‘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.

Syncopation without explanation

I’m a big believer in implicit learning environments – where a musically-rich and consistent environment enables students to build all sorts of understandings about the language of music and how it functions, without dependence on explanations or theory. This is the main characteristic that underpins my teaching at the English Language School I work in once a week as a music workshop artist.

However, challenges do arise when the only person in the room able to maintain the musically-consistent environment is you. And when you can’t give verbal explanations (you can, but the majority of students won’t understand and will either tune out, or get stressed or confused) it can be hard to establish a critical mass of understanding of certain concepts.

Here’s a challenge I am grappling with – the Upper Primary students are learning the song People Get Ready. We’re accompanying it on xylophone with a 2-part riff that has a slightly syncopated rhythm. The notes are simple and easy to memorise, but the students struggle to imitate the counting. They tend to speed up and lose the syncopation.

Tiny (my boyfriend – also a musician) suggested I do some work with all the quavers in a bar of 4/4 and try and establish a bit more understanding of the hidden beats. “Get them to clap on certain numbers of a cycle of 8 beats,” was his thought. I’ve used this kind of tactic before, but felt unsure it would work in the ESL setting, because it would introduce a new rhythmic idea, and the students might then be confused about which rhythm was to be used. How could I establish that this was just a teaching tool, rather than a new part of our musical arrangement?

However, I had no other solution, and I was also curious. I could see that for some students it might cause confusion, but that for others, it could offer some clarity about how the synocpated rhythm worked. They might figure out the relationship between the two all by themselves.

Here’s what we did:

1. I wrote the numbers 1 to 8 on the whiteboard, and asked the students to count them out loud, 4 times.
2. I put a red square around number one, and asked them to clap on the 1, as they counted all the numbers aloud.
3. I put a red square around number 2, so that they were now clapping 1 and 2 in the cycle of 8.
4. I gave out untuned percussion instruments and got them to play on those numbers now (as a way of repeating the exercise a few more times but adding an additional element, as well as creating new interest).
5. I then added some more squares, around numbers 3, 4, and 7. This clapped numbers now became our syncopated rhythm. Beat no. 5 was the one they had to get used to waiting for in their heads.
6. We clapped this new rhythm, counting all the numbers aloud, and giving a wave of the hands on beats 5 and 7.
7. I asked individuals to clap or play the rhythm on their own (another tactic to encourage listening and attention – they like to perform on their own – and add new interest to the task).
8. I brought out the bass xylophone. Under the different squared numbers I wrote the notes of the syncopated riff we had learned the previous 2 weeks. One by one they took it in turns to play (or try to play) the riff, with this new awareness of silence on beats 5 and 8.

This last step was more confusing than I’d expected. We had previously learned the notes by counting aloud how many times each note was played before changing notes:

C C C F_ FF | F F G C_ CC

(Hopefully my spacing between letters, and use of underscore,  shows some reference to the notation here!) Now we had new numbers to count aloud – that’s a lot of similar numbers, meaning different things – and the feel of the pitch contour and rhythm together suddenly felt more awkward.

For some students, it was easier to play the riff (and blur the syncopation, as before) and ignore the numbers from the cycle of 8 beats we had been using in the previous task. When they tried to count the 8-beat cycle while playing, and keep track of the note changes, they got confused. Others, however, had little moments of understanding the relationship. You could hear it in the way they started adjusting the riff, paying more attention to beats 5 and 8, and sitting on the middle or back of the beat, rather than right at the front.

So the strategy worked for some students, definitely. But perhaps I am still missing something. Can I make this even simpler, in an implicit, rather than explicit way? I’m sure I can. I’d love any of your thoughts.

End of term round-up

I did my last teaching day for the term today. It was a corker. The last class – preps – were kind of all over the place. Last week I’d noted that I should give them more variety, hand out more instruments…. but I would say that the bigger range of instruments led to way more distraction, because they all wanted to change, and try everything. And they are not a very discipline class overall. Very excitable. Next time I’ll go back to just 2 or 3 different instrument groups.

I’ve been doing lots of ‘Conducting’ with the early years groups. I teach them hand signals for ‘pick up’, ‘play’, ’stop’, and ‘put down’. Anyone who misses a cue, or plays at the wrong time has to give me their instrument and sit out. Different children get to try conducting. It teaches them to keep their eye on me, and to stop playing on cue.

It’s been quite a hit (though I think I am exhausting its novelty now). They watch incredibly carefully, especially as sometimes I try and ‘trick’ them…. they take great delight in being absolutely accurate.

The other thing I’ve been doing with the lower years is metronome work, where we set the metronome ticking and try and play in time with it. They also get an incredibly strong focus with this.

