Composing with the musical alphabet (again)

For the first four weeks of term I took on some extra classes at MELS (the Language School), teaching three of the secondary classes. With one, I decided to revisit a project I have done before, where the students and I brainstorm all the words we can spell with the letters A to G (the white notes of the musical alphabet – see here for a comprehensive list of possible words). I then asked them to string two or three of the words together to make a melodic phrase. This is an interesting task for English Language Learners, as they get to transfer their emerging written-language knowledge into the music classroom.

I then helped them arrange these different melodic phrases into a structure, worked out some suitable accompanying chords on the guitar, their class teacher wrote some (nonsensical, but fun) lyrics, and we had a song!

Here is some of our brainstorming:

Ringing the Changes

One of my favourite performances in this year’s Melbourne Festival was the music/performance piece by Strange Fruit, Ringing the Changes. It was created especially for the bell field of Federation Bells at Birrarung Marr. Each of the bells in the field has a specific pitch and sits at the top of a tall pole, and Strange Fruit perform mesmerising dance/visual/physical theatre pieces atop long bendy poles, so really, this was a match made in heaven. Composer Graeme Leak was commissioned to write the work, taking into account which bells the different performers would be able to reach within the radius afforded by their bendy pole.

The whole piece was masterfully conducted by Timothy Phillips. Here are a couple of photos:

I like the way Tim appears to be suspended in midair. It was quite a feat to conduct the work (including several sections of audience participation, which required him to swivel around to face the audience instead of the performers) without losing his centre of balance. I also like the iconic view of the MCG and its ring of lights, in the background of this photo.

The City Beats children were involved in the first performance, taking part in the audience participation sections which required them to play on tin cans with chopsticks and teaspoons. They were so thrilled by the whole event.

Winding back…

The Armidale project marked the end of a very busy few months of projects – between now and January 30th I have no more ’special projects’ to lead. I still have my usual teaching load in schools, and I have some papers to mark for the university, and some minor additions to make to my Masters thesis before get the final binding done, but I don’t need to plan for any more big projects for a while now. Lots of plans to put in place for 2010, however – the year is looking very full already, which is incredibly gratifying. I’ve received some fabulous invitations to work with different organisations and people around the country.

The last couple of months have been focused on:

• Writing papers and articles – I wrote three academic papers between October and November and submitted them for forthcoming conferences in 2010. I think I have a journal article left in me now – probably something a bit more substantial, around 5000 words perhaps. Not sure when I’ll write this – maybe when I get stuck into my thesis corrections.
• Leading Jams with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra – the last of these was on October 31st. We jammed on the Lebanese song Ah Ya Zahn, a song I first learned to sing in Bosnian, while working at the Pavarotti Music Centre in Mostar 1998 (where we called it Ah Ya Ti. I like the Bosnian words better!)
• Leading a collaborative project between the MSO ArtPlay Graduate Ensemble and the Chordwainers, an ensemble of performers who play on the leather instruments of Garry Greenwood. A very successful, interesting project with a great musical outcome.
• Teaching the last classes for the year at Melbourne Uni – the Bachelor of Ed students and the MTeach students. Some very interesting sessions, and lots learned by all.
• Continuing my usual primary (elementary) school teaching load at Pelican Primary and the Melbourne English Language School for new arrivals (these are both pseudoynms). It has been a bit hard-going this term. The students are tired. I am tired. And the Pelicans in particular get incredibly unfocussed and distracted when they are tired. And there are a few tricky, subversive student elements at MELS that I find rather testing this term. But we are getting there… we will get there…!
• I also got to have a few days away with Tiny at the Wangaratta Jazz Festival. He was playing (and played fabulously, as always)…. I sat in the shade, grooved along while drinking local wine, and chilled out, basically. The day after the festival we stayed in the area and went off to Mount Buffalo for a walk up to the Cathedral and Hump, where we perched awhile on a rock, before heading back down.

