Do Shared Audio Libraries Make CD Technology Obsolete?

Situation:  It's 7:25 AM in the orchestra rehearsal room.  I planned on playing an excerpt from Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espanol today.   As the students come in and get set up for our 7:40 AM rehearsal,  I walk over to the stereo cabinet and feed it my CD on which the movements of Capriccio Espanol are not tracked.  I search for the fast-forward button -- what? no fast-forward button??!! how old is this machine??  Completely unwilling to waste class time, I reach for the mouse of the donated Apple G3 on top of the stereo cabinet.  Click, I'm on iTunes.  I attempt to import the CD, but I discover that the G3 in our classroom has a tiny amount of memory and it won't be able to handle many more imports.  Thankfully, my MacBook Pro is in the music office just steps away.  I open iTunes on my Mac and click "Preferences", then "Sharing".  I make sure my library is shared on the network.  I walk back into the orchestra room and, sure enough, my library has appeared on the G3!  I quickly find the excerpt I wanted to play for the students and begin playing it.  Let's see - setting it up and playing the music took just about as long as it probably took you to read this anecdote.

Not long ago, I was pretty intimidated by technology.  Lately, I've been expanding my techno-skills by leaps and bounds and I'm finding that technology is not only useful - it can also be fun.  I have to admit, I felt a bit proud of myself for solving my morning conundrum.

It's so important for students to hear great recordings in music classes and over the years, the CD player in the stereo cabinet seemed adequate.  Today, that technology definitely showed its limitations.  Students tend to lose their focus fairly quickly - they are used to having the sounds they want to hear right at hand.  It seems as if every student comes to school with one ear plugged into an iPod and the other ear connected to a cell phone.  They are fascinated by technology, and putting "old music" on iTunes through a wireless connection makes it seem more hip and relevant to their age group.  Sometimes I hear people say that classical music is for old people, and that makes me sad.  I'm finding, though, that technology enhances the experience for high school students in unexpected and amusing ways.  It's not too unusual for my high school orchestra to sightread a piece (like an arrangement of Mozart's Symphony No. 40) and to have at least one student exclaim "Hey! That's my ringtone!!  Check it out!"  The sounds of classical music can come from acoustic instruments that been played for hundreds of years, but it can also come in recorded form through a laptop, an iPod, or a cell phone.  I think it's really important for teachers to understand the world that today's students are growing up in.  (It's really different from the world I grew up in at their age!)  Making connections to the past and to the future are keys to understanding an ever-changing present.