Michael Joviala

Author: Michael Joviala

  • Tonality

    So, yes, the relationship between two tones is not necessarily black and white (see previous post). Tonality puts those two tones into a context which could consist of the many shades of gray, unrestrained technicolor or a tasteful complimentary color pallet. When I use color in a drawing I sometimes have trouble limiting myself. However, In last Sunday morning’s exploratory session with some new watercolor pencils (above) I made it a point to work within some constraints.

    My weakness for unrestrained color combinations has its corollary in sound: I am an avowed congregant in the church of dissonance. When I improvise for myself I very rarely end up using diatonic harmony (subject for an introspective future post?). I do not shy away from this in my playing for children’s classes. Though they may be only able to reproduce a limited range of tones in their singing voice, I see no reason not to expose kids to all sorts of tonal relationships, beyond major and minor. Walks can be Lydian and lunges Phrygian, and stories can be excellent backdrops for all sorts of harmonic worlds. The sun can rise with a Schoenbergian series of perfect 4ths; chromatic birdsongs à la Messiaen can stop bird-loving giants while they are hiking through diminished-scale forests in their tracks; later we can float on the open seas of freely juxtaposed triads for a feeling of the awesome power of nature.

    But when we are doing something that calls for more precision, there is no substitute for diatonic tonality. For little ones taking a solo flight out their adult’s “nest” I end the phrase on a dominant when they bend down to pick up their worm, and resolve it with an authentic cadence when they return. Every once in a while (ok, pretty often) one of the little birds just wants to keep flying. If I stay on that dominant long enough (or even back-pedal to a tonic second inversion) and stay there long enough, that little bird will get the signal: time to land. I’m going for the feeling of one of those long trills at the end of a cadenza that says to the orchestra, “It’s time…”

    Older kids are ready to recognize and respond to tonic and dominant harmonic function with an association type Dalcroze game (“this=that”). For example, during locomotor movement (walks, runs, skips, lunges, etc.) they could be asked to sit if a phrase ends on the tonic, but stay standing and reach toward someone if it ends on the dominant. Whether they are children or adults, if they are doing something at all complicated like a Dalcroze dissociation (“this equals NOT that” or “do these different things at the same time”), I will most likely play as clearly as possible with the major or minor color wheel and 8-bar phrasing punctuated with half and authentic cadences at the appropriate moments. Clarity of form through classical harmony does wonders to regulate the mind and organize body.

    Speaking of organizing and regulating mind and body, we’ve organized a special workshop series in New York City at the Lucy Moses School for plastique animée. Four Saturdays in April and May of 2023. Join us for a physical experience of tonality (among other things) that just might get you out of your head when it comes to harmonic analysis.

  • One Small Step…

    Whole and half steps are kind of like air. We tend to not pay too much attention to them unless something unexpected happens. For years they were certainly invisible to me – or rather, inaudible – unless I made a mistake in a musical passage, an easy enough thing to fix for pianists. It didn’t seem like such an important subject, just a way to label the movement between two adjacent scale tones.

    In his solfège texts, however, Emile Jaques Dalcroze put this subject front and center for beginning students, and the longer I teach the more I appreciate why. As I learned to perceive them, I learned to use them to do all sorts of things. They are the keys (pun intended) to modulation and, maybe most importantly, and they offer great potential expressive power when playing a melody.

    But inside a scale? They tend to just disappear. One of my first tasks then in the adult Dalcroze solfège class is to make them at least visible, hoping that in time they will become perceptible as well. I am working for bottom-up recognition, the kind that is instant and effortless, but to get there we may need to go back and forth between what we hear and what we know analytically for a while.

    Fortunately there is the layout of the keyboard. Though they are literally invisible on a violin, the half steps stick out like sore thumbs on the piano, at least when you are in the key of C Major. This can create a kind of C major bias for some students, old and young. (I am reminded of Anne Farber often referring to “the tyranny of Do”.) However, it’s a good place to start. To combat the notion that the black notes sound different from the white I might play a Gb major scale and ask how many black notes they heard, some students will say, “None,” and are quite astonished to learn that I was primarily playing black notes.  

