Music Toolbox

Welcome!

At Music Toolbox, our goal is to introduce, explain and discuss the best in tech tools, with a special focus on music making and music teaching. Some of these tools will be music specific but others will be general eLearning tools that are particularly suited to delivering music content and assessments. Music Toolbox hopes to cover tools for learners of all ages, and to that end welcomes contributions from music educators of all stripes.

Who Is Music Toolbox

Our Mission

To provide the reader with tech tools they can use to enhance their face-to-face, blended and fully online music learning environments.

Our Philosophy

There are countless tools being developed to help enhance learning with technology. At Music Toolbox, we will sort through the chaff and find the tools that are most useful for music teaching. Some of these tools will be designed specifically for music, and some will be general eLearning tools used musically.

Our Promise

At Music Toolbox, we promise to always give you the pros and cons of new tools. This will include an investigation of their pricing policies, ease of setup & use, cross platform/mobile sharing and background knowledge required. Where possible, we will also create music related examples of these tools and techniques to demonstrate how they can be used in your learning environment.

Meet Our Team

Stephen WilcoxComposer, Music Educator & Instructional Designer

Stephen Wilcox received a B.M. in instrumental performance (tuba) and a B.M. in music theory from West Chester University, a M.M. in Composition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as a Ph.D. in Composition at the University of Pennsylvania. Most recently, he has been creating online music theory courses for Rutgers University and working as an instructional designer at UC Irvine.

His dissertation, Cho-Han, was performed by Osmo Vänska and the Minnesota Orchestra as part of the 2007 Minnesota Orchestra Composer’s Institute. A BMI award winner and MacDowell Fellow, he attended the Summer Composition Workshop in Hoy, Scotland, where he worked with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. His other honors include awards from the Arts Fund, NACUSA, New Music Delaware, “Friends and Enemies of New Music”, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Prism Saxophone Quartet.

Samples:

Salute for the Earl of Seaforth
(Piobaireachd style variation set for piano)

Kung-Fu Grip
(1 of 5 piano miniatures based on toys)

Quiet Night Thoughts
(1 of 4 songs on poems by Li Po & Tu Fu)

The Book of Kells
(2 mvt. for solo piano – inspired by the Book of Kells)

Robinson McClellanComposer & Music Educator

Robinson McClellan has received commissions, awards and residencies from the Albany, Ft. Worth, and Knox-Galesburg Symphonies, Macalester College, MacDowell, Yaddo, ASCAP, and many others. His choral music is published by NCCO, Church Publishing, and See-a-Dot. Robin earned his doctorate (DMA) in composition at the Yale School of Music / ISM. He is on the team at Noteflight, an online notation program, managing support tickets, social media, general projects, and writing a regular series on theory and composition topics called ‘Behind the Notation’. He teaches composition and music theory in several capacities: with Stephen Wilcox he co-writes and teaches online theory courses at Rutgers, and he teaches theory classes at the Lucy Moses School. He directs ComposerCraft, a course at Kaufman Music Center for advanced young composers ages 10-16, leads the composition department at SMS High School, and maintains a private composition studio. He is a composer mentor for YCIW and Music-COMP and has taught composition at Hunter College.