Things the Pelican Primary School Choir learned at their concert

Last night the Pelican Primary School Choir gave their first public performance under my direction. They were invited to sing at a special Mayor’s Community Function, for the local city hall. They were the only child performers (no other schools were there), and they were the only performance item  – the other musical performers were roving jazz musicians.

They performed beautifully, and were incredibly chuffed with themselves. The entire experience was a positive one, in which lots was learned. I rely on these kinds of experiences to make sense of music learning for the children. They provide context for everything they do with me in class, and provide a strong motivation for working hard in music classes. Here are some of the things I think were learned or revealed last night.

1. This was an authentic performance experience.

They performed to an audience of adults. A sympathetic audience, yes, but not made up of parents or teachers or other members of the school community. These were strangers giving the Pelicans their full attention, who responded with delight to the performance. This was not something just for kids, playing at being a performance. This was a real, serious, important, formal event, at which they were the stars.

2. They have to place their trust in the conductor

Before we performed I gave them the little pep talk I give all the child performers I work with. “Once we are on the stage,” I told them, “I want you to give me your whole focus. Look at me. Other people might be taking photos, or smiling, and you might think it is polite to look at them. But I want you to look at me. After we have finished performing, there will be lots of time for smiling and photos. But while we are singing, I want you to only think about the songs, and to keep your eyes on me.”

I think children need to hear this. They need to be reminded that a performance space is a precious, ephemeral space, that they are in control of. They need permission to look away from the eagerly supportive parent who is urging them to smile for the camera.

They also need to trust me, that I will support them and help them give the best possible performance. I reassure them that if they get out there and feel strange or nervous or unsure, all they need to do is look at me, and I will be able to help them. I will be able to mouth the words, to show them where we are up to. I will be able to smile at them, and help them relax. I will not take my eyes away from them for a second.

3. They learned that I can cover any mistakes, so that this is not a burden or stress they need to carry

One girl had an additional role – she played the metalophone at the start of one of the songs. She was very nervous when the time came, and only looked at me for a second before looking down at her instrument. She started to play before I had counted her in, so I joined in with her. She got confused about the number of repetitions in the chord structure, so began to change chords at random.

I could tell she was confused. I accompanied her, following her irregular changes, but all the while, whenever she got back to the first chord in the progression, whispering the repetition numbers to her (as we had practised them) until she got back on track. Then we repeated the progression a few more times, so that she could hear it was indeed solid and steady and fine.

She also learned that she had to keep going, until she found her way through the confusion. I could help her with this, but she also found the confidence to keep going, rather than to falter and stop. That instrumental section returned three times throughout the piece, and every other time she performed it perfectly. At the end she gave me a tiny smile of relief and, I think, pride.

4. They learned the importance of presenting themselves with poise

We organised ourselves into a line to walk out in. We planned how the children playing instruments would leave their places in the formation, and how they would return to them at the end of the song. We talked about standing with two feet evenly on the ground, hands by sides, looking towards me. They did all of this so beautifully, I think the two teachers from the school who’d come with us were quite taken aback.

I think most people in the audience fell a little bit in love with my soloist on the night. This was a little Grade Two boy, with a bright and confident manner, who sang the opening verse to our final song before being joined by the rest of the choir. I asked him to stand in front of the choir when he sang his solo, and to step back into the line when his solo was finished. I never needed to remind him of this, he did it exactly as I had asked, each time. Very professional!

As he sang, he sang out. He sang in a confident voice. He smiled as he stepped back into line. Hearts melted (although I expect his parents’ hearts swelled with pride).

On reflection, he was the perfect choice as a soloist (and to be honest, I am still new enough in the school that I don’t always know how individuals will react when I pose a challenge for them). He took it seriously, and he never once doubted himself. He never giggled or got self-conscious. He never let himself get distracted by other children in rehearsals trying to distract him. And thus, he created the perfect template for the choir of what it means to do a solo, and what it requires of you.

And of course, when we present ourselves with poise and confidence, we enhance our feelings of confidence. Perhaps, even if only on a subtle level, the students also learned this.

5. They learned what they have to offer

This is a school where many students struggle. They may struggle with life skills, or academically, or socially, or because they are under-nourished, or because they don’t get much attention in their big chaotic families. Taking part in this concert, and being applauded, showed them that they have much to offer, especially when they work together. The music for this concert – four songs, all with actions or arrangements to be memorised – was worked on over many weeks. I fervently, strenuously hope that they might now recognise how all of those weeks was a progression towards this kind of outcome, and how great outcomes like this are completely within their reach, when they put in the work.

