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.

Inside and outside ‘The Square’

A number of interesting scenarios have come up in discussions recently:

In one undergraduate class at Melbourne University, a group was asked to create a piece in response to an abstract painting by Russian artist Stepanova. It consisted of very free, dynamic spirals of paint, and words in Russian scattered across the canvas. Their piece included some dramatic and evocative ’spirals’ of different percussion colour, underpinned by piano playing very straight, arpeggio-driven, tonal piano chords (essentially a I-IV-V-I pattern). When I questioned the choice and musical role of the piano, one of the group turned to me in mock exasperation. “Let’s face it G,” she said, “She’s the only one of us with any musical skills!” The rest of the group all nodded in agreement, and I was dismayed.

In a postgraduate class, a group was composing a piece depicting sea people having a wild, joyous party under the light of a full moon, on a beach. One of the group, while trying out some ideas on the xylophone, found she could play part of a theme of music from a party scene in the Disney film ‘The Little Mermaid’. She played this one phrase as her part in a group composition with many layers, and it had a lot of energy and infectious drive.

In a professional development session for music teachers, designed to build their confidence in using creative and compostional approaches in music with their students (rather than only note-learning, and pre-existing ensemble charts), one group of secondary teachers was asked to create music depicting ‘an island’. The project brief required them to imagine this island and its characteristics, and create music to depict this. The group’s first decision was that, if it were to be ‘island music’ then it would ‘obviously need to have a Calypso rhythm’. They never created an image of the island itself, but put together a piece of Calypso-style music with the percussion instruments they had.

In a composition project for young musicians working alongside professional musicians, we are focusing on the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. Themes from the Leningrad Symphony have been written out and given to the young players to learn. Others are being taught aurally. At the same time, the young players are exploring some of the compositional techniques used by Shostakovich, and applying them to their own compositions. In the final outcome, the Shostakovich quotes will be embedded within the children’s original composition work.

For me, each of the above raised questions about when and why we use pre-existing musical material (or, extending from this, music frameworks with which we are comfortable and familiar) in creative music contexts. It suggests insights about individuals’ comfort zones and their willingness to think outside the square (or conversely, to stay firmly within it).

Heartbeats and other useful musical motifs

I was teaching a class of MTeach students last week, who were working on group compositions inspired the old Selkie legends of Scotland and Ireland. I’d asked them to explore ways of depicting and utilising stillness and silence in their music.

As I listened to the work of one of the groups, I found myself wanting to suggest they add a ‘heartbeat’ rhythm on a low-pitched drum. We discussed this later, and I realised that for me, the heartbeat rhythm is an incredibly useful ‘wildcard’ in compositions. It can suggest:

• stillness and quiet
• increasing adrenaline
• fear
• thoughtfulness
• drama and tension

and lots of other atmospheres.

Which led my to compose this post, where I will start listing some of the useful composing strategies I often suggest to groups, as effective and versatile musical content. Cliches? – maybe. Fillers? – sometimes they probably play this role. But they also have the capacity to hold an audience’s attention, to create atmosphere and a sense of tension or anticipation. Learning to play a heartbeat rhythm can teach a young player a lot about creating drama and tension through very simple repetition.

What other musical motifs can you think of, that can play a similarly versatile role, and that are within reach of even very young, beginning musicians? I have also thought about:

• Drones
• the interval of a perfect 5th (or a 4th, when played downwards. Think of Mahler 1…)
• Tremolos

I’ll add more as I think of them. Please contribute any that you know are an important part of your own toolkit – we can compile a comprehensive list.

Music and art workshop

I enjoyed teaching the workshop on music and visual art this week. In this project, you ‘read’ a piece of abstract art as a graphic score, and make decisions about instruments, colour, rhythm, structure, etc. This was with a group of about 20 pre-service teaching students at Melbourne Uni, as part of a subject called Integrated Arts.

We started by working all together on this painting by Mondrian:

I asked the students the following questions:

• What do you see? (State all the obvious things)
• How does it make you feel? What response does it inspire? Is chaotic/peaceful/unstable/static/other?
• Context – what do you know about the painter? About this particular work?

‘Stating the obvious’ is very important, as it encourages participants to volunteer all their observations, rather than editing out the things that they think are less impressive, or too revealing, or some other inhibitor.

The next step is to look at the artwork as a musical score, and start to decipher/interpret it, and make decisions about its elements and what they depict. I used the following list of questions to get the students to focus their observations and decisions:

• How could you equate the different colours in this painting with different instruments?
• Do any colours vary into related shades? Textures? How might you represent these nuances with sounds?
• What kind of atmosphere is suggested by the rhythm/energy/lines/colours of the painting?
• How close together/far apart are the sounds? How does this vary around the painting? The proximity of lines or marks on the image can be suggested of rhythm.
• Are there any patterns or recurring marks/lines? How could these be depicted musically?

