Michael Joviala

Tag: children

  • First Instrument

    I am always pleased when the old standards come out in my early childhood child/adult groups. I’m not talking Gershwin or Berlin here (though that would be great, too), I mean chestnuts like “The Eensy Weensy Spider” or “The Wheels on the Bus”—even if the adults seem somewhat embarrassed to be singing them. Yes, they are childish, but their melodic structures contain the DNA for so much music: tonic-dominant harmony; solid period-phrase structure found in even the most sophisticated of music.

    They are classics for a reason: they fit young voices and little kids actually do like singing them. I know they also can develop obsessions with music intended for more mature audiences, but songs like “Let It Go” from Frozen that they are often encouraged to sing are wildly inappropriate for their age or vocal development. I get it: they hear it in the car; they love the movie; they begin to sing along. Their approximations are undeniably adorable, and some parents are simply allergic to anything that feels infantile. I understand this, but I wonder sometimes if it leads to acute self-consciousness at an early age, when they suddenly become aware that they don’t have Idina Menzel’s chops.

    In my own teaching, I am constantly looking for new ways to counter this early self-consciouness. I like to end all of my child-adult classes with singing. As I’m getting to know them early in the year, I ask the pairs to sing a favorite song to their partner. I mean for this to go either way: adult to child or child to adult, but very often I see the adults prodding the children to sing something—anything. I walk around, listening in, hoping for something we can sing together. Every once in a while, a class comes in with a mental library of songs at the ready, and it is such a treat. But sometimes this request results in a staring contest. Many adults are terrified to sing to their children, and I think some children notice and internalize this.

    The early childhood music education franchise Music Together seems to recognize this too, and I think they really get it right when they structure their classes around songs. I try to introduce new songs and then repeat them week after week so that we can build our own repertoire. I am allergic to “hello” and “goodbye” songs. (For no good reason—there are wonderful examples of both out there.) The closest I get is ending almost every class with Frere Jacques. It is a very adaptable tune to whatever the theme has been: dynamics, beat vs. rhythm patterns, tempo, legato vs. staccato…

    It’s hard to do that with “Let it Go”. Young children are unconcerned with so many other things they are not particularly good at, but happily do anyway. Singing seems to be another matter. Once the kids are on their own at 4–5 years, many, if not most, are afraid—or at least reluctant—to sing by themselves. They have learned that singing can be done well or poorly. I call it ‘The American Idol Effect’: the idea that if you dare to sing something, it had better be good because someone will be judging you.

    So here are a few basic activities I try in the first few weeks of children’s Dalcroze classes to set the tone, so to speak, about the singing voice.

    The Singing Hand

    Lie on the floor. When the ‘singing hand’ hovers over you, it causes you to hum any pitch. When it disappears, you stop. Variations:

    • Anyone can have the singing hand.
    • There can be multiple singing hands.  

    Pitch Press

    Hum a tone, and I’ll try to match it. If it is a match, press your hands together. If not, keep them apart. (for younger children: if it is a match be still, if not, wiggle)

    Vowel Sound Choir

    Make the vowel sound you see (on any pitch): ‘ah’ ‘ee’ ‘oh’ ‘oo’, etc. The “choir” watches conductor. For older children, the vowel sounds can be written on the board. For younger, they can watch my mouth. Variations:

    • multiple leaders
    • create signals for louder/softer; start/stop; higher/lower; individuals or groups, etc.

    The Sound of One Stick

    I hold up a single rhythm stick or clave. “What instrument am I thinking of?” [I mimic violin playing.] “Right! Violin! What does it sound like?” Children make the sounds. Continue with trumpet, flute, guitar… Next week, flip the roles.

    Play and Sing

    Play the rhythm sticks (or any percussion instrument) and sing a song. Make up the song or sing one you know. (Now is the time for (part of) “Let it Go”.) If no one has a song, I ask them a sung question: “What did you have for breakfast?” etc. and require them to answer with their singing voice.

    Sing Do When the Music Stops

    Walk, run, skip, lunge, etc. with the music. When the music stops, you stop and sing “C” or “Do” or “1” or any selected pitch. Variations:

    • sing the last pitch you heard
    • sing to someone else
    • sing your favorite color (or anything else)

    Scale Yoga

    I didn’t have my first yoga class till I was thirty years old, but all kids seem to know yoga these days. These are associations with classic yoga poses. Scale Degree 1 (SD1)= lie on the ground; SD2=cobra; SD3=cow; SD4=cat; SD5=dog; SD6=runner; SD7=touch toes; SD8=stand up hands together. They can sing the pose name or the numbers, the sound the animal makes or anything else you can imagine. This really belongs to a different teaching subject, the major scale. I include it here because kids seem to forget they are singing when they do it.