That’s at Pelican Primary School. At Language School, we finished the term with a performance last week for Refugee Week, and an end-of-term concert for the parents and other classes. Here’s what we did:

Lower Primary

We finished composing our song Many, many butterflies, inspired by their visit to the Butterfly House at Melbourne Zoo, and in part a strategy to encourage them to ‘play like butterflies’ on the instruments (ie. not whack them so hard). We accompanied it with guitar, and lots of quiet triangle, bell, and glockenspiel playing, tapping gently on the pulse and working in cycles of eight beats.

Middle Primary

We composed a rousing song for Refugee Week, Big Strong Heart, which included call-and-response verses, and a chorus in 2 parts. At the public performance last week we taught it to the audience and they sang with us. Yesterday at the school concert we taught it to the parents and other students. We accompanied it with four different rhythmic and tuned percussion parts. I have a pretty skilled drummer in the MP class at the moment – I will be coming up with some new project ideas for next term that will engage directly with his skills.

Upper Primary

The UP class performed two items for the end-of-term concert – our percussion piece based on riffs from Beyonce’s song Bellydancer (I assume it is Beyonce – that is what the kids told me), with its very funky 12/8 chorus Shake-a-balika-balika Dancer. Then they performed the song they wrote for the builders, to celebrating the completion of the new library building. They performed this song a few weeks ago, at the opening ceremony for the library, and it was so well-received that we decided to perform it again.

So now I get a break from teaching, which is great. Next week I am back with the MSO ArtPlay Ensemble with a 2-day project based on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and then one day of artist training for the Royal Children’s Hospital. Then I got on a week’s holiday.

Tuned percussion strategy

At Pelican PS I’ve developed a new strategy for building skills in students working with tuned percussion (we have a small range of Orff-style xylophones and metalaphones). They often find it difficult to locate notes on the instruments, or to get used to the leaps and stepwise movement in the parts.

The following strategy came into being one day when, out of the blue, the music room wasn’t available and I didn’t want us to waste a lesson doing something unrelated to our instrumental work. I decided to get the students to sing and play their parts, using vocal sounds and body percussion. Drums were easily covered with chest thumps and patsching. Guiro players mimed their pattern and imitated the guiro sound with their voices.

For the tuned percussion, we had an ostinato:

D-A-D-A

C-G-D

It’s basically a pattern in fifths, following a Dmin, Dmin, C, Dmin chord progression. I got them to ‘play’ it on their bodies, using the following points:

D = knees

A = top of head

C = floor

G = shoulders

They weren’t hitting these body parts in order to make a sound; rather, the intention was to create a visual simulation of the distance between the notes on the xylophone.

The students seemed to enjoy dong it this way. It proved to be a good way to help them memorise the pattern (bear in mind these are children who have not had a lot of regular opportunities to play tuned percussion instruments), to stay focused on the ostinato, and to internalise the sense of distance between the notes. Later, we kept all of these body percussion parts in the piece, and used them as a warm-up before moving onto instruments. I’ve since used it with another class, for a different tune (a more complex one, with stepwise movement as well as leaps), and they too have responded well to this way of practising a riff, away from the instruments.

Noise

In my last post I described a tactic I’ve developed at Pelican Primary School that, to my surprise works incredibly well  as a way of introducing instruments, playing techniques, and building focus and participation. It involves just one instrument to be passed around the group, with each person getting to play it, one by one. Nothing else is taking place at this time. Everyone’s attention is on the person with the instrument.

The focus we get when just one instrument is passed around surprised me at first, and surprised the class teacher too. The first time I tried it, the kids had been really badly behaved – disruptive, unfocused, a little bit crazy… we started the one-instrument-taking-in-turns idea about two-thirds of the way through the lesson. Suddenly they were calm!

I wonder if it is the fact that there is just ONE THING going on in the circle. They all focus on it. Their interest in instruments is genuine… also, perhaps they see that they are going to get a turn, and so are happy to wait for that (and sense that they should behave well, or they might miss out). It is a visual activity as well as a physical one – they can see what is going on throughout the task.

I also wonder if they struggle with the noise level when multiple instruments are passed around the circle. Not only does this create confusion about where their attention should be directed, it may trigger a kind of panicked ‘chaos’ reaction in their brains.

Earlier this term a brass quintet came to perform for the students. The whole school was in the hall for the concert, and apparently they were pretty naughty. The next day in the staff room, teachers told me about it, shaking their heads in a kind of amazed horror at the memory of it.

