Michael Joviala

Tag: children-subjects

  • Dynamics

    I wonder if some of the other musical subjects are envious of ‘dynamics’. It’s very name sounds like a superpower. How about the others? ‘Duration’ sounds world weary; ‘Augmentation/diminution’ feels like a medical procedure. ‘Meter’ sounds like something a bureaucrat made up. But ‘dynamics’? It’s very name is brimming with life-force energy. (Note: the image above is AI-generated after typing in “dynamics music superpower”. A little creepy, but I decided to keep it.)

    I can sometimes feel a let-down if I need to define the word in class. Loud or soft? Is that all it means? When dynamics are reduced to a set of symbols (f, mp, p, etc.), it definitely does not live up to its own hype. The labels themselves are fuzzy. Just how do I know if something is ‘medium soft’ (i.e. mezzo piano) anyway?

    But I spotlight this subject in the beginning of the year because actually every Dalcroze class is about dynamics. Subtle changes of energy at just the right time are what makes music sound expressive and nuanced. Rhythmic subjects like phrasing, meter, duration and pitch subjects like harmony, melodic shape and phrasing all hinge on careful control of how loud or soft we are playing or singing at any given moment.

    If forced to reduce the difference between a music theory class and a musicianship class, you could do worse than simply saying, “Dynamics.” But in my own private instrumental lessons they were added on to the cake like icing or decorative flowers after the notes and rhythms were learned. In the musicianship class (which is what a Dalcroze class usually is), they can earn their rightful place as a subject of study. Because they can be mapped on use of weight, use of space, balance, interaction with others, and speed, they are the real meat and potatoes of the movement class.

    Activities:

    Teach a group of elementary-aged kids to make a circle and change the size from very large to very small. This could take a session or two depending on the group. Then play or put on some music that has lots of changes of dynamics. Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5 has a fun kinetic energy that kids seem to enjoy, but there are many possibilities. Whether I am improvising or using a recording, it’s especially fun when there is a good deal of predictability with just enough surprises to bring out giggles.

    To strengthen independence in children, I use an activity I have taken to calling “Orchestra/soloist” in my lesson plans. One child moves as they like (I try to encourage locomotor movements such as walking, skipping, lunging, etc.) and I accompany them matching their tempo and dynamics as best I can on the piano using a single-voiced melody while the rest of the group watches and waits to move. When I bring in both hands (and all ten fingers), the rest of the group knows to join in the same movement. What tells them? Dynamics. I aim to develop a dialogue between soloist and orchestra that feels like a concerto.

    Towards the end of the year, we play the same game but I’ll start by putting on the board a big list of tempo terms (from slow to fast), dynamics terms (from soft to loud), and kinds of articulation (staccato, legato, marcato, etc.). Soloists choose their own combinations (“build your own sandwich”), for example, soft/slow/legato or quick/light/legato. I bring in as many musical terms as is appropriate for age and institution. Once someone chooses a particular combination, it’s crossed of the list.

    For early childhood, I have been doing a ball passing experience with the second movement of Hadyn’s Surprise symphony for years. I have to wait until I feel like most of the kids will willingly roll a ball back to me soon after receiving it. We sit in a circle with kids (3-4 years old) and their adults. This piece has many hilarious changes of dynamics usually built the same way: soloists, trios, full orchestra. When it is calm and quiet I have one ball that I am rolling to different children. As the activity speeds up I add a second. When things really get moving I add up to three or four balls. And of course that ridiculous surprise early on gets its on large bounce from me out of nowhere. It’s a long movement (almost 10 minutes in some versions), but kids almost always stay engaged with the drama (and the comedy). Who will get the next ball? When will we add more? Why is he holding on to them now? The right group will stay amazingly focused.

    Dynamics play a role in the overall form of all my kids classes. Especially in early childhood they will tire quickly and need frequent rest periods. Some kids are good at self-regulation: they’ll just lie down in the middle of a class when they need a rest. As long as they are not in the middle of the room where they might pose a safety risk, I never mind this. But I try to build a couple peaks of activity during every class so that everyone (even me) gets some rest. I follow each peak with complete relaxation on the floor. I often use the same rest music (Schumann’s “Far Away Places” and Ravel’s “Sleeping Beauty” Pavanne are my two go-to pieces for rest). The kids come to expect these rests and drop to the floor willingly. (Sometimes I encourage slow melting.)