    Gestures come in handy, too. By creating a simple movement association for half and whole steps (for example, paint the scale in space, keeping the hand open for whole steps and closing it for half steps), I can ask a student to sing the scale with an absolute naming system (e.g. fixed do solfège or letter names) while gesturing for whole or half steps. As she sings, I can play exactly what she gestures, even if it is in conflict with what she is singing. This technique is a bit like mild electroshock therapy, but it can be startingly effective. This technique is supercharged by starting and ending the scale on different scale degrees (one of Dalcroze’s most brilliant pedagogical inventions).

    For young children we’ll need a different approach. This is definitely one of those “teachery” subjects that invite eye glaze or outright rebellion if pushed too much (I can see watery eyes even from adults if I spend too much time on this). With elementary-age students I start with the keyboard, again no matter what instrument they play. I look for ways to physicalize the pattern of white and black. I play a game based on the American sidewalk game ‘hopscotch’ I call ‘hop-scale’. We move across the room imagining the chromatic layout of of whole and half on the keyboard, jumping with two feet when we would land on a black note, and one foot for white. I have them speak the letter names, thinking with sharps when we ascend, and flats when we descend. The trick is remember the two sets of adjacent white notes. The pattern is just off-center enough to keep students from going on auto-pilot until they really know the map.

    We can do a version of this for adults, too, by having them sing the chromatic scale, but step only on the notes of the C Major scale (or any other key, even starting on any scale degree). If the students are seated, have them clap, snap or gesture on the notes of the scale. Another way to bring this perception into awareness is for me to play a whole or half step on the piano. If it is a whole, they will sing the two notes and put the gesture in the middle, if half they sing without the rest. When I do this, I try to make it feel like music, rather than the atonal randomness of my own college ear-training classes. It is in the context of a melody that the power of the half step becomes tangible, especially when I put them to use in a modulation. Which is just what they do in “real life”, outside of the ear training classroom.

  • Picturing Music

    I’ve been thinking about representation lately.

    No, I don’t need a lawyer. I’m talking about how we ‘picture’ music. As an experiment last week, I asked my kids to draw a picture of rhythms we were working with during the session. I didn’t ask them to use notation. Some of them are too young to know any notation anyway (the older ones have basic reading skills). I just said, “Draw a picture of the two’s on one side and the three’s on the other,” which had been the focus of the day’s activities.

    A few drew groupings of lines or shapes, but most simply drew whatever it is they liked to draw. There were human figures, airplanes, even a well-shaded piece of fruit. I asked them to hold up the side that matched the music they heard, and I improvised music in two or in three. In most cases, I would have been unable to discern which drawing was which by merely looking. I needed an explanation from the artist. When it seemed to me to that there was an identical piece of fruit on both sides of the paper, the student explained to me that the one with more empty space was for the two’s. Of course, the words ‘draw’ and ‘picture’ naturally send kids into a particular mindset. Interestingly, this mindset is usually representational in some way. We don’t always draw what we really see.

    Our minds are built to associate meaning with symbol, and musical notation takes advantage of this proclivity. All of the words and symbols on this page are mostly arbitrary. We have agreed on their meaning, and so I am able to communicate with you. It has without question made possible some profound and glorious combinations of sound throughout its history, and yet I find myself wary of placing too much emphasis on it in my teaching. Notation creates a hierarchical grid that is not part of my experience of so much of the music that I make and that is important to me. Making things worse, the names in American English are highly problematic. Four-quarter time? Sure, makes sense. One quarter is 1/4th of a measure of four beats. So how can one “quarter” note stand in for 1/3rd of a bar in three-quarter time? And on and on. (In naming their rhythm units after knitting needles, the British have an advantage here.)