6. They learned that I have expectations of them…

… and that I won’t accept less. That this is what being in an ensemble means, and that we are only going to do it in an authentic, meaningful way. That the fun comes while you’re working hard. And that I am very proud of them.

—

They also will soon learn that these kinds of performances bring further rewards. The local council paid us a performance fee and we are going to put that towards some new instruments. Today I talked with one of the local music stores about bringing a selection of instruments up to the school during choir time so that the choir people can help select what we buy with that money. This way, they will get to enjoy the material contribution they have made to the school through their hard word too. I’m planning to put together a price check-list for them, and let them circle the instruments they think we should buy (up to the maximum money we have to spend). I’ll then make the final decision.

 

Directed or creative?

My teaching style usually emphasises creative projects with children where they are actively engaged in inventing music, and seeking out solutions to musical problems or challenges. However, it needs to be said that this approach (which I believe to be far richer pedagogically, leading to deep musical understanding among children) can be very demanding on the teacher:

• It requires you to think on your feet, constantly ready to respond to the music as it emerges from the children’s efforts;
• My creative projects often span several weeks, if not the whole term, so there can be quite a lot of planning and developing that needs to take place between each lesson;
• When children get over-excited through the freedom of the process (which can happen, and is quite an issue at Pelican PS), then a huge amount of energy needs go into simply containing them and keeping the process on track. It is this last point that I think I find the most debilitating sometimes.

By the time Term 4 started, I knew I was feeling pretty weary. It has been a busy year of projects! The children were too, so I decided to develop a number of ‘directed’ projects for us all, projects that would involve playing and singing, but primarily through learning material, rather than inventing it.

It has proved a good tactic. At the Language School, the Middle Primary class with its very particular group of demanding, narcissistic boys has really benefited from learning specific, pre-existing material. There had been too much hijacking of creative tasks in previous terms, in terms of disruptive behaviour, and tantrums when collaborative processes didn’t go their way, and things felt much calmer this term.

Here’s a rundown of the kinds of things we’ve done:

Lower Primary – Learning the song Ho ho watanay and developing accompaniments (some learned, some invented). Lots of instruments, and detailed structure to memorise.

Middle Primary – Learning the song Ah ya zahn (traditional song in Arabic from Lebanon) with various learned instrumental accompaniments. This song introduced the children to thefull chromatic glockenspiels, and they learned to play the melody, with its wonderfully twisting, middle-eastern mode.

Upper Primary – Learning the song Sakura form Japan (both in Japanese and in the English translation that I wrote some years ago). The UP students also created new melodic material on glockenspiels, using a Japanese mode (take off all the Gs and Ds so that you are left with F-A-B-C-E). I asked them to think of a flower or plant that is special to the country they come from. From these suggestions we developed three spoken phrases, with rhythms implied by the syllables of the words. Then, working in teams, they selected notes from the mode in order to make a melody to this rhythm. Their words included:

Hababa flower, many colours (from Ethiopia, Oromo people)

Some big, some small, pink, purple, white and blue

Yellow sunflower, follows the sun (suggested by an Assyrian boy from Iraq)

Shishke on the Christmas tree, all the year round (from a Russian girl)

At Pelican Primary School, things have been similarly structured:

Preps and Grade Ones have invented their own simple version of the song Driving in my car (originally by the UK pop group Madness). These are very cute songs. We’re trying to add instruments, and on a good day, it all comes together.

Grade ones and Twos are singing The Earth is our mother and have created several melodic phrases inspired by sentences that describe ways to keep the planet healthy.

Grades 3 and 4 have learned to sing Ah Ya Zahn and developed similar accompaniments to those that I’ve taught at the Language School.

However, my Pelican Primary School experiences are making me re-think a lot of the creative work that I do. These children have so much creative energy, but zero internal discipline (as a group) to hold their focus long enough to make something work. In my experience, this kind of constant distraction, or distractedness, is quite common in schools where there are high numbers of refugee-background students. These kids have so much to gain from well-managed, clearly-structured creative processes. However, many of the tactics I have developed at the Language School have been proving too loose for the children at Pelican PS.

