable, or what you really want to do isn’t fitting what others want you to do, you’ll find this class a liberating experience. JoAnn uses practical tools to assess your individual work-styles to help you find your most productive work environment and workmates. You won’t get this anywhere else!

How To Play Well With Others (Collaboration Tips)
Instructor: JoAnn Braheny
Dates/Times: Wednesday (July 27) / 9:00 AM
Is your writing more abstract or concrete? Are you an introvert or extrovert? Do you like to keep your options open or want to nail things down and finish quickly? A quick quiz (no grades!) will reveal your individual preferences. We’ll discuss how to apply these to working better with others.

Meet The Monsters (And Helpers) In Your Head
Instructor: JoAnn Braheny
Dates/Times: Thursday (July 28) / 4:00 PM
Four basic career paths are explored, identifying what motivates and rewards you. If your path doesn’t feel comfortable, or what you really want to do isn’t fitting what others want you to do, you’ll find this class a liberating experience. JoAnn uses practical tools to assess your individual work-styles to help you find your most productive work environment and workmates

Principles Of Writing (Songs) For Radio
Instructor: John Braheny
Dates/Times: Tuesday (July 26) / 4:00 PM
These principles (not rules, by the way) and techniques of song structure and dynamics have characterized radio hits and just plain great songs throughout the history of popular music. Particularly valuable to writers who are pitching songs for others to record. Don’t allow your songs to get rejected because you don’t understand these basics..

Pitching Your Song to Film, TV And Other Visual Media
Instructor: John Braheny
Dates/Times: Wednesday (July 27) / 4:00 PM
Realities of pitching music/songs for film and TV production. Resources for connecting with the projects. What do they need? How much can you make? How do you get paid? Production music libraries.

Taking Care Of Business
Instructor: John Braheny
Dates/Times: Wednesday (July 27) / 9:00 AM
Protect your music. The four main sources of royalties. How royalties are collected and divided. Publishing, co-publishing and administration deals. Co-writer splits and the business of collaboration. Never too soon to learn to TCB. Don’t wait to learn the hard way.

And of course, there will be one-on-one consultations available between classes! To make your appointments, email: John@JohnBraheny.com.

Enjoy!

JoAnn and John Braheny are traveling again. We’ll be in Pittsburgh, doing a day there of one-on-one song critiques and consultations on July 17th.

We’ll also pass through Cincinnati, Ohio, to meet with the good folks at Writer’s Digest Books — they’ve been publishing The Craft and Business of Songwriting (by John Braheny), over 60,000 copies sold!

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And then we’ll be in Nashville, Tennessee, July 25-28, 2005, for the NSAI Songposium, 4 full days of classes and workshops taught by songwriting teachers and music business pros, from all over the country.

And we’ll pass through Austin, Texas, also doing consultations around August 6-7.

Check out the event schedule on JohnBraheny.com.
To set up an appointment, email John@JohnBraheny.com.

See ya there!
JoAnn

Yeah, I know … there are a zillion of these … but when I saw these easy reminders posted by Naina Redhu on ideas@aside, I just had to pass them along. [I must admit that, when reading this list, I was reminded of how family members scoffed when I did any one of these. It’s nice to have a little affirmation here.]

1. Associate with diverse individuals
2. Spend time with children under the age of 6
3. Eat and drink different foods and beverages
4. Try a new hobby
5. Fly a kite
6. Exercise stimulate endorphins)
7. Relax (blow bubbles, review momentos from last vacation)
8. Meditate (beta state of brain)
9. Go to a cultural celebration
10. Visit a museum
11. Walk in the woods
12. Visit a foreign country or watch a foreign film
13. Practice saying “Yes” and “why not” to something new
14. Listen to music or an opera
15. Encourage creativity in yourself and others

Enjoy!

I’m not too sure I agree with #3 as I have found a few programs that are truly inspiring. Let’s just say we might be more selective in what we watch … and let it go at that.

10 CREATVITY BOOSTERS
© 2004 by James Corless

We are all naturally creative but there are ways of making the most of our gifts. Here are ten ways to boost your creativity.

1. Exercise your brain.
“Use it – or lose it!” applies as much to your brain as it does to your body. Brains need exercise to stay fit. Read a lot – challenging material, talk to smart people, have debates/discussions, do crosswords, learn something new, but do things to give your brain a regular workout.

2. Don’t do drugs or get drunk.
Creativity requires a clear head. You may think you’re creative when you’re smashed or stoned but next day your ideas don’t look so brilliant. That’s if you can read your writing.

3. Don’t watch TV.
It’s not called the Idiot Box for nothing. Feed your mind a more nutritional diet than the dumbed-down time-killers they serve up on TV.

4. Feed your mind.
Read as much as you can about all manner of things. Read books, magazines, web pages, newspapers, notices and the back of the corn-flakes package. Read to find information about your area of interest. Read to discover new things. Read to be informed, entertained, challenged and stimulated. Reading exercises your brain, provides you with new information – the basic material that fuels inspiration.