    I experience a rich interplay of pulse levels and even meters when I listen to, for example, a Sonny Rollins recording. There is great pleasure to be found in the play of two’s and three’s (on many levels) as my perception shifts from one to another. The musicians communicate through a dynamic, flexible and somehow simultaneously precise and ambiguous rhythmic language. Of course, students learning a Haydn Sonata need to be able to decode the shift from eighths to sixteenths to triplets and then to thirty-seconds, but I am loathe to lock them into that too soon via notation.

    When a quarter becomes the de facto representation of a beat, something is lost. Anything can represent a beat: a quarter, an eighth, an apple… In the Dalcroze classroom I try to split the difference between my natural inclination to avoid reducing music to representation too soon and my responsibility to make sure my students are prepared for their music lessons. I want to create musical experiences that will be solid, tangible, lived, felt and authentic. If I am doing that, I can feel more at ease showing them a quarter note and telling them that it represents—or can represent—a beat.

    I made the drawings some time ago to help myself visualize a couple poly-meters and cross-rhythms. Some will be easy to see, some less so.

    But I’m ok with that.

  • Come Play With Us

    I’m leading drop-in online guided improvisation sessions in February 2023 on Saturdays, 1:00-1:45pm Eastern. To learn more about it and find out how to join, click here. No improv experience necessary and only you (and whoever is in your house!) will hear yourself.

    A few past attendees were kind enough to write descriptions of what the sessions are like. I’m sharing them here. This time, I’ll post videos of myself playing through the prompts here. Join us!

    “I loved the guided improvisation classes with Michael last year! There were many new ideas to try out in my improv that I had never considered. The use of visual reactions via a powerpoint presentation helped spur creativity and kept the class moving without too much dialogue. Participants were muted for the improvisation, and the anonymity helped me to feel safe in taking creative risks. I’m looking forward to another session this winter!” Katie, Denver

    “As a working musician trying to find the right work-life balance, I took the online guided improvisation sessions with Michael to give myself time to check in with my mind and body. The instructions are easy to understand. I am given enough time to play for each one. It requires me to stay focused and actively present during the session as the instructions flow from one to the next. I feel calm and refreshed afterwards. I like to use this as a warm-up exercise to improve focus and concentration in my personal practice.” Tina, New York City

    “Michael’s online guided improvisation sessions are a true musical gift. Each time I’ve participated, he’s crafted unique prompts that encourage the participants to explore their instrument in new ways. By participating online, I found the freedom to express without any self-consciousness, and his thoughtful prompts provide a structure where I otherwise might have floundered. It is a really wonderful way to help craft a personal practice and I look forward to every opportunity I have to participate.” Liz, New York City

    A sample prompt

  • Ensemble Skills for 1st-2nd Grade (Part 4 of 4)

    This is the final part of a series on skills, goals and objectives for 1st-2nd grade Dalcroze classes. The lists from the previous posts on movement, rhythm and pitch would not have been out of place in many other introductory theory, ear training or music or movement fundamentals classes. I regard this final category, ensemble skills, as just as important as the others, even if they are not the outright focus of the class. Items that appear on this list are an attempt to answer the question, “How do we make music with others?”, especially music that we create ourselves through real-time composition, a.k.a. improvisation.

    When I went to the list I shared with parents last year, I was surprised to find it was much shorter than I expected. In my mind, learning how to function in a performing group are foundational skills for musicians that can provide a lifetime of enjoyment in music-making. Yet there were only eight things on the list, and I could easily imagine a list of 8 different things. How could that be?

    As I sat with this discrepancy, I thought about what each of these items have in common. Unlike the other lists, they are less concerned about what music is, and more focused on how it is made. They are relational: they focus on the quality of connection with other musicians, and the ability to retain and express individuality within a larger group.

    These items fall squarely in the ‘musicianship’ category on the syllabus, as opposed to the ‘music theory’ end of the spectrum. They are skills musicians need whether playing improvised music with others or playing “pre-composed” music (e.g. performing a string quartet or an orchestral work). Developing these skills is a lifelong process, but I try to make space for them in each class. There are many ways into the woods, so this is simply the form the work took last year. Instead of just bullet points, I’ve included a bit of background for each.

