Michael Joviala

Tag: children

  • 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

  • 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?

  • 7-9 Year-old Dalcroze: April

    Life caught up with me in April, so this is the first update for class activities in over a month. Here is a brief list of some of the things we have explored and games we have played over the past several weeks:

    • Toss the bean bag on the high note.
      • Kids hear melodic patterns in 4/4 time. Each pattern consists of quarter notes with a high note falling on beat 1, 2, 3 or 4. They walk and toss on the high note. Challenging for most. We spent some time in the beginning exploring things to do with a bean bag that can match specific tempo and dynamics requirements.
    • Lead your partner through touch.
      • Partners work to develop a set of signals to guide their partner around the room. Signals can include direction, starting/stopping, tempo, etc. I encouraged them to talk as little as possible. Pairs demonstrated for the group. The group attempted to discern and describe the signals they saw.
    • Movement Concertos
      • The student with a bean bag moves as she likes, the piano follows her with a single voice. When the piano plays with many voices, the entire class joins in the same movement. The children are encouraged to use a wide variety of tempo and dynamics as I attempt to mimic concerto form and style in my improvisation.
    • Improvisation with rhythm cards.
      • Partners sit across from each other. A holds up rhythm card, B plays rhythm following whenever A changes. All partners perform simultaneously.
        • variation: One student conducts for dynamics.
    • Metrical scarf toss
      • Quick reaction: step the beat and toss the scarf on the 2nd beat of a 4/4 measure if I call “2”, etc. (Students are hearing dotted quarters on their toss as I play.)
    • Dotted Quarter Quick reaction
      • Walk with a partner linking arms. When you hear a dotted quarter + eighth, change directions with your partner.
      • Walk alone. At “hop”, take one step backwards. (“hop” coincides with a dotted quarter + eighth.)
    • Pattern + soloist, improvisation
      • Group plays a pattern, one soloist is free to play as she likes. (All have percussion instruments.) We experimented with the form of this one, and really practiced listening for dynamics and responsiveness to the soloist.

    Those are a few of our greatest hits. I’ll give you one more update at the end of the year, which is coming up fast. Happy Memorial Day! Always interested in your thoughts and comments.

    Michael

  • 7-9 Year-old Dalcroze, 4/4/17

    This week’s activities:

    We first reviewed the notation and language for some basic rhythms for compound (ternary) meter: dotted quarters, 3 eighth notes, quarter-eighth. I put the symbols on the board, and asked one student to stand in front of the one he/she wanted to hear and see moved. After this quick reaction game, I gestured a pattern. In our rhythm language, it was, “Running and skip and beat beat.” I asked them to speak it in as many different ways as they could (using the same words). It took some time but we eventually got a variety of dynamics and tempos. I then asked them to move freely to the music, but stop and show the pattern if as soon as they heard it. After this, we practiced simply moving the pattern. The starts with three running steps, which lead to a single skip, followed by two slow steps. It was challenging for them to get off the ground and immediately stop. There were varying degrees of success, but as a group we managed to get a gestalt of the pattern.

    They wanted to be seen moving it one at a time, so I asked them to design the space. They lined up and each moved the rhythm twice across the diagonal of the room. I decided to spend some time making what we call a ‘plastique’ out of the rhythm. In this case, this means that we choreograph how to move, who is moving when, the shape and organization of movement in the room. I did a fair amount of prompting by giving them a series of choices (e.g. “Should we move it twice or once? “Should partners move at the same time, or one after the other?”). In this way I helped them to make the many small decisions necessary to create organized movement. We tried it several times and I accompanied them on the piano.

    We ended with a quick experience/game with three rubber spots, which I placed on the ground and associated 1, 3 and 5 of the major scale with. First I moved and sang myself. Then I moved and asked them to sing. Finally, I sang while they moved. We improvised short phrases for a while, and then said goodbye. I will return to this game in the future.