Our interpretation

We created a very atmostpheric, minimalist piece, with the students divided into groups of four. One of the four took on the Yellow role, playing metalaphone, another the Blue role, playing xylophone, another the red role, playing glockenspiel, and the fourth person was White, playing triangle.

We read the painting as having the yellow lines running continuous, with the other small squares of colour being imposed upon the yellow (as opposed the the yellow colour being broken or interrupted by other colours – we saw it as continuing, underneath). The small squares of colour represented single sounds on the relevant instruments. Each group chose a line to ‘read’, a direction to read it in, and a single pitch to work with. Yellow people played continuous running quavers, very lightly, on that pitch. The others played short tones, in the order and time spacing suggested by the painting, according to the line they had chosen. If we’d had time to take the project further, each group could have chosen multiple lines, and moved from one to the next. The effect of these different lines, each played ona different pitch, all being played at once, and stopping according to each group’s reading of the line, was very hypnotic and peaceful.

However, some people in the group thought that the Mondrian had quite a chaotic feel, like a bird’s eye view of a busy grid of traffic. We could have chosen different instruments and depicted this chaos, using the same group structures.

It worked well. The groups went on to choose different paintings (all by Russian abstract artists – these are my favourites, and the images I felt would work well, when I conceived this project) and create new pieces of their own.

Making progress

It has been a busy couple of weeks but I am getting through everything, in fact I feel quite pleased with my productivity! I have:

• Designed and taught a new workshop for the Integrated Arts subject at Melbourne Uni that focuses using abstract art as graphic scores for music composition
• Designed and taught a new workshop for the MTeach students at Melbourne Uni, where they are exploring creative approaches to music, and creating group compositions inspired by the Selkie legend (of the sea people who are seals in the water and humans on land)
• Planned the forthcoming workshop for AYO in Picton (part of the Silvan String Quartet’s residency in Bundanon), which is based around a piece by Elena Kats-Chernin, Charleston Noir.
• Led two Jams for MSO
• Finished two out of three sections for the ArtPlay research report I am writing, that looks at the model of practice we have developed in the MSO ArtPlay Ensemble program.

I’ve been doing all my usual teaching as well, which is going okay. Some of the work at both the Language School and Pelican PS is progressing really well, but some other class projects are less well-established. Sometimes this happens because the regular teacher is absent on music day, which means the students are a lot less focused. If this happens for a couple of weeks in a row we can lose a lot of momentum. Other times, the problem is that the project idea I had for that class doesn’t really work. This has happened with a class at Pelican today. They are a gorgeous class of Prep/Grade 1s, with a very supportive and enthusiastic teacher. A few weeks ago we developed a song that I was completely charmed by (I’m gonna buy a farm… to go with their term theme on ‘animals’) but in subsequent weeks it has really dragged and not engaged them at all. So I need to find a new idea for that group.

August planning frenzy

I have a lot of new projects approaching at the moment, in fact, some have already started. So this month is one of intensive planning. Here’s a bit of a rundown of what is percolating in my head at the moment:

Jams

For the MSO I am leading 3 Jams (and a further 2 at the start of September). ‘Jams’ are express music-making workshops on a large scale. They are geared towards all ages – families, really – and all levels of musical ability/experience. They’re a lot of fun to lead, because they are fast-paced and get a lot of people playing music together with very little preamble. I like to give the participants a brief page of musical ideas to work from, so that they have something to take home and revisit at their leisure, so I have been preparing these over the last two days. Tomorrow’s Jam is based around the standard penatonic scale – a Jam on 5 Notes.

String Quartet education project no. 2

At the end of August I am heading back up to the Shoalhaven area to work with the Silvan String Quartet, leading them in a composition project with a youth string orchestra in Picton. We’ll be basing the project on Charleston Noir by Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin. This is the second composition project I have built around a Kats-Chernin work, and I’ll be doing another one in September for the MSO. I have to say, I am really enjoying getting to know her work. Her compositional language is proving a fabulous inspiration for these kinds of projects.

Project wrap-up – May

I’ve come to the end of my crazy-busy month of May. I think it will prove to be my busiest month of the year, in terms of the range of projects I’ve done. Here’s a bit of a run-down/wrap-up:

Jam with MSO in Ballarat

Five musicians and I took the Tarrago up the Western Highway to Ballarat for the afternoon. We did a one-hour Jam with a group of children and parents. The kids were aged from about 3 upwards, I’d say.