I’ve spoken about this with some of the other teachers, and they confirm that this lack of capacity to engage well with creative tasks occurs in other classes too. “Even just having a discussion about something with the class is very difficult in this school,” one teacher admitted. The disciplines of listening to each other, taking turns, not interrupting or shouting another person down, aren’t really present.

In music too, more open tasks make many of the students feel uncertain about what is expected of them, and this uncertainty (coupled perhaps with general insecurities, and the abstract nature of music in the first place) sees them go off-task very quickly, and just make random noise.

I’ve written before (see here) about the way the Pelican students seem to respond to noise in general, and specifically to multiple sources of sound in music. Little by little I am realising that the strategies I’ve been developing for ESL/ELL students in the Language School can’t be transferred here automatically. The students in the Language School have a far greater capacity to focus and remain engaged.  Perhaps the length of general classroom focus is always determined by the shortest attention span – or the shortest attention span among the more dominant class members!

There are lots of children from refugee backgrounds at Pelican Primary School. If we think about survival skills – being able to stand up for yourself, and get what you need for you and your family, making sure your voice is heard over the top of many other voices, making sure you are never at the end of a line, no matter what, being quick to react to any new potential threats around you, and learning to respond to a constantly chaotic environment – then we can see a kind of progression from those survival tactics to the common strategies employed by many students in the school. Lots of shouting over each other, interrupting conversations (often not noticing if said conversation is even taking place!), turning heads to watch whatever is taking place elsewhere in the room, and so on.

I feel very sure that music can offer these children opportunities  and motivation to break some of these patterns, and to experience themselves as learners in a different way. Creative music-making offers the additional benefit of a sense of ownership over the music, a validation and endorsement of one’s own contributions to the process, a deep understanding of the music from the inside out, and a powerful means of self-expression and individual voice. But I do need to figure out some new and powerful ways into creative music that scaffold each of the smallest of steps, and offer tangible experiences of success and delight to the students in as short a period of time as possible, due to those peskily short attention spans. Those experiences of success and delight are the key to their motivation to continue working cooperatively with me and with each other.

 

Learning lyrics in a new language

The Lower Primary class I teach at the Melbourne English Language School is very sweet – lots of energy and goodwill, and an impressive ability to focus as a group and make some coherent music together. This term we have been with two traditional songs from Canada (Iroquois, I belive) – Ho ho watanay and Canoe song.

Both these songs can be accompanied with a simple 2-chord pattern. I tend to play them in D minor, with the second chord being C. The chord progression is Dmin | Dmin | C | Dmin.

It’s been a lovely project. We’ve worked out some accompanying patterns on glockenspiels, which they’ve invented themselves, and we’ve added in some drums. We’ve tried singing both Ho ho watanay and The Canoe Song as partner songs, and we’ve tried them as rounds.

For these young English learners, Ho ho watanay is the simpler of the two, as the lyrics are repetitive, and are just a series of simple sounds to be memorised:

Ho ho watanay, ho ho watanay

Ho ho watanay, kee-o-ka-na kee-o-ka-na

The Canoe song is more complicated, with lots of unfamiliar English words:

My paddle’s clean and bright, flashing with silver

Follow the wild goose flight, Dip, dip and swing.

They picked up on the ‘Dip, dip and swing’ line first and have always sung that with gusto. However, they struggle with ‘Follow the wild goose flight’ – lots of words, lots of syllables, a d-ending followed by a g- beginning… and other similar challenges. Last week I devised some simple warm-up games to get them to repeat this line and become more confident with it:

1. Pass The Sound – this is a Game we play every week, where a single sound (usually a clap, a ssshh, or other vocal or body percussion sounds) gets passed one by one around the circle. It’s like Chinese Whispers except the intention is for the sound to copied accurately every time. To bring the focus on the lyrics, I passed around single words like ‘follow’ or ‘goose’ or ‘wild’. Then I strung two words together, such as ‘wild goose’ and ‘goose flight’. Then we moved onto three-word strings – ‘wild goose flight’ or ‘follow the wild’. Lastly we sent the whole phrase ‘follow the wild goose flight’ around the circle. The children enjoyed the predictability of this game, but it also gave them a chance to hear their own voice pronouncing these unfamiliar sounds (and to hear that others in the group were also struggling).
2. How Many Words? - I know that when I am learning a new language it helps if I can visualise how the sounds separate into different words. I asked the Lower Primary children to tell me how many words were in each line of the song (particularly this difficult line) by counting on their fingers as they said the line aloud.
3. Hocketting- Lastly we said the line one word at a time, around the circle. Then we tried saying the whole song like this.