5. Eat right to think good.
Eat a balanced diet (there’s plenty of information on the Internet) that sustains you. Poor nutrition affects your mind as well as your body. Vitamin B is essential for brain function. Common sources include chicken and eggs, organ meats and legumes. Minerals are also essential for correct physical and mental function. Take a multi-vitamin supplement, if necessary.

6. Ask questions.
Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. Curiosity kept her young and interested. And interesting, too. An enquiring mind is never bored. Children at school ask up to 65 questions a day. By the time we get to retiring age we’re down to asking only six (“Where can I sit down? What is the world coming to? etc)

7. Laugh.
Sadly, our laughter patterns follow the same downward curve as our question-asking – from 113 times a day as children to 11 as mature adults. Laughter is the best medicine. Thomas Edison started every day at work with a joke-telling session. The ability to laugh is a vital skill to creativity.

8. Play.
All work and no play makes anyone dull. Playing changes the mental gears, engages the right brain and lets the serious left-brain coast for a while.

9. Listen to music.
Play Bach. Or Mozart. When they played classical music to plants – they grew faster. When they played it to chickens, they laid more eggs. If you’re not more creative with Bach in the background, there could be something wrong with you. Or you’re not a chicken. Or a plant.

10. Enjoy silence.
Most of us live and work surrounded by distractions. Take time out for some peace, whether it means turning off the radio, going for a walk in the park or learning to meditate. Silence allows the mind to function more freely.

————————————————————
James Corless is an artist, writer and creativity coach.
[Sadly, when I tried to open Corless’ site, I couldn’t, however this list still contains some helpful reminders, so I’m glad to include it … maybe he will come back online with another URL.]
For more articles and creativity resources and free coaching visit
http://creativity101.com or email him at james@creativity101.com.

The Poetry Foundation commissioned NORC [National Organization for Research – at the University of Chicago] to design and conduct Poetry in America, the first national survey of people’s attitudes toward and experiences with poetry.

This unprecedented study explores people’s reading habits in general, their formative and current experiences with poetry, their perceptions of poetry, poets and poetry readers, as well as the barriers that prevent people from reading poetry.

This ground-breaking national study is underway and will interview roughly equal numbers of users and non-users of poetry.

The Poetry Foundation plans to use results from this study as a baseline against which to measure the effectiveness of programs to reinvigorate poetry’s presence in American culture.

For more, visit The Poetry Foundation.

And to learn more about Poetry in America and other initiatives, visit their site.

Enjoy!

Here’s an article that will get you thinking … 11 Steps to a Better Brain, at NewScientist.com. The steps include:

Smart Drugs
Food for Thought
The Mozart Effect
Bionic Brains
Gainful Employment
Memory Marvels
Sleep On It
Body and Mind
Nuns on a Run
Attention Seeking
Positive Feedback

Here’s an excerpt (and I’m sure you’ve heard SOME of this before!):

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

You are what you eat, and that includes your brain. So what is the ultimate mastermind diet?

YOUR brain is the greediest organ in your body, with some quite specific dietary requirements. So it is hardly surprising that what you eat can affect how you think. If you believe the dietary supplement industry, you could become the next Einstein just by popping the right combination of pills. Look closer, however, and it isn’t that simple. The savvy consumer should take talk of brain-boosting diets with a pinch of low-sodium salt. But if it is possible to eat your way to genius, it must surely be worth a try.

First, go to the top of the class by eating breakfast. The brain is best fuelled by a steady supply of glucose, and many studies have shown that skipping breakfast reduces people’s performance at school and at work.

But it isn’t simply a matter of getting some calories down. According to research published in 2003, kids breakfasting on fizzy drinks and sugary snacks performed at the level of an average 70-year-old in tests of memory and attention. Beans on toast is a far better combination, as Barbara Stewart from the University of Ulster, UK, discovered. Toast alone boosted children’s scores on a variety of cognitive tests, but when the tests got tougher, the breakfast with the high-protein beans worked best. Beans are also a good source of fibre, and other research has shown a link between a high-fibre diet and improved cognition. If you can’t stomach beans before midday, wholemeal toast with Marmite makes a great alternative. The yeast extract is packed with B vitamins, whose brain-boosting powers have been demonstrated in many studies.

“Junk food is implicated in a slew of serious mental disorders”
A smart choice for lunch is omelette and salad. Eggs are rich in choline, which your body uses to produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Researchers at Boston University found that when healthy young adults were given the drug scopolamine, which blocks acetylcholine receptors in the brain, it significantly reduced their ability to remember word pairs. Low levels of acetylcholine are also associated with Alzheimer’s disease, and some studies suggest that boosting dietary intake may slow age-related memory loss.