So it has been a busy term (we are now up to Week 6 of an eleven-week term). I’m happy to be winding back a little bit now, in terms of inventing new projects and coming up with innovative and imaginative ideas. My brain is looking forward to a bit more open creative space.

A couple of shots of Tiny in action at Wang:

‘Excursions’ in Armidale

I’ve just got back to Melbourne from Armidale, NSW, where I had the privilege of working once again with the wonderful staff and students of the New England Conservatorium of Music. I was up at NECOM last year, leading a composition project for the Australian Youth Orchestra and the Armidale Youth String Orchestra. This year’s project was with the AYSO again (who get new players each year, so only some had worked with me on last year’s project) and four fabulous musician-teachers.

I called the project “Excursions” and our starting point was a pile of brochures and tourist information from the Armidale Tourist Information Centre. The AYSO members grabbed random sentences and phrases from the brochures, turned these into spoken riffs, developed short vocal pieces using these riffs, and then transferred the pieces to their instruments, each group sticking to a mode of their choosing.

I use a similar project model to that which I’ve developed for the MSO ArtPlay Ensemble – 2 intensive days of creating, then rehearsing, finishing with a performance at the end of the second day. We created nearly 15 minutes of original music in Armidale this year. The process goes a bit like this:

• The children work in a small group of 5 or 6, and are supported by one of the musician-teachers. They work on their own unique piece, using the riffs they have already developed, and the mode they have chosen. I go from group to group, monitoring how things are going, offering suggestions or guidance if needed. This takes up the main part of the first day.
• Then we bring all the small groups together and hear each others’ pieces. I take notes about the structure and content of each of the pieces, listening out for sections that might enhanced by having the whole ensemble play them, or for elements that might benefit from the stabilising influence of a bass-line, or something percussive or vocal, or having a musician from one of the other groups join in.
• We spend most of the second day all together, and go through each of the pieces in detail. I stop and start things, getting the small group members to teach their music to the rest of the ensemble, in the places that I’ve already identified. In this way, we start to create one large, seamless piece, rather than four discrete short pieces. We figure out musical ways to transition from one piece the the next, and create moments in each piece where the whole ensemble will be playing. As you can imagine, this process is very demanding of the young players. They essentially have to sit there, listening as the different groups play, and ready to join in, and learn a new part – from memory – at any point! These are young players aged 8 to 13! It is demanding and I always warn them about this. But I think for many of them, it also proves to be an important learning environment, because they are engaged in a very authentic music-creating task, and can offer their own solutions to some of the musical problems I raise.
• Once we have worked through each of the small group pieces and planned the transitions, we play through the work. We generally need three play-throughs before a performance. In the first one, we will just be recalling all the decisions we have made, and mapping out the work in our heads or on paper as we go. The second play-through tends to be much more cohesive – the music sticks together more, and a critical mass of players usually remembers enough to keep the transitions flowing. However, the second play-through also tends to highlight those sections that we haven’t quite got around to fixing yet – a messy finish, for example, or an awkward section transition where this is still a bit of doubt in the group. The third play-through is usually very fluent, and I tend to record these, in addition to the performances.

In Armidale this year we didn’t get to do a third play-through. I think we all felt this in the performance – the piece felt a little ‘fragile’, with a couple of hesitant moments. However, I’ve just finished listening to the recording I made of the performance (just using my MacBook’s built-in mic and Garageband) and it sounds really, really impressive! We had made a very complex piece, and in fact it hangs together extremely well.

There is usually an incredible intensity to the way young players perform a piece like this. That is in part due to the fact that it is entirely memorised, and they have learned it in a fairly segemented way, for the most part. If they allow themselves to get distracted even for a moment, they find it very difficult to drop back into their part. Also, the music becomes a kind of journey for them, I think. They have been so intimately involved in all the decisions leading to its creation, so there is much to hold their attention. And because they are not reading from a part, they need to keep up their intensive listening and engagement while they are not playing, in order to know where to come in again. There isn’t a set number of beats rest to keep count of – rather, they are waiting for musical and visual cues.