    Play something that has a beginning, middle, and end

    I can hear you thinking, “Doesn’t everything have a beginning, middle and end? How hard can that be?” True, beginnings are not hard. Middles take care of themselves. It’s the end that seems to be a learned behavior (and not just for children). Endings are different from merely stopping. Endings are intentional. They make space for the next thing. They can question or answer. They can merely pause. They can be abrupt or gradual. They can be expected or they can surprise. But in my experience, this is learned behavior needs to be encouraged at every level of improvisational study and practice.

    Make clear choices of dynamics, tempo and texture

    Most students come in with a primary or favored mode of expression: loud and fast, say, or careful and deliberate. In class we might call attention to these tendencies in the form of simple observations. “Mark played fast and loud.” “Jenny played soft and slow.” After a while, I’ll try to find ways for students to try on someone else’s mode of expression. Imagery and story are very helpful for young children, but so is cultivating careful and close listening, naming and acknowledging so that children are exposed to a wide variety of possibilities while having their own choices validated.

    Play something similar

    Remember that Sesame Street feature, “One of these things is not like the other”? I loved playing that game. It highlighted not only what was different (1 fruit and 3 vegetables!) but also what was the same (all something that you eat!). This is a very useful concept for creating music. When we are playing together we can learn to both stand out as ourselves while fitting in to the overall dynamic of what’s happening. Not a bad life skill, either.

    Play simple ostinatos under an improvisation

    The group plays a repeated pattern (perhaps with some combination of beat and twice as fast or slow), and a soloist is free to play as she likes. At first, most kids will either play something completely disconnected from the music or play the irresistibly compelling thing the group is playing. I’m fine with either of those at first because I am mostly interested in helping the group to stay together in a simple repeated pattern. Can we maintain it without speeding up or falling apart? Can each child resist the urge to unleash his or her wild energy on an instrument for the sake of the group? It takes a while to cultivate this, but when it happens, it’s the same magic feeling humans have been addicted to for time out of mind.

    Follow a conductor in a group

    Again, subverting your will to the will of someone else (a composer, say, or a conductor) is sometimes what music is all about.  I find children are often more than willing to watch and take direction from each other, usually much more excited about it than doing so with me, yet another adult telling them what to do. When they lead each other, I love watching them sense the power behind (at least momentarily) investing someone with authority.

  • 1st – 2nd Grade Skills, Experiences and Objectives Associated with Pitch (Part 3)

    Well, “next week” turned into two months! The teaching season has heated up, but I’m finally continuing my curricular lists for 1st-2nd grade. This time the focus is on pitch. Rhythm skills for kids this age are a lot more predictable for me than pitch skills. Some kids have an easy, natural relationship with their singing voice, while others seem to struggle with the kind of self-consciousness that plagues older kids and adults in relation to singing. However, many of the pitch skills are about perception, which does not necessarily require the singing voice. Here, kids seem to be on more equal footing. Also, as I look at this list, I notice that these are mostly skills rather than experiences. I think I know the reason for that, but perhaps that’s for a future post. Suffice it to say for now that all of these skills are taught through – you guessed it – experience. Here’s the list:

    Voice

    • slide up and down through the range of your voice
    • improvise phrases in a singing voice
    • match a pitch

    Melody

    • recognize and respond to melodies that change directions frequently vs melodies that move in one direction
    • Melodic Contour
      • distinguish melodic lines that ascend/descend/stay in place
      • discern the high note in one-measure patterns

    Scale

    • Major Scale
      • Sing scale degrees 1-5 with letter names or numbers in the key of C
      • Differentiate the tonic (scale degree 1) from other pitches in the scale
    • Chromatic scale
      • learn the pattern of white and black notes on the piano
      • be able to name the notes ascending using sharps from C
    • Minor scale
      • experience the expressive posibilities of music in the minor mode
      • distinguish between musci played in minor and major
      • sing simple melodies in the minor mode

    Harmony

    • hear, identify and sing 1-3-5 of the major scale in different combinations
    • explore the concepts of consonance and dissonance

  • 1st-2nd Grade Dalcroze Skills and Experiences: Rhythm (Part 2 of 4)

    Second in a series of posts describing what a typical class might cover during the year.

