Themes & Variations dba Musicplay is committed to providing quality music curriculum materials to schools that are amazing and affordable.
The company was founded by music teacher Denise Gagne. Denise has taught band, choir and classroom music from pre-school to college since 1978 and holds degrees in music and education as well as certification in Kodaly and Orff training. Hello world. Her choirs and bands have won many awards at Music Festivals and have performed for local and national sporting events, on national radio and even for the Queen. Denise has authored many of the Themes & Variations publications and is now the senior editor of the company.
Themes & Variations was created as a sole proprietorship in 1994 and was incorporated in 1997. We have a passionate and commited team including:
• Carey-lyn Holt, operations manager (B.Mus composition, MA Business)
• Nathan Gould, head of IT, Website developer/manager
• Matthew Dane Peavoy, game developer, privacy expert (B. Mus piano performance)
• Denae Konynenbelt, ethno/musicologist (B. Mus piano performance, MA ethno/musicology, U of Toronto)
• Morgan McKee, sound and recording engineer, districts team lead (B. Mus Berkelee)
• Leanne Holloway, Business Manager.
• Bryan Mildenberger, Customer Support, voice overs (Dip. Theatre, RDC)
• Lisa Ward, content editor. (B. Music in choral conducting)
• Allyson Wyntjes, early childhood specialist (B. Ed, experienced PreK and K teacher)
• Stacy Werner, music education consultant (B. Ed, Dip. Mus RDC, ARCT, experienced music teacher)
• Scott Milne, video editor and creator (BA fine arts RDC, dip. Marketing RDC)
• Becky Spelt, office manager; Lana Swanson, graphic design, Spencer Young, support/sales,
Our team provides exceptional service to schools filling orders quickly and efficiently. Support is provided to teachers through workshops, newsletters,
website links and e-mail. We have more than 18,000 teachers on our email newsletter list and
we send our brochures annually to all English speaking schools in Canada.
Our company provides materials that are written by practicing teachers – these materials are very practical and
are successful when used in the classroom. Teachers like the affordability of the materials,
especially when compared to similar products. The majority of products that Themes & Variations sells are its own publications and recordings.
The publication of the Musicplay textbook for teaching music in the schools in 2000 marked a milestone in Canada. This was the first Canadian music curriculum published since 1989 and the first to use CDs vs cassette tapes or records. We have continually updated the program with many new recordings and in 2010 released a digital edition of the student guides that included the new recordings.
An important part of our success has been providing workshops to teachers. We give between 50-75 workshops each year at conferences, school district professional development days, provincial, state, national and international conferences. Since Covid, we’ve provided virtual workshops to many school districts, and our free Wednesday Webinars have reached thousands of teachers. Denise Gagne has been the primary clinician for workshops but more presenters are now available.
Denise Gagne’s resume includes
• presentations at the ISME 2006, 2008 – International Society of Music Educators Conference;
• MENC – Music Educators National Conference in the USA;
• AOSA – American Orff Shulwerk Association National Conference;
• workshop presentations in all 50 states and in every province and territory of Canada.
• workshops in Australia (2000, 2004, 2013), Singapore (2008), Korea (2008)
When Covid closed schools worldwide in 2020, we opened the Musicplayonline website to students worldwide for free. The free student access continued until the end of 2021. The massive increase in use – a million page views in a week – initially crashed the site, but once our tech team had the site restored, we provided music classes for hundreds of thousands of children. The tech team built an infrastructure for the team to write lessons that were easy to follow, and we build Lesson Modules for grades PreK-K-1-2-3-4-5-Middle School for every week of the school year. The Learning Modules have been updated to allow teachers to copy and customize their own lessons, or create their own lessons from scratch. The Musicplayonline website was featured on the cover of the Texas Music Educators Association magazine in 2020. Denise Gagne received a service award from the Florida Music Educators association for her work in providing teachers with online materials during the pandemic.
On July 1, 2022 Musicplayonline merged with John Jacobson’s JJ&Me website to provide musicals, reviews, choral music and more to our teacher subscribers. John Jacobson is a legendary composer, choreographer, speaker and writer of materials for elementary schools.
Musicplayonline continues to evolve and grow, and is the most comprehensive and pedagogically sound online PK-6 music curriculum in the world. We reach 3 million students with our website — and do this while keeping our site affordable!