It was at this time that I began to wonder if in fact these children don’t cope very well with too much noise (which is ironic, because they generate a lot of it). Unfamiliar or unexpected noise can be a very stressful thing. Hearing loss or damage can cause people stress and make them respond in a snappy way all of a sudden if constant jarring noise is inflicted upon them (like the players sitting in front of the brass in a confined orchestra pit, for example). I wonder if a lot of the Pelican students have a similar, reflex reaction to unfamiliar, loud sounds. They get overwhelmed, they feel a little panicked or over-excited inside, and they don’t have the self-discipline (or group discipline) to have a programmed, calm response when this happens.

Interesting… What can I do to help them? Develop their listening skills… playing music that gradually adds parts could help, as they will be actively involved in noticing and accepting each new part as it is added, and hearing/experiencing how it ‘locks in’ rhythmically… Encourage them to listen critically to recorded music and its elements… encourage attention to good quality of sound when they play… see if they can articulate how they experience live music in their heads and in their bodies, thus hopefully building greater awareness and understanding of the experience, both physically and mentally. And emotionally.

Progress at Pelican PS

It is already week 8 of the term, which means things are starting crank up, in order to round up by week 10. I’ve been enjoying my new teaching at Pelican Primary School, and little by little and working out some effective tactics with these kids.

• Starting the music lesson the same way each week (a Name Game – very simple) really does seem to ground everyone and pull the focus in. Often it is all the warm-up we need.
• Things can still be chaotic when I bring the instruments out…. but I want them to have these experiences. One thing that is working with all the year levels is to take just ONE instrument (a drum, a xylophone… it works with all of them), and pass it around the circle one by one. Despite their time being spent mostly just waiting (and hopefully listening to each other), they focus incredibly well when we do this. Who’d have thought?
• We need to move through tasks lightning-fast with the younger children, particularly the preps that I teach last lesson on a Wednesday. It’s like aiming for constant distraction, but with a little bit of music work disguised in every task.

I’m also developing my rapport with the different teachers, as we get to know each other. A couple of weeks ago, I posted my realisations about the importance of a Strong Beginning in each of my music lessons. Since that week, that class has always been ready to start on time, and I’ve had some great support and participation from the teacher. Now I can also see what the class is like despite a strong, clear start to the lesson. That’s been important to know as well – it means that little by little, I can get a sense of what will work with this class, in the last lesson on a Wednesday afternoon.

Slowly coming to understanding

We finished the music term at the Language School last week, and presented our compositions to parents and friends. Only two students were graduating on to mainstream schools this term, which means we will have lots of the same students returning next term.

It was an interesting term. It seemed to take a while to get settled. I suspect I was more distracted by things outside the school for much of the term – redundancy, and the intensive thesis-writing mode I was in, in particular. Each class have lots of new arrivals, so the level of English understanding was almost zilch.

Interesting things to observe were the different ways students started to show their understanding of what was going on. ‘Experiences of success’ can come in many different ways. For example, I see them taking pride and care in knowing how to put the instruments away at the end of the lesson. This sounds like a small thing, but it is probably an act that is familiar, that they can figure out on their own. These newest students – boys and girls – will pass me the instruments one by one, then scout the room for anything further.

In terms of musical development, things happen at their own pace. Middle Primary has a new student from Ethiopia (I think, or maybe Somalia) who has had very little prior schooling. She spent the first couple of weeks positioning herself next to the teacher and looking very lost. She joined in everything until she had to do something on her own (such as say her name in time to a shared beat), at which point she would get very quiet and shy, understandably so. In the class composition she chose to play the glockenspiel, one of a group of four who were all playing the same melody. She never quite got the hand of it. Her teacher sat beside her, guiding her hand, and saying the rhythmic syllables (based on different fruits) out loud. Then she seemed to invent her own part, which we encouraged her to do; musically, harmonically, it worked, but her rhythm was never quite accurate enough to make it truly fit with the other parts, and for a few weeks there, we were all just tolerating it, and those others in her group got progessively louder (and therefore progressively faster) in order to drown her out!

So it was with great delight in our concert that I noticed her making small adjustments in her music, so that it fit better with the other parts around her. Gradually, she was building confidence in what it was she was to play, and therefore slowly getting to a point where she could let the other sounds into her ear, and be guided by them. My sense was that she had dropped into a new level in music, that I think will allow her to experience even greater awareness and success in the lessons next term.

The presence of lots of new students highlights for me the importance of patience, of trusting that understanding comes slowly, or at different speeds for different children, but that it does come. As with their English learning, it is first about exposure to the new language (sounds) and a slow absorbing of the rules and syntax, through experiencing them, rather than having them explained. If the environment is consistent, then understanding grows, and actual abilities can flurish, and start to be developed further.