I end up with multiple themes from the music buzzing around in my head for days. Yesterday, on the plane home, it was D’s cello solo, that she had invented, and that had caused her a certain amount of stress. Today, it is the perky riff that C played to go with the vocal riff “Tickle the tamest trout”. (Presumably that phrase came from a tourist brochure for a trout farm experience…). Big thanks and congratulations to all the musicians – young and less-young – who were part of this project.

Quoi??

I am in the middle of marking at the moment. Students often find it difficult to articulate their ideas about teaching music and integrated arts, especially when they are new to these subjects, and are grappling with how to set about teaching them in their own classes (as generalist teachers, not specialists). There can be a lot of paraphrasing of the set text, albeit in a very haphazard, two-unrelated-sentences/phrases-thrown-together way, joined by a conjunction and little else… that’s when whole chunks aren’t being copied verbatim. Sometimes it is hard to know exactly what they are on about:

(The additional time required for planning an integrated arts unit) may challenge teachers as the concept of time within the curriculum is a difficult notion to grasp. Time is a continuous changing matter…

Hmm. Last time I looked, time was not ‘matter’ at all (though I agree it is continuously changing. I’d be worried if it wasn’t). Though I wasn’t aware that teachers in general struggle with the concept of time. Most people come to grips with the notion of time sometime during their early childhood (I think my student means that there is never enough time to fit everything into your teaching day – it requires constant management).

Her comment reminds me of a quote from Mike The Cool Person of The Young Ones, who, when asked by Helen Mucous the Escaped Murderess “Is that the time?”, answers smoothly:

No, time is an abstract concept. This is a wristwatch.

Another thing that made me giggle was one student’s list of the range of creative decisions students can make when they are involved in an integrated arts unit:

The artistic benefits… allow students to become creative in their work. Depending on the task, students may need to consider instruments, props, colour, paper, costumes, pencils etc.

It was the inclusion of pencils in this list that made me smile. From broad concepts to the very specific… Still, perhaps this is because I am a musician, rather than a visual artist.

Ten more of these papers to go. Nearly done.

Current writing and thinking

I’ve been writing papers this week – one that I’m submitting to the next ISME conference in Beijing (ISME being the International Society for Music Education) and one for the CDIME (Cultural Diversity in Music Education) conference, taking place in Sydney in January 2010. Both papers are drawn from my Masters research and thesis.

For ISME, I’ve written about the pedagogical approach I have developed for work with children who understand very little English. I have drawn a lot on my blog posts over the years in writing about my approach – this blog is often the place where I first start to try and describe things that I am trying, or revelations I am having. In the paper I describe the kind of teaching language I use (very pared-back and minimal), the importance of visual cues and other environmental scaffolds, and the way the project-based approach supports student learning and understanding.

For CDIME my paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise when doing research with children from non-English-speaking backgrounds. It was quite a surprise to me that there was so little published guidance on conducting interviews with children via interpreters, for example. First there are the issues in the way the interpreters understand the research, and the questions you are asking. For example, I wanted some of my questions to be fairly ambiguous in the language they used, in order to elicit ‘pure’ or uncontaminated responses from the children. How easy were these ambiguous questions to translate? How easy is it to talk about music if you are not used to talking about music? (I think musicians learn to talk about music over many years. This is not a debate about music-specific terminology, rather, a discussion about the intangible nature ofmusic that means we can’t point towards things that are difficult to label).

Other things arose too, such as the additional interpretive layers that arose through the additional voices; also, questions about social and cultural conditioning were present. Interactions between adults and children vary between different cultures. How much were these expectations a source of confusion for the children being interviewed? In some cultures children would rarely be asked by an adult for their opinion. Was it therefore awkward for them to respond to my more personal or hypothetical questions?

And so on. Very interesting stuff for me. Anyway, I got both papers finished last night, in time for the deadline. I have one more to write, which will be more concerned with the children’s perceptions of what they are learning and doing in music lessons at the Language School. In particular, do they know they’re composing and inventing material? Who knows, if so? And for those that are still trying to make sense of the whole school environment, what do they think is going on?