    Adults and older kids often need specific techniques they can use to adapt to changes in dynamics, which often accompany changes in tempo. Here are some possible things to explore:

    1. Stride length – larger steps for louder dynamics, shorter for smaller (with implications for exploring the interrelationships of time, space and energy).
    2. Body parts: which body parts are more suited for expressing the louder dynamics? Which for the softer?
    3. Size of group = dynamic: solo, duo, trio, full group
    4. Resistance: use of elastic bands, or simply pushing against or pulling a partner can capture the dynamic arc of a phrase
    5. Balls are effective ways to explore the dynamic subtleties of each beat in a measure: bounce, catch, pass, toss each might have their place in a meter of four.

    All of the above have direct application to music that closely maps our experience of being weighted beings subject to the force of gravity. Jaques-Dalcroze used this physical experience to create a theory of rhythm that can be applied remarkably well to many kinds of musical situations. (He even created ‘rules of nuance’ in an effort to teach musicality.) But I believe we can also benefit from exploring the many ways that musical reality might differ from our own physical capabilities. This is why I sometimes like to decouple the usual pairings of tempo and dynamics: slow and loud; soft and fast. What about loud and fast? Soft and slow? Music is large enough to contain these realities, too, even if they don’t come as naturally to us as movers. It can present and interesting question to explore in the adult classroom.

    Live in New York City? Like music and dance? Interested in improvisation? Come see my group Locomotors with special guest Marty Ehrlich at the Mark Morris Dance Center October 27th, Friday, 8pm. Tickets and info.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Musical Subject: Beat

    I enjoy working with the subject of ‘beat’. The phenomenon itself is so fundamental it can be a challenge to define it. It’s like asking, “What is air?” We can all produce a quasi-scientific definition of the air we breathe, but our experience of it could not be more fundamental to our existence. Yet it is very difficult to capture this experience with words. It is the same thing with ‘beat’.

    The definition of the word itself is slippery. Older children or adults more oriented to popular music are likely to associate the word with drum patterns. Classical musicians who primarily learn music through notation tend to associate the word ‘beat’ with groupings of beats, i.e. time signature or meter. Jazz musicians relate the concept of beat to a player’s sense of “time”: one’s personal style might be associated with being “ahead of the beat” or “behind the beat”.

    Like many fundamental motor experiences, people can’t really be taught to feel a beat in music any more than they can be taught to walk, ride a bike or skip. We can “teach” by setting up the right conditions for it to happen naturally, but I do think the we have to say “teach” in this case. With the Dalcroze approach, based on teaching through direct experience, I feel comfortable removing the scare quotes from the word.

    When I begin to plan a lesson related to this subject, I ask myself, “What are some things musicians need to be able to do with a beat?” The list is long and varied, but it might include things like:

    • Maintain a steady tempo
    • Change the speed (slowly, suddenly, just a little bit, a lot…)
    • Change the quality (light, heavy, in between…)
    • Feel it when it is not being overtly expressed
    • Recognize when there is no beat (recitative, for example)
    • Follow a conductor
    • Lead an ensemble
    • Return to an original or previous tempo

    This is just a start, but even with this list I can begin to imagine what we can do together to immerse students of any age and background into direct experience. For young children, I will look for ways to elicit the target behavior (e.g. speeding up, slowing down, returning to an original tempo) and let the music follow them. Images and stories are very helpful. The cat prowls, slows down, stops to pounce, etc. Older children can be asked to synchronize their movement to the music they hear. I aim to give them more responsibility, though. Once they are moving at my tempo, I’ll gradually give them more space, forcing them to take charge in maintaining the tempo. Students of all ages can lead an ensemble or partner (or even myself at the piano) in tempo changes of all kinds, as well as fermatas and ceasuras. The possibilities are endless, which can make choosing specific activities for a lesson overwhelming. (It’s the same problem you might have with an empty plate at a buffet.) I try to remind myself that these are foundational skills that will be revisited time and again under the auspices of many other related musical subjects: divisions of the beat, dynamics, tempo, meter and all the rest.

    This is an example of a playlist I have to explore this subject with students of all ages. In some selections the beat is very strong and clear, in others almost totally obscured (but still present).

    What would you put on your ‘beat’ playlist?

  • Drawing Music

    For the past few weeks, you may have noticed your children leaving the classes clutching drawings. In the spring of the year, I usually begin to focus the children’s attention on ways that musical events and phenomenon can be visually represented. However, the longer I teach, the more I find myself delaying the introduction of standard notation symbols for younger children.