A salad packed full of antioxidants, including beta-carotene and vitamins C and E, should also help keep an ageing brain in tip-top condition by helping to mop up damaging free radicals. Dwight Tapp and colleagues from the University of California at Irvine found that a diet high in antioxidants improved the cognitive skills of 39 ageing beagles – proving that you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Round off lunch with a yogurt dessert, and you should be alert and ready to face the stresses of the afternoon. That’s because yogurt contains the amino acid tyrosine, needed for the production of the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenalin, among others. Studies by the US military indicate that tyrosine becomes depleted when we are under stress and that supplementing your intake can improve alertness and memory.

Don’t forget to snaffle a snack mid-afternoon, to maintain your glucose levels. Just make sure you avoid junk food, and especially highly processed goodies such as cakes, pastries and biscuits, which contain trans-fatty acids. These not only pile on the pounds, but are implicated in a slew of serious mental disorders, from dyslexia and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) to autism. Hard evidence for this is still thin on the ground, but last year researchers at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, California, reported that rats and mice raised on the rodent equivalent of junk food struggled to find their way around a maze, and took longer to remember solutions to problems they had already solved.

It seems that some of the damage may be mediated through triglyceride, a cholesterol-like substance found at high levels in rodents fed on trans-fats. When the researchers gave these rats a drug to bring triglyceride levels down again, the animals’ performance on the memory tasks improved.

Brains are around 60 per cent fat, so if trans-fats clog up the system, what should you eat to keep it well oiled? Evidence is mounting in favour of omega-3 fatty acids, in particular docosahexaenoic acid or DHA. In other words, your granny was right: fish is the best brain food. Not only will it feed and lubricate a developing brain, DHA also seems to help stave off dementia. Studies published last year reveal that older mice from a strain genetically altered to develop Alzheimer’s had 70 per cent less of the amyloid plaques associated with the disease when fed on a high-DHA diet.

Finally, you could do worse than finish off your evening meal with strawberries and blueberries. Rats fed on these fruits have shown improved coordination, concentration and short-term memory. And even if they don’t work such wonders in people, they still taste fantastic. So what have you got to lose?

The point of this Bouncing Ball Game is to see how many times you can get a ball to bounce without falling in a hole. Easy to understand, difficult to accomplish. Exercises your depth perception and how quick you are with eye/hand coordination.

Enjoy!

Now that warm weather is officially upon us (well, at least for those of us in this hemisphere), it’s easy to find any excuse to get lazy.

However, if you feel you need to fight that urge and be productive anyway, (including doing your art or music or writing), here are some very easy-to-do right-this-minute steps, (like sitting up straight)!

Open Loops: Your Central Nervous System: Your Biological Key to Productivity

This is written by Jason Womack and is from his blog, In The Life. He works on “effective productivity practices” and this list is too good to pass up.

7 ways to increase engagement

I was in a workshop last week and during one of the activities, I started a list. The prompt:

What can I do when I’m unenthused, uninspired and (gasp!) bored to re-engage and get going?
I came with some of the things I have used in the past and realized getting going is really only as far away as a thought followed by an action.
Here are seven things to do (and any one will get me started) to kick into gear:

1) Walk around the block (or around the building) three times.
2) Call a mentor and ask an off-the-wall question.
3) Open a search engine and type two of your old hobbies separated by: and. ( _______ and _______)
4) Subscribe to a magazine on the fringe of your interests.
5) Read the second to the last chapter of a business book best-steller.
6) Make a list of 7 people you would like to meet.
7) Shop for two postcards of your town/city, and send them to an out-of-state friend.

My thanks to Douglas E. Welch, who also has an excellent blog called
My Word, for alerting me to this one.

When I first heard about this book by Steven Johnson, I felt much better about playing video games and watching television. Certain games allow us to fantasize and daydream … others require holding on to a variety of details, in the same way as a game of chess. Of course, I appreciate the title of the book, which suggests that previous generations have deemed these activities as a waste of time, i.e., ‘bad’ for us.

By everything bad Johnson means video games and today’s TV, which supposedly stupefy and corrupt their users with repetition and violence. But set aside characters, settings, and other representational content, Johnson says, and consider procedural-systemic content. The games require discovering and employing their rules in increasingly complex situations; new TV, including reality TV, requires construing and remembering relationships among many characters and interpreting developments inferentially from what is learned.

Such games and shows teach users how to find “order and meaning in the world” and make “decisions that help create that order.” Later Johnson points out that, despite contemporary Cassandras screaming that pop culture and its consumers just get dumber and dumber, average IQ has risen at the same time that games and TV have become increasingly complex. The violent crime rate, the demographic for which overlaps heavily with that for video-game playing, has plummeted, too. Exemplifying from such hits as Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Seinfeld, Survivor, and 24; never disparaging high culture, especially literature; and writing with maximum clarity, Johnson broadcasts good news, indeed.
Ray Olson
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