     

     

  • 7-9 year-old Dalcroze: 3/28/17

    Here’s what we did:

    • Tempo and dynamics Follow ( 2 dotted quarters, 3 eighths, 1 dotted quarter)
      • In this classic Dalcroze exercise, the class moves a pattern through a variety of tempo and dynamics changes. The three eighths required us to develop some technique, as the students found it difficult to run for three and stop suddenly.
    • Drums around the room; move freely until you hear the pattern, then stop and play it on the nearest drum.
      • This required some sharp listening and more movement technique. I was able to test their abilities to discern between variations of the pattern a couple of times. They seemed to enjoy this game.
    • Improvisation: 2 groups; one plays a 3 bars of a pattern, alternating with a one bar soloist by someone from the other group.
      • This was an arrangement that I came up with, in hopes that they would suggest alternatives after a few times through. We came up with a few interesting variations.
    • Free improvisation
      • This was the most interesting part of the class for me. As students were suggesting ways to change the above improvisation, they ran into inevitable disagreements. I began to suggest that music could accommodate everyone’s wishes if they decided that was ok. We tried this successfully within a strict structure as above, and then I suggested that we all try to play together without discussing anything first. Our intention would be to play what we wanted while listening to what other’s played. There was, maybe predictably, a lot of loud playing, and I did wish for more attentiveness to others as they were doing it. However, all seemed very pleased with the results, and someone surprised that this was even possible. There is nothing particularly Dalcrozian about this concept (it comes more from the free jazz tradition), but it certainly does not go against the grain of our work. Perhaps we will be able to build on this idea in future classes.

     

  • 7-9 year-old Dalcroze: 3/21/17

    What can you do with 4 spots?

    The question is quite open, but the kids took it in the spirit intended (uses were restricted to ways to arrange and move through them). Here are some of the ways they discovered, and questions they explored:

    • arrange in square, step only on the spots
    • what’s the difference between a square and a diamond in this case? (answer was inconclusive, but seemed to have to do with visual perspective)
    • take one step in between each spot
    • place them far a part
    • place them close together

    I played a pattern (quarter quarter half) and asked them to arrange the spots any way they liked, and to move through them to show this pattern.

    There were two solutions. In one the kids stopped on the spot for the long note, in the other they kept moving, arriving at the spot during the second beat of the longest note. The spot represented a rest in one version, and the end of the pattern in the other. Both true, and highlighting different perspectives. I accompanied both versions, and one student felt certain that I was changing the way I played on the second version. I wasn’t, but her feeling changed by changing her movement. A very Dalcrozian experience!

    Chalk Talk Exploration

    They asked to draw on the chalk board. Ok: one student drew, and I followed their movement on the piano. After everybody had a turn, we switched: I played and they drew to match. This was an introduction to a dictation technique that we will return to later.

    Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong: St Louis Blues

    We ended by listening for the call and response of trumpet and voice in a classic recording of the blues we have been playing and singing for the past few weeks. Here’s the link if you’d like to hear it.

     

     

  • 7-9 Year-old Dalcroze: 3/6/17

    This was another very unusual class. The story from the previous week was very strong in their minds, and they desperately wanted to continue it. That kind of intense student engagement is very hard for me to resist, so I relented, not having the least idea about where it would turn out. To further complicate matters, one student who was absent last week was present this week, so he had to be brought up to speed. Instead of my usual list of activities, here is a straight narrative of the day:

    We began with a quick reaction game: if you hear music, move with the feet; no music move with the hands. I long even phrases at first (8 beats of music, 8 beats of silence) and gradually worked it down to shorter patterns. My goal was to introduce some basic rhythm patterns in 4 that contain 1 beat rest. They were moderately successful at this, so I went to the board and notated them to see if they could distinguish between them. They are not quite ready for this, but they can reproduce them if I point in time to the rhythms.

    They suffered through all of this rather pedestrian teaching so they could get to what they really wanted to do: continue the story. We ended up spending most of our time trying to remember everything: which rhythms went with which characters; what the rhythms were, who was playing what.

    Each group was supposed to play as the others moved, and here I probably pushed a little too hard to get them to act like a sensitive orchestra. Give anybody an instrument and the first thing they want to do is explore it: make sound, see what it does, try this, try that… The last thing a kid wants to do is hold it silently and wait for something to start. I can get kids there, but I need to allow them time to discover first, and I did do that.