The stick-passing game

This is a great game. I first learned it from my friend and colleague (and all-round inspiring human being) Eugene Skeef. It was during the year I worked in Bosnia with War Child. A group of us had driven out to a town called Ljubinje, in Republika Srpska. This town was extremely isolated – situated near two inter-entity borders, so people there didn’t have a lot of freedom of movement. There was a very motivated and energetic drama teacher there, so our team went out to work with him and his students and give them some support in building a creative and peaceful life.

Eugene led the workshop. He asked all in the group to go outside and find a stone. It needed to be a stone that was small enough (and large enough) to fit comfortably in a hand. Smooth stones were preferable, but not essential; ideally the stones would have a certain robustness too, and not fall apart on impact.

Everyone went out and found a stone to their liking, and came back into the workshop room. Eugene got us all to sit or kneel on the floor in a circle, with our hands on our stones in front of us.

He then explained how the game works:

On a given count, everyone passes their stone to the right. They have to place it on the floor in front of the person on their right. They then pick up the stone that is now in front of them (placed there by the person on their left).

Playing in time

With our focus on jamming and improvisation this term, I’ve been looking for ways to help the children play more in time with each other. This is tricky enough to teach in English, let alone with students with a very minimal command of English!

Firstly, I want to state my own position: I believe that we all have an innate understanding of music, that gets built on everyday, when we listen to music (of our own choice, or as background music). I want to tap into this innate knowledge somehow, in building ensemble-playing skills. I think that one of the main things that gets in the way is trying, when we become so focused on effort and on getting it right, that we tense up and become more awkward (and less natural or easy) in our efforts. (This earlier post talks in more detail about the way I like to teach, for those who would like to know more).

Therefore, I don’t like to bring to much attention to the issue of ensemble when it arises, because I don’t want anyone to get tense or worry about it, or think of themselves as failing somehow. But I do want them to be aware, and to develop more sophisticated understanding of how to play together. There were a few things that happened this term at the Language School that seemed to work, so I’ll list them here.

Improvising, composing and jamming

It’s end of term, so time for a bit of a wrap-up of where this term’s projects got to at the Language School.

I started the term with an interest in developing some improvisation skills among the Upper and Middle Primary students, and developing music on Identity, that would respond in part to music the students would teach to the class from their own countries and cultures.

Lower Primary on the other hand were so crazy and unsettled that the focus was to get them to be able to play together, to follow some simple conducting signals so that they might experience the pleasure of playing in an ensemble. I’ll write about them in a separate post.

Improvising

This proved tricky to introduce in some ways, and some of this was to do with language, some of it was cultural, and some of it was to do with the way that student learning develops in Language School (ie. the systems that support the students to learn when they have very little language schools to help them). I discussed some of these issues in earlier posts here and here, so won’t repeat myself… in any case, as the term progressed, I found that the work we were doing began to settle, musically.

In the end, what improvisation do we have? In the Upper Primary piece, we have a drum part (played by seven drummers, so pretty loud! They are sh0wing considerable restraint, I have to say) which came from the young Sudanese girl at the start of November. I am guessing that this was a rhythm she knew from somewhere else. She has left the school now, by the way.

We have 3 xylophone parts, and here the origins of the parts are more varied. One part came from me – I taught it, and the student plays it exactly the way I showed her, and she seems to love it. Her friend, playing next to her, is envious, and has tried through various sneaky means to swap parts (to no avail). The friend, May, has an improvised part to play. I originally asked her to invent her own melodies, always ending on either C or G. The first week, she did this well. She was reluctant, but with a lot of encouragement, she gave it a go, and executed the task well. The following week however, she mutineed. She wouldn’t say a word (not in English, not in Chinese), and I wondered if perhaps she needed to withdraw from the piece altogether, so pained she seemed. This week, I spontaneously came up with a new strategy.

“May,” I said, “I think that today we should choose music for you to play, that you can remember. We will all help you make this. I think that will be easier for you than always making something up.”

May looked a little unconvinced at first (something of her usual facial expression in music, it has to be said), but a couple of other students surprised me by saying, “Yes, it is easier, I think. It is better.” So May agreed.

I asked her to play me (improvise – though I didn’t use that word) one of her melodies. “Start on G,” I suggested. She played a string of notes, I asked if she liked them, I sang them back to her, she thought they sounded okay, and I wrote them down on the blackboard. We did the same with a second melody. Of course, she referred back to ideas she had already worked with in the previous weeks when she was improvising. And her third melody was her most ambitious, with jumps and triads and a definite ‘hook’.It seemed like she was gaining confidence in the process, and her own contributions.