    There are endless variations here: kids can lead; move and sing a simple song like Hot Cross Buns; follow my singing; move a phrase after I play it on the xylophone; invent your own series…

    Bonus activities for grown-ups or older kids:

    Move your voice

    Make sound with your voice and move. Let your sound shape your movement, or let movement shape your sound. Variations:

    • group or pairs watch a mover and make sound
    • Listen to a sound maker and move (again whole group or pairs)

    Sound sculptures

    (In small groups) Choose an order. No. 1 moves into a position and hums a sound; No. 2 adds to the sculpture and hums another pitch; continue until everyone has contributed. Repeat. No. 2 starts. Variation:

    • Sound Machines: the positions include repetitive movement and sound. Good for kids.

    In Dalcroze pedagogy we often refer to the body as instrument. This single metaphor becomes a giant portal for musical discovery and a vehicle for the expression of the musical impulse. But the voice doesn’t need to represent anything.

    It is quite literally our first instrument.

    What are your favorite ways to invite students to make use of this profound gift?

  • It’s All a Charade (Part 2)

    I was first attracted to the educational practices of Èmile Jaques-Dalcroze because they seemed to turn everything on its head, allowing a fresh perspective on music and teaching. What can you learn from singing every scale from one pitch? What could moving precise rhythm patterns tell us about the very nature of rhythm? But even revolutionary approaches can become rigid. Here’s part 2 of the story of a 3rd-5th grade class which encouraged me to think outside of a box that was already outside of the box.

    ******

    Believe it or not, 9-12 year-olds love rules. They have a burning desire to ‘be right’, with an often cool exterior that can barely keep the lid on an absolutely goofy interior. (Sometimes is it is the exact opposite!) Over the years I’ve worked with groups this age that seemed to have an innate understanding of the connection between movement and music, and how movement can be put to use to discover the ‘musical truths’ that reside in the body, as Meredith Monk put it. This year? Not so much. In a previous post, I described how I used the timeless party game of charades to demonstrate how almost anything related to human experience could be expressed solely through movement.

    They loved playing the game and they continued to ask for it all year. We had many follow-up classes in which I attempted to steer the experience more overtly to musicianship training. I felt that they understood the point of playing, but it still didn’t seem to spark too much curiosity about music as a physical experience. Music, at school at least, seemed for them to be more about learning notes and then playing them from memory.

    If there is anything like a dogma in Dalcroze education, it is that students should experience music before analyzing it. With some groups, I can simply give a direction like, “Step the beat and clap the division.” Once this has been mastered, I can add, “Change hands and feet at the signal.” Assuming terms “beat” and “division” have been well defined and are basically understood, once most have mastered the skill I can then ask them questions about their experience. I might start with a precise question like, “How many steps for each clap?” If, for example, we are comparing simple and compound meters (beats with two and three divisions respectively) the answers will be ‘2’ or ‘3’. But to move beyond the math, we can compare how it felt to move the 2’s as compared to the ‘3’s. (If I keep the division of the beat constant, when written as 2/4 and 6/8, the eighth notes will be played at the same tempo, expressed usually as “division=division”.) Did one feel more linear and the other feel more curvy? Did one feel more ‘flowy’ and the other feel more angular? Why might that be? Their physical experience becomes their teacher.

    When I tried my usual experience-first approach with this particular group and asked them to compare the feeling of the two meters, instead of using words like “curvy” vs “angular” they answered with words like ‘shorter’, ‘longer’ and ‘faster’ or ‘slower’. These are relative words that can point to a significant aspect of the experience, but only if we can compare them directly to physical experience. But these students couldn’t discern basic movement data such as the three divisions of 6/8 which lead to opposite footing every beat, and the two divisions of 2/4 leading to regular footing every beat.

    I needed a different ‘different’ approach.

    So the next week in small groups, I gave them separate challenges. One group had to demonstrate the difference between simple and compound meter, and the other was asked to show the pattern of whole and half steps in a major scale. Both had to use movement alone. They would be successful if the other group could explain the concept back to them.

    Normally this kind of activity would come somewhere towards the end of a class. The students would have had enough experience of the subject to accomplish it without too much input from me. They would simply be putting their own spin on it. But by this point in the year, I knew this group well. If I tried my usual approach, I expected that at some point I would look up from the piano and see them listlessly trudging around, dutifully doing what they were told, but doing it mechanically and without making any strong connections between their movement and the music they were hearing.

