There are some 82 million songs on Spotify, 50 million on Apple Music and thousands of radio stations around the world. Yet when it comes to teaching a course about music appreciation, educators have far fewer choices, usually one or two textbooks.
Not surprisingly, teachers have long asked for the Goldilocks of music appreciation resources: flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of teaching approaches, nimble enough to keep up with evolving tastes and trends, and affordable enough for students on a budget.
In response to this need, McGraw Hill unveiled Connect Master: Maestro for Music Appreciation, or Maestro. This first-of-its-kind product is all digital, fully immersive and customizable. Before it launched in February 2022, educators spent several months pressure testing Maestro, experiencing it as both an instructor and a student. Their feedback directly shaped the finished product.
Though Maestro is still being rolled out into classrooms around the country, the response so far has been overwhelmingly positive, says Antoinette Moore, a senior marketing manager at McGraw Hill. “After trying out Maestro for a few weeks, a longtime instructor from New Jersey told me, ‘This is the first product ever that’s made me say, ‘I should change the way I do things,’” Moore says. “The second she said that, I turned my head and was like, ‘I think we might be on to something.’”
Read on to learn about the four ways Maestro is helping instructors level up their music appreciation courses.
1. When it comes to customizing coursework, the sky’s the limit.
Though useful, a music appreciation textbook can only cover so many artists and genres, and its one-size-fits-all approach leaves no room for emerging trends or regional preferences.
Because Maestro’s offerings are completely digital, instructors have total control over how they teach their course. They have the freedom to curate music from a wide variety of eras, styles, cultures and communities; refresh or add new content; and select and reorganize assignments according to what they want to cover.