That final paper is due at the end of October.

Happy Train – City Beats

The second project I led last week was the City Beats project, an ensemble of children from grades 3 and 4 who have had very little exposure to music-making prior to this project. It’s the second time we’ve all worked together this year – the first time was in April. The City Beats program is targeted towards kids from ‘disadvantaged’ communities. I hate using labels like that – they’re so broad and sweeping, and can conjure up all sorts of inaccurate images… but the project is targeted towards them in recognition of the fact that nearly 100% of the participants in most MSO/ArtPlay projects are kids who have access – through school/parents/community – to be part of music events, to learn an instrument, and to hear different performances. And the children/families who don’t have access to these things also don’t tend to be supported by the kind of community infrastructure/communication networks that lets them know about free or low-cost opportunities.

We came up with the City Beats project as a way of offering an entry point to children who are keen to do more music. They get their travel provided (a bus in and out of the city for the group) and lunch on each of the workshop days. And they spend two days working with me and a small group of MSO musicians to create and perform their own music.

Last week’s project was focused on trains. ArtPlay used to be a train engine workshop, in its former life, in the days when the railways lines in Melbourne crisscrossed the area that is now Federation Square. Also, ‘trains’ in music offer rich composition starting points. There are the sound effects you can make to sound like trains running on the tracks (vocal sounds, body percussion, different whistles); the rhythmic motion of the train (can be played on all manner of instruments); the emotion attached to travel (can be translated in song lyrics as well as melodies); and there are lots of great examples of music you can listen to to get ideas. I like to play:

• Nowhere Train by the wonderful Melbourne-based vocal ensemble Coco’s Lunch
• Indian Pacific by Australian composerJames Ledger, an orchestral piece that depicts the epic train line between Perth and Sydney, connecting the two oceans; and
• Pacific 231 by Honnegar, which has some fabulous rhythmic and harmonic writing in it.

This year’s City Beats Ensemble is a group of wonderful live wires – really open, happy bright sparks with loads of ideas. I said to the musicians at the end of the first day, “We haven’t asked one question yet that has been met with silence. There have been lots of ideas in response to every question I’ve asked. So keep asking them questions, keep handing the responsibility over to them!”

With this project, I want to give the children strong experiences with the instruments we provide (big range of percussion), where they can develop techniques and get a sense of their expressive range, and creative problem-solving tasks, in the form of composition tasks in small groups. We brainstormed some of the parts of a train journey that could be depicted musically, then divided into the three groups (4 in each group) and chose one of those ideas for each group.

We also had some whole-ensemble elements – a body percussion dance that started off the piece (accompanied by the MSO musicians), and a song that we all wrote together.

My favourite part of the project was on the second day when we were preparing to perform the music we’d composed. I suggested the children go outside (ArtPlay is next to a very popular children’s playground) to approach the adults and children there, and ask if they would like to come into ArtPlay to hear their performance. The children did this so beautifully – I think their friendliness and genuine offer quite endeared them to many of the adults they approached!  One group of four adults came in quite bemused – they felt the tiniest bit railroaded, they confessed (excuse the pun) but also genuinely keen to see the performance, to show their support and interest in the children who had approached them.

Within just a few minutes we had gathered an audience of about thirty people – maybe more! – most of whom had never even been inside ArtPlay and had no idea what it was. They were incredibly appreciative – several said on the way out that they felt they had been “incredibly lucky – we were in the right place at the right time!”

What happens next for the City Beats children? They have another performance opportunity coming up this year, but for next year, I hope that some will put up their hands to be part of the MSO ArtPlay Ensemble in 2010. We would continue to sponsor their involvement, and provide instruments for them to play if they don’t have their own… so that little by little we can also start to expand the pool from which membership of the MSO ArtPlay Ensemble is drawn. I think you need to approach these kinds of cultural change/shift projects with long timelines and a lot of patience. There are lots of barriers (financial, practical, cultural) that make it difficult for many children to access projects, even when the projects are free. One of these is about being made to feel welcome and legitimate, or belonging, and a confidence that your contributions will be welcomed and accepted. Hopefully the City Beats project in 2009 has established that sense for some of these children.