    Now we get to the heart of the matter. This is a formidable list, and not all that different from a list I might make for adult classes. Does this mean the children will master each of these things? No. But then again I don’t think I’ll ever master (“master”?) them either! In the Dalcroze approach we aim for spiral learning. We visit musical skills, concepts, phenomena over and over in different ways to accumulate many different kinds of experience and to allow each subject area to acquire personal meaning.

    Some of the items on the list we may only work with once or twice (beats divided into 4, or dotted quarters, for example). Others I’ll manage to work into almost every class (synchronizing locomotor movements to the beat of improvised or recorded music, for example). I hope that my students eventually have an expansive catalogue of experiences for these musical subjects. It’s much more than learning to read notation, though that is indeed one of the goals. Yes, I want them to recognize that the symbol of a quarter note is one way to represent the beat (actually there are many other ways!), but more importantly that they know that a steady beat in music has the potential for so much expressive power: beats can speed up, slow down, be strong, be light, pause, disappear and reappear in unexpected places, and on and on. And that’s just the beat! Here’s the list:

    • Dynamics:
      • express dynamics in different parts of the body
      • associate different types of weight with a range of dynamics
      • combine any tempo with any dynamic
      • change dynamics on command
        • slowly
        • suddenly
      • lead a change of dynamics
      • associate language and notation
    • Beat:
      • be able to synchronize different locomotor movements to the beat of improvised or recorded music
      • stop and start on command at the same tempo
      • synchronize to
        • another
        • the group
        • music
      • do something for a specific number of beats: up to 8
      • express beats in different parts of the body
      • relate a beat to notation (the bottom number of a time signature)
    • Rests
      • Perform specific actions during beat-long rests in different parts of the measure (simple meter)
      • Experience different expressive possibilities of longer rests in music
    • Division (durations smaller than the beat) in simple (beat divided into 2’s) and compound (beat divided into 3’s)
      • differentiate one set of divisions of 2 or 3 from the basic beat
      • step the beat and clap a division of 2
      • move divisions of 2 from a beat played on the piano
      • recognize notation with quarter note as beat
      • recognize notation with a dotted quarter as beat
    • Subdivision in simple meter (beats divided into 4)
      • recognize aurally
      • play simple patterns with beat and division
      • recognize notation with quarter note as beat
    • Multiples (durations longer than the beat)
      • perform an action for a specific number of beats
      • Recognize notation for multiples of 2, 3 and 4 with quarter as beat
      • step beat while clapping a multiple of 2, 3 or 4; same with hands and feet reversed.
      • Hearing beats, perform an action lasting 2, 3 or 4 beats.
      • Match durations in movement or on an instrument that lasts 2, 3 or 4 beats
    • Meter (groupings of beats):
      • duple, triple, quadruple in simple (beat divided into 2’s)
        • distinguish between the three groupings aurally
        • recognize and understand time signatures of x/4 (top number of a time signature)
        • Step beat and clap downbeat
          • change between meters (2/4 3/4 4/4)
            • on command
            • in response to the music
        • Express meters of 2, 3 and 4 in movement in place
      • Compound duple (beat divided into 3’s)
        • move to beat, division and trochee (skipping) rhythms
        • respond to music that changes between compound duple and simple duple
        • move to music containing subdivisions in compound (e.g. sixteenth notes in 6/8)
    • Rhythmic Patterns
      • Simple meter patterns: anapest (short short long), Dactylic (long short short)
        • be able to identify aurally, step and play on percussion
        • recognize in notation in at least one way
      • compound meter patterns: trochée and iamb (long short and short long)
        • identify aurally and respond appropriately in movement
        • play on percussion
        • see examples of notation