    All in all, our creative rhythms did not fall into place this time. But artistic creation is certainly like that. If nothing else they got to experience that knowing that we could try again another day.

     

    Michael

  • 7-9 year-old Dalcroze: 2/28/17

    This was an unusual class in many ways. The girls’ love for dramatic story telling prompted almost an entire class devoted to the development, rehearsal and enactment of one story. The class loosely followed some goals I had already set up, which was to work with 3 different rhythm patterns that are found in the slow movement of Mahler’s 1st Symphony. This movement is a basically a minor reworking of the tune Frere Jacques. But here is roughly the sequence of events:

    • I asked the girls to create characters for each of the 3 rhythm patterns I had written on the board, and which I played on the drum. They came up with a king, a queen and a kangaroo.
    • I let them choose whichever character they wanted to be. There were many kangaroos, a few queens and no kings – so I took on that role.
    • We explored how each group would move according to their specific rhythm pattern.
    • By asking them a series of questions, they created the following scenario: there is a king who likes turning people into statues, and one day he froze the entire kingdom. When the queen saw this she tried to save the statues, but was unsuccessful. A bunch of kangaroos came along and worked their magic spells to release the people. The queen was delighted.
    • Each group had percussion instruments. The kangaroos were to play for each other, and all played for me. We practiced this.
    • We enacted the story, attempting to talk as little as possible. This was easier the second time.
    • I told them that after the statues were released, the king was sorry he had done that. The entire kingdom came together and moved each other’s rhythms in different patterns. At this point I played the Mahler and asked them to listen for each rhythm and move freely however they liked. Some chose to move as a character, others choose to pretend to play instruments. After one time through, we talked about what they heard. We played it one more time, and pointed out the various rhythms we heard as it went along.

     

    By this point, the time was almost up. We gathered for a quick round or two of the St. Louis Blues, and had to say goodbye. This was a class I might be able to repeat with a different group, but only one as imaginative and interested in story as this one.

  • Dalcroze: 7-9-Year-olds, 2/14/17

    Here’s what we did:

    • Statue tag
      • All students make a statue. One moves as long as she likes. When she stops, she makes the shape of one of the statues. That statue is free to move.
        • This game is more fun when whoever is making someone else’s shape does not make their shape directly in front of the other person. This forces both the mover to be very clear, and the entire to class to watch the mover. Improvised music follows the mover.
      • Move to the music; when you hear one measure of eighth notes, stop for one measure.
        • This is a quick reaction calling for an inhibition. It’s challenging because the listener has to pay attention to the melody while moving (always a challenge for this age), and rest for exactly 4 beats. Most everyone needed verbal cues and pretty clear signals from the piano to achieve this. We will continue to work to strengthen the internal rhythmic feeling necessary to do this well.
      • What can you do with one stick and a special friend (who also has one stick).
        • A chance to exercise the imagination and work with a partner. Many creative responses.
      • Partner A holds out stick for 8 beats; B plays 8 beats on A’s stick. A moves stick each phrase. Switch.
        • After accompanying them on piano for a while, I began to play “Ah, Poor Bird” from last week. As they recognized it they began to tap it.
      • Spin off
        • The partners move to the music separately. When they hear the first 4 bars of the song, they must find their partner in time to tap the last 4 bars.
          • As the game went along I disguised the music more and more, challenging them to listen closely for the quarter-quarter-half rhythm of the opening. Some were successful, others needed some verbal cues.
        • Explore notation of song.
          • Now that they were thoroughly familiar with the rhythm of the song, it was time to see it translated into notation. As they stretched out on the floor, I asked them to show quarter notes in their legs, half notes in their arms (in retrospect I wish I would have switched these two) and eighth notes in the air with arms. I played through the various durations for a while, and then slipped into the song one last time. Some were able to translate it into their body, but that was hard for others. I sat them up and we put the notation on the board for all to see.
        • Blues
          • We ended by playing call and response phrases (with percussion) over the blues. I used St Louis Blues, a song I hope to come back to over the next few weeks.