    So I decided to simply tell them right away what the difference between the two meters was rather than giving them experiences that would allow them to discover it. “The beat in simple meter has two divisions; in compound meter the beat has three,” I said and sat down to watch them work. They blinked at me (they knew me well, too), surprised that I would just come out with a fact like that, unearned. For those working on the scale, I brought them up to the piano and simply showed them the pattern and then stepped out of the picture.

    This goes against the cardinal Dalcroze pedagogical principle that class activities should lead students to discover facts like these rather than be told them from the outset. But I needed a way to get them to want to “discover”.

    The groups divided themselves into boys and girls (at their request). The girls got to work pretty quickly. They needed help focusing and paring down their ideas, but they came up with something that effectively signaled the pattern of whole and half steps mostly on their own. The boys needed quite a bit of coaching, but mostly because they were having trouble working together. Eventually they, too, succeeded. The efforts of both were very mechanical even though I insisted that they use the whole body in their creation, but they were accurate and successfully communicated at least the ‘math’ of the concept. It took the entire period for them to accomplish this.

    By the next week, they were able to piece together the mathematical difference between simple and compound meters relatively quickly and we were able to focus on what the physical experience of moving them felt like. (I used a list of words describing movement in place and movement from place to place  from Barbara Metler’s “Materials for Dance”. Perhaps the subject of another article…)

    What’s the lesson? The lesson was for me.

    Composer John Cage used to say “get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.” No matter how effective a teaching method, system or principle is most of the time, it won’t be effective all of the time. I don’t know how far I got in connecting their minds to their bodies this year, but it reminded me that every once in a while it can be useful to turn upside-down things right side up. Then guess what: they become upside-down again! (Assuming, as in this case, that “upside-down” is a good thing!) These shifts of perspective helped me stay focused on what I am really trying to do in the classroom: engage with my fellow humans through sound and movement in an effort to express something meaningful and maybe even beautiful.

    And that’s not just a charade.

  • Color My World

    How many times have you looked at a young child’s drawing and thought, “Wow. That’s terrible.” Maybe you even said to yourself, “That’s supposed to be a puppy? It’s just a bunch of scribbles! This kid needs some lessons.”

                Absurd, right? We afford children an amount of freedom for their visual creative work that we withhold when it comes to music. Part of the reason for this may be the evolutionary pressures that now allow us to close our eyes but not our ears. I can glance at the child’s drawing, praise her, and be done with the whole interaction in a moment. Not so easy to do when someone is sawing away at the cello for hours, or producing sounds on the recorder that make even the dog head for the door.

    But I wish we let children explore their instruments as often as we encourage them to freely dive into a box of Crayola 64. Music so quickly turns into the study and practice of fingerings, reading and “notes” (a word I wish would disappear). I admit it’s not an entirely fair comparison. If young students are to be in an ensemble there are things to know and skills to perfect. I grew up playing in these bands and orchestras, and I always loved the cacophony of the room before the rehearsal started: 30 young musicians all making their own sounds! There was a kind of power and even unity in the chaos that trundling through Hot Cross Buns, or even The Theme from Rocky—as thrilling as that also was—could never quite match.

    This year, in addition to my Dalcroze classes, I’ve been teaching an instrument discovery class. The kids (between 4 and 5 years old) with their grown-ups get to spend time with the recorder, the piano, violin, cello, and the ukulele. In addition to classroom Dalcroze experiences, they have weekly assignments that I hope will encourage them to think of music as not only mastery of an instrument but also as a wide open field of creative possibility. So far they have written short songs, matched movement to sound with homemade instruments, conducted each other with musical gestures and drawn pictures of sounds. The sounds they are producing on the recorder can be headache-inducing for those with sensitive ears, but I guarantee you I could find master improvisers, some at the forefront of music innovation, who have made those exact same sounds on recordings that are now considered classics. If it’s not too early to let a child spread paint with their fingers onto a sheet of paper, surely we can set them free with a simple instrument and let them discover some of its possibilities for themselves. As they share their discoveries with the class they also get a taste of what it’s like to prepare something to perform for others or to be a member of an ensemble.

    It’s their 3rd week on recorder, and, yes, we are learning to produce specific pitches and building skills related to breathing and tonguing. Yes, we are heading towards Hot Cross Buns (a beautiful example of simplicity, contrast, AABA form, and so much more) before we shift to the next instrument. And, yes, the families may need to thank their neighbors with a bottle of red for their kind indulgence. There will be plenty of time in their young lives for standing still, practicing a difficult passage for hours, perfecting tone. Where would music be without those willing to do those things? But also, where would music be without the hunger to explore and create? I believe we can nurture both from day 1.