Piazzolla, syncopation – and a program finishes for the year

It’s school holidays, which for me means ArtPlay projects (ArtPlay being the fantastic children’s arts space in the heart of the city that Melbourne is so lucky to have). In the April and September school holidays I lead two separate ensemble projects at ArtPlay – the MSO ArtPlay Ensemble, and City Beats (you can read about the April projects here). It makes for a full-on week straight after the full-on term finishes, but I love these groups. We make some fantastic music together.

The MSO ArtPlay Ensemble always takes inspiration from a piece of music they will hear the MSO perform shortly after completing their workshop days. This project however, had a newly-commissioned piece by Elena Kats-Chernin as its focus, so we decided to work with the same starting points or brief that Elena had been given by the MSO (music of Piazzolla) and take some short pieces of musical material from the score of her piece as well.

Piazzolla’s music is characterised by many things, but one that Elena focused on was his “strange harmonic twists”. Typically in our MSO ArtPlay projects we build pieces around modes, but this time I decided to get the group to work with chord progressions, and to practice adjusting their riffs and melodies to fit across a progression of chords. It wasn’t easy (the group is made up of children aged 8 – 13, and while some are very skilled on their instruments, others are only just getting started), but we took it slowly, chord by chord, and eventually we got the progression (and its accompanying riffs as invented by the group) sorted.

We also focused on syncopated rhythms, which has proved quite a theme for the whole year. In small groups, I asked them to invent a rhythm in 4/4 by establishing a clapped cycle of 8 beats (quavers, or eighth notes), and choosing 1-3 numbers to leave out (ie. not clap). This gave us 4 rhythms, all of which had syncoptated elements.I got them to perform these rhythms on their instruments, not with notes, but with percussive sounds they could make – slapping a cupped hand on the mouthpieces, swiftly dragging a resin-ed cloth over violin strings, tapping keys, etc. Sounded cool!

We also familiarised ourselves with the rhythm you get if you clap just numbers 1, 4 and 7 – the typical tango rhythm. We listened to some different Piazzolla examples – originals with him performing, and arrangements by other composers/orchestras – and the children could recognise this tango rhythm, and also tried counting out cycles of 8 under their breath to try and identify which numbers had been left out in other rhythms they could hear.

This was our last project together for the year, so it was an opportunity to cast my eye arond the group and note the kinds of developments and changes I’d seen over the year:

• The clarinetist who took on an improvised solo each project, but in this third project was now really listening to what he was playing, slowing down enough to hear the music and have time to hear his ideas in his head before playing them. No more guessing and hoping for the best!
• The serious young violinist who took part in three try-outs (in previous years) before being offered a place in this year’s ensemble. She is so quiet – one of those students you fear will get overlooked… but in the small groups she always had contributions to make, was always engaged, and locked the music into her memory as it evolved. She played a solo with her small group in this September project – a melodic line that she created herself and played with considerable assurance.
• The young trumpeter with his somewhat unstable playing (in the tradition of young trumpeters everywhere) whose playing had just soared this project! I commented on it to his mother and she explained that he’d just been given a new trumpet, and was practising all the time. Such a difference a decent instrument makes to young players!
• The very shy clarinetist whose contributions in the warm-up games became gradually more extrovert as the year went on. She remained quiet, but upon closer attention revealed many original ideas.
• The flautist who is the youngest member of our group and who I suspect was occassionally a bit overwhelmed by all the boisterous big kids, but who is a lovely player. In this project, a brief explanation I gave her group about sequences in music, and how you can use them to build an improvisation, led to her performing a confident and musical improvised solo with her group, making rich use of sequential material
• The cellist who plays beautifully but who struggled to make eye contact with any of us at the start of the year, still struggles to make eye contact with any of us! And still plays beautifully.
• Another young trumpeter who grooved away during our syncopated rhythmic taps, and embellished our whole-ensemble choruses with extra notes, a few more each time. He was having a ball!