    This is not because young children are not able to hear rhythmic relationships in music. Studies have shown that babies are able to perceive complex musical features that we consider quite sophisticated. (For more on this, see the work of University of Toronto researcher Sandra Trehub.) As they become accustomed to the music of their particular culture, these perceptual abilities are pruned away. And while 4 year olds may have lost some of this natural perceptual ability, I am very wary of reducing their experience to symbols too soon.

    One of the main goals of a Dalcroze class is learning initially through discovery and experience, rather than conceptual explanation and visual representation. I can tell a four-year old that eighth notes are twice as fast as quarter notes, but what will those words mean to a young child who has had only limited experience using numbers to add, subtract , multiply and divide? And if the conceptual ground is not solid, emphasizing the symbols seems for these young musicians seems to be the wrong way to go. By this point in the year, I know that they can already perceive the difference – they easily change from running to walking as the music changes.

    If I show them a quarter note and tell them that this is for walking music, a great deal of their experience will have been disregarded (not to mention the many ways quarters are used as symbols in music, not always for ‘walking music’ by any means). I would rather ask them questions: How could you draw walking music? Then: How could you draw soft music? Fast music? Heavy music? The fact that something that you see could possibly represent something that you hear is not necessarily obvious, or even logical, to a four-year old mind, and so as I ask these questions I let them draw what they like. I invite them to tell us about their drawings, and, the accompanying sounds that go with them with using percussion instruments or their voices.

    And so, while I do now and then show them quarter notes, eighth notes and the like while we play and sing, I don’t make a big fuss over them. The tools of notation, with all of their inherent freedoms and limitations, will be available to them as needed.  But until then, I hope as much as possible to preserve their direct connection with their essential experience of music as we begin the process of mapping sound to visual representation.

    Michael Joviala

    March, 2014

  • Leading and Following, Up and Down

    Over the past few weeks the 4-5 year-old classes have been exploring several different aspects of musical experience that I have written about previously. Now that they are getting used to working together as part of a group, I like to give them opportunities to lead and follow. Recently gingerbread men and women have lead their fellow cookies through the snow to a frozen pond (ice skating ensued…), and elephants have followed their leaders through the crowded city streets on their way to their jobs at the Big Apple Circus.  I have written about these kinds of activities in a previous post which you can read here.

    Also, we are continuing to explore musical elements related to pitch. This year I have found myself singing more to the children throughout the class, and encouraging sung responses from them. It is interesting to see the many different attitudes towards singing that have already taken hold in the children. Some are quite ready to sing anything: made up songs, their favorite songs, what they had for breakfast… To encourage those that may be more shy, I attempt to give opportunities where the entire group is making sound with their voice: perhaps the elephants can call out to each other,  or maybe we can all wonder how a monkey would sing Frere Jacques. Previous posts address other ways I attempt to give them experience hearing pitch, register and scale, click here for more.

    Got a question? Add your comment here. I’d love to hear from you!

    Michael

    December, 2013

  • Leading and Following

    train_old
    Because music is often a social activity, the Dalcroze classroom is a great opportunity for kids to experiment with roles that will also be important for them as they move through life. Over the past several months, I have become interested in giving them experiences of leading, following, working with a partner and being a member of a large group, all areas good musicians navigate with ease.

    At 4 and 5, children are such natural followers that, when asked to become the ‘engine’ of a train, they will very often simply end up following the ‘caboose’. I gently encourage them to make a directional choice that allows the train to follow a winding path throughout the room. As they go the music mirrors their movements as closely as possible, giving them a more solid experience of their own tempo choices. Of course, when they speed up, it is easy for many children to loose track of the ones following them as they become caught up in the thrill of moment. If their train falls apart, we regroup and I encourage them to carefully lead the cars so that the train stays together, and the passengers safely arrive at their destination.

    Once they become skilled at this, they are ready to lead a partner in a room full of pairs making independent choices. We become taxis drivers and passengers, and an observer stepping into the room would see (on a good day!) many different things happening: taxis driving alone and with a passenger, stopping for red lights, going slowly in traffic or on the expressway, and many other surprises the children come up with on the spot. This is done without music, so that I can narrate what I see, helping the children become aware of possibilities other than their usual favorites.

    The older children seem to be moving into a more social phase of their development. I often notice that the 5-6 year olds are more interested in directing their playfulness towards each other than are the younger children. They have experienced walking alone vs. walking with a partner vs. moving with the whole group, taking their cues from the music. In a follow-up activity they mimed playing an instrument while I ‘conducted’ solos, duets, and full orchestra to the opening movement of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I have also made time to improvise freely with different combinations of non-pitched percussion instruments in solos, duets, trios and whole ensemble configurations.

    Michael

    3/1/13