    One way to do that is through the Dalcroze approach. Now that we are heading into our third month of study, many early childhood Dalcroze families are wondering just what the heck we do in there for 45 minutes? Children are notoriously unreliable narrators, so some previous articles I’ve written can help give you a general idea of our goals and objectives.  You can use the ‘early childhood‘ tag to see articles about early childhood Dalcroze. Here’s a good one to start with for a basic overview. If you are really intrigued, ask to visit an adult Dalcroze class—no musical experience necessary—and try it for yourself!

    As always, I’m delighted to hear your thoughts, comments and questions in the box below.

    Now go get a box of 64 for yourself and have some real fun…

  • It’s All a Charade

    The Classic Party Game as Music and Movement Portal for 3rd-5th Graders

    Last week, I came across a passage in a book by Elizabeth Vanderspar that stopped me in my tracks. (The book was originally published as “Principles and Guidelines for Teaching Eurhythmics” and is now available as Dalcroze Handbook: Teaching Rhythmics.) She suggested playing charades with older kids who are new to Dalcroze to give them an experience of communicating through movement.

    The second I read this I knew immediately I would try this with a 3rd – 5th grade Dalcroze class I have this year. Most of the students have been studying an instrument for a while and most of them are new to Dalcroze this year. They are basically affable and game to try anything, but after our first month together I did not feel that many of them really understood the point of the class. It’s a good question: just why are we moving again?

    There are many possible answers to this question, and my own answers have evolved (and multiplied) over the years. The one most often cited–to learn music theory primarily through direct kinesthetic experience–still holds up. But simply telling someone this, especially a 5th grader, is not very effective. “I signed up to learn to play the piano. Why am I running around a room without my shoes?”

    Vanderspar’s suggestion seemed perfect for this age group. They love rules (they can be lawyer-like in their execution to the letter of every utterance from me); they are highly competitive; they love to problem solve; and most of all they love any excuse to laugh and get completely silly. What better way to experience communication through movement than with this classic game of, well, communicating through movement? Brilliant.

    So we tried it.

    To save time I decided to bring in the words myself that they would guess rather than let them select. I used a random charades generator (thank you internet) set on ‘easy’. I let them self-select their teams (predictably it was boys against girls). And I let them play one regular round: 3 minutes per team to guess as many words as they could, no talking, only gesture. They enjoyed themselves. The girls did much better than the boys (also predictable).

    We played another round, and this time I accompanied the gesturer on the piano whenever I thought it might help. I tried to follow their lead and complement their movement, sometimes making verbal suggestions if they were stuck. If a team was having trouble guessing, I asked the mover to listen to the piano and reflect more closely what they heard. This often led to a more conscious use of weight, space or time, and it seemed to facilitate more accurate guessing. (The boys did slightly better on the second round.)

    In between rounds we talked a bit about what elements went into successful communication of a word or idea through movement. I was not able to elicit much in the way of thoughtful analysis: how, for example, a rhythmic slicing of an imaginary pizza made use of weight, space and time, and just why that facilitated quicker guessing than just drawing a triangle in the air over and over with an exasperated look on your face.

    So we played a third round. This time, I intervened more often to give direct assistance. One boy was having trouble communicating ‘snow’. The music I played lightly in the upper register of the piano (actually a pale imitation of Debussy’s “La Neige Dance”) gave him a bit of assistance, but then he began trying to mime the making of a snowman and ending up just confusing his team. He quickly drew a few circles in the air and was stymied when no one could figure out what he was trying to communicate.

    I understood so I butted in. I bent down to roll a heavy ball of snow. I made another, slightly smaller, and bent my legs with my back straight to slowly lift it and place it on top of the other. I did it a third time, with a smaller ‘snowball’. The students instantly guessed “snowman” and then it was a short trip to elicit the word ‘snow’.

    This was paydirt. The clear use of weight, time, shape, effort made for clear communication of an image. It was not hard for them after that to make the connection to music performance. When you are playing an instrument the sound you make is entirely dependent on your movement (unless you are programming a digital instrument). Loud and soft, fast and slow, short and long all depend on physical precision, and the connection between the imagination and this fine motor precision are what give music its expressive power.

    All of that took up the full 45 minutes. We discussed no music theory directly. There were no quarter notes or eighth notes on the board, no time signatures.  But I think it was worth it. We talked about the value of using your imagination to translate ideas, feelings and experience from one medium to another: sound to movement; movement to sound; something heard to something visual; a feeling to a phrase of poetry…

    I think we opened some doors, and most importantly I got a clearer picture of how they conceive of both movement and music. It will be fun to see where we end up by the end of the year.

    I’ll keep you posted!

  • 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.

  • 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: , ,