    For more lists see:

  • Skills and experiences for 1st-2nd Grade Dalcroze: Movement (Part 1 of 4)

    The focus for this list is movement. In each Dalcroze class, I give a short warm-up at the beginning. The focus is usually on some kind of movement technique, and I often use the warm-up to provide an introduction to the musical subject of the day (for example beat and division, syncopation, simple triple meter, etc.). Of course, movement happens throughout a eurhythmics class, and some of the items are core movement objectives that we aim to visit and refine throughout the year.

    Skills and experiences associated movement:

    • Execute any kind of locomotor movement with grace and ease
    • move isolated parts of the body with ease
    • change between
      • isolated parts of the body to whole body movement
      • top half and bottom half of body
      • symmetrical and asymmetrical positions
    • move
      • with spatial awareness
        • hi/low/front/back
          • using oppositions
        • of pathway
          • curvy
          • straight with quick turns
      • with different lengths of stride
      • with awareness of the room and the group
      • with spirals
      • with awareness of how joints articulate in the body
      • with expansion and contraction
    • vertical vs horizontal space
    • Releasing isolated parts of the body vs. activating parts
    • Figure 8 in different planes (horizontal, vertical, sagittal)
    • using body weight to push, roll, turn and tumble across the floor.
    • using gravity to create momentum (e.g. with swinging arms)
    • use hands and feet separately and simultaneously in simple ways
    • use gesture to express a wide variety of tempos and dynamics, in place
    • move effectively
      • independently
      • with a partner
      • in small groups
      • with the whole group
    • Create and remember sequences of movement (up to 5)
    For more lists see:

  • Letter to 1st and 2nd Grade Families

    note: here’s an end-of-the-year summary for the families of my 1st and 2nd grade Dalcroze classes. I refer to a list of skills and experiences. It’s a bit long for a post, but if you are intersested, I’m happy to send you a copy.

    Dear 1st and 2nd grade families,

    The 1st and 2nd grade Tuesday Dalcroze group came a long way this year. Dalcroze learning is based on the accumulation of musical experience. We move, sing, play games and use our imaginations for 45 (or fewer!) minutes per week. In a music conservatory like Diller Quaile, a portion of that time is spent relating their experiences to skills, knowledge and understanding they will need as they learn their instruments. However, children especially will have a hard time explaining exactly what they learned or even did. I’ve attached a long list of skills and experiences they have had this year, but even I am overwhelmed by looking at it! We did all that?! Wow. It’s important to remember that the kids may have not, say, completely mastered the concept of meter, but they can probably perform a requested action (a jump, for example) on the first beat of a measure, even when the music changes between meters. They may not be able to explain what the difference between consonance and dissonance is just yet, but they have created shapes with their bodies to express the differences, which are all too apparent to them even at this young age. It’s best to keep that in mind when looking at the list of skills and experiences that I culled from my record of lesson plans for the year. It’s just a beginning.

    Demonstration classes are the most effective way to understand what goes on in a Dalcroze class, but those were difficult this year because of COVID, so here’s a description of a typical class. Hopefully that will give you a context through which to understand the larger list of skills and experiences.

    I like to start my classes with a physical warm-up, and I love to do it with them. Their class is at the end of the day, and I imagine they need to be grounded in their bodies as much as I do. For each class, I choose a movement subject, a rhythm subject and a pitch subject. I don’t always get to each, but that is the goal. (To make it easier, I sometimes try to kill two birds with one stone!) In this class, from week 19, my movement subject was isolations (i.e. moving a single part of the body by itself), meter and basic vocal exploration. Here’s what we did.