We will hopefully see many of these young players again, because now that they have finished their year in the MSO Artplay Ensemble, they become what we call Graduates, who can take part in a big range of creative projects throughout the year. The whole program between MSO and ArtPlay is into its 5th year now, and I am getting the privilege of seeing these young musicians grow and develop into their teenage years. That’s unusual for someone like me who usually works in schools or with groups for finite periods of time – unlike teachers in schools.

Musical understanding

I am currently reading Teaching for Music Understanding by Jackie Wiggins, and I can’t recommend it strongly enough. It’s written in a highly readable, direct, sympathetic, no-nonsense style, with lots of practical suggestions and explanations. I am finding that much of what she suggests holds true for my own preferred approach to music education, and it is wonderful to read such clearly articulated descriptions of education values and strategies that I hold dear, but sometimes struggle to label.

For example, she acknowledges the wealth of information that has been written for music educators about teaching the musical elements, but suggests that musical principles – such as simultaneity and ensemble, balance, tension and release – are also an incredibly important part of musical understanding. She writes,

These principles are broader than the specific elements as they seem to connect to more than one of the elements. Simultaneity and ensemble are related to rhythm and texture but also to pitch in terms of intonation. Balance is also related to ensemble. Tension and release are an important part of harmony but are also linked to rhythm, dynamics, tempo and even form.

Wiggins, J. (2001). Teaching for Musical Understanding. New York: McGraw-Hill (p. 69)

I never give much explicit attention to the musical elements in my music teaching. It seems to me that if you take a compositional or creative approach in your teaching – when the students are engaged in creating their own musical work – all the elements will be present, and the students’  learning and understanding will grow through the manipulation of these, through the creative process. They are elements after all. They are all present, all the time. And they can learned very effectively through implicit teaching, and rigorous musical environments.

Jackie Wiggins presented at the ASME [Australian Society of Music Education] conference I attended in Launceston in July, and another approach she talked about was the use of dimensions, or metadimensions. Metadimensions might be genres or styles or other affective qualities, that can prove a powerful “doorway in” to creative work. I started to see that the sort of broad starting points of compositional language that I use in the projects I lead with the MSO ArtPlay Ensemble to take this approach.

She talks about “creative probelm-solving” as being the broad descriptor for the kinds of composition tasks her students engage in – “problem-solving” in that the tasks that are set require the students to undertake their own investigation and develop their own solutions. The tasks are authentic, and very open-ended. The questions the students ask are the same questions an adult, or a profssional musician would need to ask if tackling the same problem. This too, is true of the way I like to work with students. I’ve essentially adapted my own group-devising processes I would use with peers and other professionals, for the work that I do in primary/elementary schools. The questions that need to be asked in order to solve the problem are essentially the same.

I realise too, that in a project-based context, I try to give participants a range of experiences, and then a musical problem to solve. The ‘experiences’ might be new concepts or techniques, or particular musical strategies that I think will be useful in the creative problem-solving task that follows. I wonder if, when mapping out my pedagogy, and how it varies in the different environments in which I work (from orchestras to refugee/minimal schooling backgrounds) I could build my workshop plans around the two strands of Experiences and Problem-solving?

Mondrian Mondrian Mondrian

Ever since I wrote my post on my Music and Visual Arts workshop that I taught at the University this semester, my blog stats have gone through the roof. Every day, it seems 30 or more people read that post.One day over a hundred read it.

Now, I am not complaining at all about the number of visits – bring it on, I say. But who are all these Mondrian fans? Why so many of you? (No disrespect to Mondrian intended). Have I unwittingly tapped into some kind of zeitgeist? And what do you think of the workshop? Have you tried it out? Leave some comments, I’m fascinated.