As is often the case with the Jams, we had very little knowledge beforehand of who would be turning up, and what instruments might be there. Fortunately, this project took place in a music shop, and the store manager was very easy-going about letting us use a big range of percussion instruments from the floor stock. We shared these out among the participants and started by asking for ideas of ‘words’, or themes that we could base some improvisations around. In the end, we had the words ‘love’ and ‘machinery’ (“Love machinery?” suggested one of the MSO musicians with a bit of a devilish glint in his eye. Only one of the parents giggled along with me… so we decided to drop that particular emphasis and treat them as two separate words. Ahem).

MTeach class, week 5

From now to the end of semester, the MTeach students and I will be exploring the music of different twentieth and twenty-first century composers. Today we explored Shostakovich.

For me, Shostakovich is immensely approachable as a composer. For one thing, he is very well documented, with a lot of footage and quotes available that features people who knew him and worked with him, and heard his music performed. If you haven’t seen it before, Shostakovich against Stalin – the War Symphonies, is a must-see documentary that really depicts the times in which he lived and worked. I love it. I probably watch it every year. The interviews and archival footage are interspersed with performance footage of the symphonies by Valery Gergiev conducting the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. If you don’t know Shostakovich’s music, this film is an excellent way in.

He was a composer of his times, and justly celebrated, in a way that we don’t see these days in the ‘western art music’ world. He wrote about current events in a way that his audience connected with very directly. His use of musical symbols (quotes, rhythmic figures assigned specific meanings, melodic fragments) is in dispute between scholars, but his musical vocabulary is certainly a rich one to mine for workshop starting points.

I have led several composing projects based on Shostakovich’s music. My main points are to:

• identify a current event or topic about which the group feels strongly, to depict in the composition
• Develop ‘word-songs’ (following Shostakovich’s example with his ‘name-song’, D.SCH) as the main melodic material and mode to stick to for harmonies
• Choose several rhythmic figures or cells from Shostakovich’s music to incorporate into these pieces.

I find that this is enough to get some really interesting music happening. It did today – even limited to mostly tuned percussion instruments, each group created highly individual pieces of music. The group chose the current controversy over the photographer Bill Henson as their composition focus. They developed word-songs on words like ‘dirt’, ‘art’, ‘pervert’ and ‘photos’. Some of the small-group pieces sounded more ‘Shostakovich-y’ than others, but that’s fine. We are not looking to imitate him wholesale, rather, the intention is to create strong listening pathways into his music for all the participants.

MTeach, week 4

(Posts written on this subject are written with the MTeach students in mind, as a way of giving them notes on what we do in each class – but hopefully of interest to others as well).

Last week’s session with the MTeach students at Melbourne Uni was focused on inventing melodies. I taught them a workshop project I like very much, that involves inventing melodies through chance processes. Several people in the group had brought their own instruments with them, others played tuned percussion, guitar (including bass guitar) or piano.

This is an outline of the project:

Cycle of 6

MTeach class, week 3

This week we moved onto tuned percussion instruments. The aim is to start applying some of the rhythmic rules of last week to pitched instruments – as soon as we also have to worry about notes, things can become less stable, so I like to move people onto instruments one step at a time.

Warm-up – clap/ssh/bing/hiyah!

This is a circle game that is a variation on Zip-Bop, which I taught the class last week. I particularly like this version because it is easy to adapt it for different groups, to add new sounds and layers, and new rules. The range of vocal sounds you include can create some very interesting musical soundscapes, once the game is in progress.

• Start by sending a clap swiftly around the circle, one by one. Insist on good eye contact – each person must watch the clap as it approaches them, and when they pass it on, should make immediate eye contact with the person they are passing it to.
• Try it in both directions.
• Now get the game underway. The aim is for the clap to be passed around the circle as swiftly as possible, however, anyone, at any time, can change the direction. The game gets people’s reflexes and quick reactions engaged, and has a high ‘fun’ element.
• Now play the same rules, but use the sound ’ssshh’ instead of the clap. Once everyone has got the hang of this, give the players the choice of sounds – at anytime they can change the sound, or change the direction of the sound.
• The use of ‘bing-bong’ and ‘hiyah’ were detailed in MTeach class, week 1.

Instrument work

Everyone then went to the music store room and chose a tuned percussion instrument to play. Most of these are Orff-style instruments, with removable bars.

I asked everyone to remove all the As and Es, which created a 5-note mode that I think of as my ‘Indian raga’ mode (it sounds to me like one of the ‘Morning’ ragas). Five-note modes are ideal for early improvisation work, as there are no ‘wrong’ notes – ie. there are no notes that clash uncomfortably with each other. Also, modes have a certain amount of harmonic ambiguity – the sense of the harmony can shift with the riffs and ostinati that people invent, which stops the music becoming static.