    I began by putting on some music by a young jazz vibraphonist I like named Joel Ross. This week there was nothing definite they were supposed to hear in the music, but I hoped it was set a tone of focused, creative curiosity. I began by slowly moving a single part of my body (maybe an arm, my shoulder, a foot), and gave them the direction, “Move a different part of your body at the same tempo.” When they got the idea, I let different students lead. After a while, I switched the directions: “Move the same part of your body at a different tempo.” I had a couple goals in mind. One was to expand their movement vocabulary. This can be accomplished by watching others, and perhaps by moving, say, an arm much more slowly than they are accustomed to. The other goal was to work with the concept of tempo.

    After the movement warm-up, I usually move into the rhythm subject, which often calls for more specific kinds of movement. Today the subject was meter (regular groupings of 2, 3 or 4 beats). An important musical skill is being able to keep track of the first beat of the measure, even if the groupings change. First we sat, and we tapped the floor on count 1, and the remaining beats of the measure we clapped silently. At first I called out the number of beats, but soon I was just playing on the drum as they followed the changes. When they could do this well, I switched to the piano. After they mastered this, I asked them to step only on count 1 and clap the remaining beats. It’s challenging for this age to take a single step and hold it while doing something else. By this point in the year, though, they were getting better at these kinds of activities.

    This is a very focused activity, and when I begin something like this, I know I will have to end it soon and give them something much freer. So our next movement game is what we call a “reaction” game. They were asked to move to music that suggested walking, running, skipping, lunging, etc. and at the signal (“hop”), they were to stop and clap four beats. This also gives them an experience of meter, but now I can change the tempo, the style, the dynamics, etc. to give them the experience of lots of difference kinds of music. If they are very good at this, we can alternate between stopping and clapping 4, then hopping 4, and perhaps more. This helps build their musical memories and powers of focus while still moving with joy and abandon (hopefully!).

    After all this, they earned a rest. We melted down to the floor and allowed bodies to succumb fully to gravity. I typically have a moment in each class like this to allow body and mind to recuperate. At this point in a class I will often bring them up to sitting for some board work to tie in whatever experience we’ve had to notation or terminology. This time, however, because the subject was somewhat a review, I chose to move into a bit of vocal exploration. Many of the kids are a bit shy to sing. This has been an increasing trend over the past 10 years or so, and I am at a loss to explain why. To help them to loosen up their voices a bit, I pretended to shoot a basketball, and asked them to use their voices to trace the arc of the ball, gliding up and down. I then asked students to lead this as well.

    We ended with an improvisation. I told them I would answer any question they asked, as long as they asked it with their singing voice. (This was a follow-up from the week before, in which I had sung them questions like, “What did you have for breakfast?” in a singing voice, and asked them to sing their answers back. I remember this having the desired effect. They forgot they were singing and got interested in things they could ask me. I moved on from this type of exploration after this class, but I now wish I had returned to it. I think it was paying off!

    And that’s a class! We sometimes end with a song, but not this time. 40 minutes goes by pretty quickly! By the end of the year the class was working well as a group. They had made progress in using their bodies effectively and creatively in many musical ways and I was really enjoying their ever-emerging personalities. Never a dull moment! I wish you all a good summer and hope to be able to work with your children again. I’m happy to answer any questions you may have about our work.

    take care,

    Michael Joviala

  • Meter

    Part of a series of posts on the ‘musical subjects‘ I am working with in my classrooms and thinking about as a musician and teacher.

    I often turn to Walter Piston when I want some inspiration for teaching or for my own practice. Here’s what he says about meter in his book, “Counterpoint”:

    “In itself, meter has no rhythm. It is simply a means of measuring music, principally for purposes of keeping time, and as an aid in playing or singing together in ensemble music.” (Walter Piston, Counterpoint. Norton, 1947. pg. 26.)

    This rings true to me. The language of meter—that of an accountant or an actuarial—gives it away. We count, we measure, we create bars and lines. Piston provides easy and obvious examples of music in which the melodic and harmonic rhythm do not agree with the grid on the page. For me the point is not that meter really exists only on the page, rather it is something we can feel as a living thing. It should be as flexible, responsive and alive as a beating heart.