The children remained engaged throughout all these tactics. It gave me a chance to hear and assist the children who are often very silent during singing tasks, and to encourage them to try these words aloud, and in the context of the song. The singing of the song became much more confident. I’ll have to wait until next Tuesday to find out how much has been retained!

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:

‘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.

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?

Saying the Koran

It’s Ramadan at the moment, and for one class of grade one students at Pelican PS it turns out that means murmuring prayers from the Koran intermittently throughout the music lesson. It started when the class arrived at the music room door – one of the boys was speaking very quickly in Arabic, and it sounded to me like a learned prayer. I asked him what he was saying and he said it was the Koran. Another began to join in, enthusiastically. “It’s the Koran, he’s saying the Koran,” other children informed me. They spoke very fast, like it was a race, and I remember when I was child going to Mass how some of the longer prayers like the Creed (do we call that a prayer? I don’t know…) sounded like incredibly fast and complex whisha-whisha whispering, and it seemed amazing to me that people could remember all those words in order.

In that class, we started with some circle games to get the focus settled and then began to sing a song, one that they already knew. But after the first verse I realised there was something odd in the sound, and it took me a while to adjust my ears and work out what was going on. Someone was saying the Koran (I’m describing it as “saying the Koran” because that is what the children called it) while we were singing.

This hasn’t happened before. I figured it probably had something to do with Ramadan. I stopped the song and asked the children concerned what they were saying while we were singing. I assured them they weren’t in trouble, that I had noticed they were saying something else and that I was interested to know what it was.

This question led to a stream of information about Islam and being a Muslim, in the words of emphatic, intense grade ones. They told me about how there is the God Allah, and about how Adam was the first prophet and he “made everything”. One boy went off onto a kind of tangent after mention of Adam, about how the aim was to get to the place where everything was perfect, all green fields, beautiful mountains and where you no longer had to do anything, you didn’t need to eat, you could just be there… I must have looked puzzled, because one of the girls then chimed in, helpfully, “It’s kind of like paradise”.

I was intrigued. The children went on to talk about the evils of a character called ShayDan (I may have remembered this name incorrectly, and I have no idea how to spell it), who might “come up and whisper in your ear, tell you to do bad things, like, he might tell you to go up to this other kid and bash his face in!” One boy re-told a story he had been told at the mosque about a young boy and girl who had been going to the mosque to pray, but ShayDan had come up to them and gone into their ears, and then they didn’t go into the mosque they went away and started behaving very badly, and this was because of ShayDan.

All very interesting. I never quite worked out why they had started saying the Koran during the song, as most of the Muslim children had been happy enough to sing along. I suggested that we sing the song again, and that children who wanted to say the Koran could say it after the song was finished. And if they didn’t want to sing with us today, they could just stay silent. What was interesting this second time through was that pretty well all the Muslim children now wouldn’t sing, and took the option of being silent. One girl started to sing, but had a stern finger wagged at her across the circle by one of the boys, and though she protested, saying, “What?” and gesticulating back to him, she stopped singing too. It ended up being a rather feeble rendition of the song, with the remaining non-Muslim children looking a little confused about what was going on.

Anyway… I draw no particular conclusion from this lesson. I’ve taught lots of Muslim children before, and taught during Ramadan, and never had anyone start ’saying the Koran’ during a song before. I know that there are many groups within the Muslim community who hold different views on the place of music, and on participation in music, and I’ve been in schools that respond to these concerns in different ways. That day at Pelican I went back to the staffroom and asked if anyone had had children start reciting Koranic verses in the middle of classes before and no-one had. Sometimes I know that teachers wonder if the children create new rules for themselves of what they can and can’t do at school, knowing that the non-Muslim teaching staff won’t know which are real rules and which have perhaps been invented by the child, or are exaggerated or misinterpreted…. It can get very complex. I need to do a lot more investigation, so please forgive the scant attention and uninformed deliberation I am giving this topic tonight, and consider these thoughts as my initial entrees into a complex area for discussion! Meanwhile, I’d be interested to hear of other people’s experiences of opposition to music or songs for reasons of religious belief.

This Music Education forum in the United States discusses the issue of children not participating in music classes, and points out that there are other groups (such as Jehovah Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventist groups) who may abstain from music involvement. And this article draws upon one music teacher’s experiences in the British education system.