Michael Joviala

Tag: selected feature articles

  • Freedom and Control

    When I work with Dalcroze teachers-in-training, the most frequent question I ask them is, “What are you teaching?” It’s easy to confuse what we are teaching (music) with how we are teaching it (Dalcroze teaching strategies). For most teaching situations, the goal of the class shouldn’t be Dalcroze teaching techniques like follows or quick reactions; it should be a musical goal like experiencing simple triple meter or syncopation. I named the blog (“Musical Subjects”) after this concept to help myself remember what my job—when I’m not training teachers— actually is: teaching music. But at the end of this school year I noticed myself pulling at the harness, and so I allowed myself (um, my other self) to loosen the reins. This took on two quite different forms in two different classes.

    In my 5–7-year-old class, I used a scenario about inhabitants of far-flung islands who don’t yet know that other islands and people exist. The children each demonstrate how they move in their world, gradually discover each other, and come together to learn about each other’s culture, which can involve things like flag making, pageants, peace anthems and musical and dance performances. (Yes, I’m creating the actual world I want to see. I can dream, can’t I?)

    I usually tie the different islands to specific rhythms. For example, if my subject is compound meter (like 6/8 or 12/8) ,one island may be the beat (i.e., dotted quarter notes), another is the division (groups of three eighth notes), another the long-short skipping pattern (quarter-eighth) intrinsic to compound meter, and so on. Students would move their assigned rhythms as the sun came up on their island, as indicated by what they hear me play. They would come together to form combination rhythm patterns as they discovered each other. Their ‘flags’ would be large notecards with their rhythms printed on them.

    But as I was teaching it this time, I suddenly dropped all of that and let the kids completely decide how they wanted to move. When it came time for ‘flags’, I let them create their own with crayons and paper. Though I definitely influenced their choices by the music I played to match their movement, I wanted them to feel ownership and agency in the direction the story took. We all improvised together at the end, each child with their own unique percussion instrument. I told them that after the islanders encountered each other, they decided to play so that they could hear each individual instrument well. They succeeded, much to my delight. The girl playing the finger cymbal let it ring instead of playing it as fast and loud as she could. This let us hear another child’s simple soft beat on the drum as well as another’s gentle repeating pattern on the xylophone. It needed little intervention from me once I decided that it was okay that the sounds they were making weren’t going to fit neatly onto a rhythm grid. If I were evaluating a student teacher, I might have been critical of this, but they were making their own music, not ‘teacher music’. Maybe their rhythmic inclinations did not align perfectly with my curriculum—but it was authentically and undeniably theirs. Of course, rhythmic precision and clarity are indeed essential musicals skill to learn. But who am I to say that the kids must do this all the time? The most important thing was that the kids were really aware of and listening to each other. That’s not a theoretical musical topic like beat and division, but it is an essential musical skill. I don’t think the result would have been the same in a lesson focused on an exclusive set of rhythm patterns.

    In another class, I went the opposite way: from creative freedom to more structure and accountability. These kids are older (3rd—5th grade), and they’ve spent quite a bit of time with ‘loose reins’ this year. We’ve done our share of straight nuts-and-bolts Dalcroze exercises, but have also done a lot of freer, exploratory improvisation as these kids seemed to really respond to that type of work. Over the year, engagement has been up and down, and the group lately has been a bit cliquish. So instead of planning a precise lesson with sequenced events, I gave them a practice list of things to figure out and perform, such as dissociations (hands, say, do one rhythm and feet do another), conducting patterns to execute, and rhythmic systems to move (such as stepping a rhythmic pattern with divisions that change position in each measure).

    I demonstrated each one and asked them to practice one thing with someone else, making sure they partnered at least once with every person in the group. I expected some resistance, but to my surprise, they were completely into this. One girl who had seemed intimidated by the older girls all year left the room with a big grin. Although my main goal was breaking down the social barriers that kids this age are prone to, I realized it also tied into the essential musical skill of collaboration: orchestra members must find a way to work with their stand partners; a comping jazz pianist should support the harmonic choices of the soloist, for example.

    Typical Dalcroze classes are focused on a single subject, and we aim to let the subject unfold so that, as much as possible, students discover what they need to learn on their own. At our best, the lessons gradually unfold, building skills and understanding in an artful way. But in this class I just dumped a bunch of stuff onto the table and let them work on their own. It seemed to bring them closer together and make them more independent. My takeaway from this is to question the value of any kind of rigidity, orthodoxy or dogma. There can be a time for freedom and a time for control. And given the state of the world at the moment, that may be even more important than building musical skill and understanding.

    I was also reminded that my teaching is not always about the kids; it’s often about me. I needed to loosen up my own expectations about what a class should contain, about what constitutes ‘good teaching’. I wouldn’t have given either class in a public demonstration. If a student teacher taught similarly for a teaching exam, I wouldn’t have passed them. But I realized I needed to listen not just to the kids, but to myself. What do I need this week? What will prevent me from going through the motions of a lesson I know will ‘work’? I think our students, especially when they are children, respond well to us when we are being true to ourselves. They can certainly sense when we are not.

  • It’s All a Charade

    The Classic Party Game as a 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 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 Danse”) gave him a bit of assistance, but then he began trying to mime the making of a snowman and ended 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 and 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 is 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.

  • One Small Step…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Picturing Music

    I’ve been thinking about representation lately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    But I’m ok with that.

  • Leading and Following

    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. From early childhood on, I like to give them experiences of leading, following, working with a partner and being a member of a large group, all roles good musicians navigate with ease.

    Very young children (3 and 4) delight in performing an action that causes a reaction from the whole group. In our classes, they participate with an adult. After a story about a cat that pounces on a mouse, I can ask the group to watch a single child jump, then clap just as she lands on the ground. The expression on the child’s face when she realizes the power she has is absolutely priceless. 

    At ages 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 direct them to create a winding path in the room, so that the train actually goes somewhere. As they go, the music matches their movements as closely as possible, giving them a more concrete experience of their own tempo choices. Of course, when they speed up, it is easy for many children to lose track of the ones following them as they become caught up in the thrill of the 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 taxi drivers and passengers. 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 might be done without music at first, so that I can narrate what I see, helping the children become aware of possibilities other than their usual favorites. Later we can all synchronize the game to music to give us the experience of phrase.

    Beginning around 6 or 7, children become more interested in—and capable—of working in pairs or small groups. I want them to experience the difference between working alone, working with a partner and working with the whole group. One simple game we might play is to walk alone when they hear a single melody from the piano, move with a partner when that melody is harmonized with another line, and move together as a group when I play with full chords. For older children (7—9), this can be extended into counterpoint. When the two voices are parallel, they maintain the same distance from their partner; when the two voices move in contrary motion, they move away from or toward their partner. To perform the activity well, they must be attuned to each other and make many subtle movement choices together. This is actually the essence of playing music with others. 

    I also make time to improvise freely with different combinations of non-pitched percussion instruments in solos, duets, trios and whole ensemble configurations. While I do make time to play specific rhythms we might be working on in class, I also want the children to be able to experiment freely. At 5 or 6 years old, I start with duets with me, allowing the child to choose a preferred percussion instrument (triangle, finger cymbal, claves, etc.). I turn this into a leading/following game with simple prompts such as, “Play only when I am not playing,” or even, “Play only when I am playing.” If I allow freedom, I must accept what they play, but by the time we’ve gotten around the circle, each child has given us an opportunity to hear different kinds of music: loud, soft, fast, slow, careful, reckless… I consider this expression a way of leading, too.