    In groove-based music such as jazz there is no other way to do it other than to feel it. Once you feel a regular grouping of beats into, say, three or four, there is nothing more to ‘measure’. The cycle of the meter in groove and dance based music is so much more than an ‘aid to playing or singing together’, though it certainly is that, too. Each beat has the potential to contain whatever can be imagined in time, with it’s own function in the cycle.

    In the classroom, I find myself working with meter in ways that I don’t have to with other rhythmic phenomena such as beat, division of the beat or syncopation. I’ve never taught anyone to synchronize to a beat. I have simply set up the conditions in which this primal human behavior can take place. Not so with meter. For children (and even many adults) synchronizing an action to different parts of a measure takes effort, understanding, practice and often patience.

    With children, the first thing I want to know is whether or not they can detect the regular, recurring grouping of beats into meter. Do they notice when this grouping changes, say, from four to three? Though I do not have any proof of this, I suspect they can feel metrical differences long before they can articulate them. This is why I like to slip different beat groupings under their basic locomotor movements. I’ll let them walk or even skip in 3 once in a while and watch them. They will sometimes look at me to see what I’m up to. Often, they’ll subtly change the way they are moving to reflect what they are hearing. Those are special moments!

    By the time they are a little older (say 5 or 6 years), I can begin to get them to synchronize to specific parts of the measure. This week I (somewhat spontaneously) told a story about 3 spare parts in a warehouse that decided to find a way to work together. (One child did not understand the idea of ‘parts’ so it was not entirely successful!) In groups of 3 they assigned themselves an order and created their own movement possibilities. I improvised music with nothing but three grouped beats. As they gradually found a groove, I began to play more ‘naturally’, stretching phrases over the bar lines, adding longer durations to the melody here and there. For some groups, I even slipped in a bit of the Bach Minuet in G that many of them have heard. My 3rd-5th graders are comfortable enough with the concept of groupings of beats that we were able to explore meters of 5 in different combinations this past week (3+2 and 2+3). They were able to toss and catch stuffed bears (the balls were missing, so I had to improvise!) in groups of two and three.

    For older kids, especially those that have had lessons, I also try to connect the work to the time signatures they encounter in their music books. I try to loosen the vice grip the quarter note has as representative of the beat. Any note value can be a beat after all, so I am careful with my language, “One way of writing the beat is with a quarter note, etc.” Children are taught to say that the quarter note ‘gets’ the beat. I am not at all convinced that this has lived meaning for most children and even many adults. I know it doesn’t for me. Why should a quarter note ‘get’ anything? If anything, it should be the reverse: the beat should get the quarter note as choosen by the one notating (the composer, the arranger).

    When I stepped into a Dalcroze class for the first time, meter had long since calcified into ‘time signature’, a thing I ‘knew’ all about. Irregular meters perhaps could command my attention, but certainly I had long since mastered everything there was to know about 4/4. The power of creative, purposeful movement helped create a sense of mystery around this most basic subject for me that continues to unfold to this day, and that is something I hope to do for others as well as in my work with adults. The usual oversimplification applies here: the kids can feel it but can’t explain it, the adults can explain it but can’t feel it.

    If I seem wary of this subject, well, it’s because I am. I notice that I emphasize it much less in my work with young people than I did when I first started teaching, perhaps because I am so aware of things I have needed to unlearn. I’ll give Emile Jaques-Dalcroze the last word on the subject for now:

    “… the metric tradition kills every spontaneous agogic impulse, every artistic expression of emotion by means of time nuances. The composer who is obliged to bend his inspiration to the inflexible laws of symmetry in time-lengths comes gradually to modify his instinctive rhythms, with a view to unity of measure, and finishes by conceiving only rhythms of a conventional time-pattern.” (Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm, Music and Education. p.185.)

    Related posts for personal practice:

    Triple and quadruple time

    Changing Meter: Reaction Game