Constructive criticism, healthy dialogue

How does a musician learn to be a strong music workshop leader? One of the things I remember (and sometimes miss) most about my times at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where I did my training, is the considerable amount of time my fellow students and I spend discussing and critiquing our own and each other’s workshop efforts. These conversations could go into amazing detail – not just about workshop content but about the words we’d used to describe tasks, or the way we’d phrased a question, and alternative wordings or gestures that might have generated different results. It was rich, painstaking constructive criticism and we all learned a lot from it.

When I took on the teaching of Community Music at NMIT this semester, I thought a lot about how I could engender a constructive culture of criticism and feedback in the class, getting all the students to engage deeply with the skills I’d be teaching them. One of their assessment tasks is to lead a short workshop in class, for their peers. I wanted these to be workshops that everyone contributed to – first by taking part, and then by sharing and analysing their experiences with the leader.

I decided to this using a peer-assessment model. Inspired by this blog post on The Teaching Tom-Tom, I worked with the students to develop a suitable rubric for use in class with the workshops, so that they would all be assessing each other’s work.

First we brainstormed a list of all the things a good workshop includes. The list of characteristics was later condensed down into six criteria on their assessment rubric.

Next we discussed context-relevant gradations. The students nominated a range of 5 grading categories –

• Uninspired and uninspiring (harsh words, I felt, but the students were unanimous that this was a reasonable thing to label a workshop, and would be a good incentive to people to ensure that no-one would have a reason to tick this box)
• Embryonic
• Developing
• Dress rehearsal
• Gig-worthy

Then they divided into groups to devise the text that would go under each grade heading, for each of the 6 criteria. I wrote all the ‘Gig-worthy’ text so that they had something to work backwards from. I then took their contributions away, tweaked things slightly to ensure consistency across the gradations, and typed up a draft version of the rubric for their comments, and later approval.

“Make sure you are happy to have these grades and criteria applied to your own work,” I reminded them, “and that you are happy to use them to assess someone else’s.”

Has it worked? At this stage, halfway through our season of student-led workshops, I’d say it has been a successful strategy. The rubric gives focus to the discussions after each workshop. In general, I feel that the scores they give each other are a suitable reflection of the work that was done (although I do think they deem things ‘gig-worthy’ more readily than I do!). Most importantly, there seems to be a strong sense of ownership of the process and descriptions, and a willingness to consider the ways that strong work differs from weak or less convincing work, taking this into account when they plan and lead their own workshops.

Extending a game into a composition

So many music games and activities have more depth than we credit them with. If we bring our musicianship and musical imaginations into the mix, then they can take us off into directions that yield interesting and often complex compositional outcomes. This post describes the workshop I led on Monday with a group of MTeach music students, looking at three games that I’ve collected/learned from around the world, and the compositional possibilities of each.

Activity 1 – Stick-passing

The first game I taught was stick passing game that I learned as a stone-passing game from a South African musician. I’ve written in some detail about this game in the past, and the song, Bhombela, that I often teach with it. With the MTeach group, we experimented with passing the sticks in a duple time signature and singing a song in a triple time signature (Edelweiss) or a changing time signature (Dham Dham Dham – a children’s song from India). How could you build upon these starting ideas, I asked the group, in order to develop a more intricate, varied compositional outcome? One group took on this task, and developed some complex stick passing patterns that included tapping two sticks together, tapping one on the floor, and passing it around after a set number of taps in a 7/4 time signature, which they then varied into other time signatures by changing the number of floor taps. They also experimented with dividing into two groups and having unison sections contrasting with polyrhythmic sections (with each group working in a different time signature). They also explored hocketting melodies while passing sticks… at which point things start to get more complicated than the timeframe allowed! (More thoughts on hocketting here).

Activity 2 – Kecak

Next we learned the interlocking rhythms of the Balinese kecak (pronounced KECH-ahk). The Kecak isn’t really a game, but in the way that I teach it, it is learned quickly, and has playful properties in the characters it introduces. The three rhythms are essentially the same rhythm, but phased, so that each subsequent phrase is an eighth note out from the previous phrase. We learned them as three word-phrases, in order to lock the rhythms into our heads:

Rescue the princess.

We defeated him.

Give us Rawahna.

We discussed ways of extending these rhythmic ideas into a composition. Students suggested:

• arranging the rhythms onto instruments
• keeping the rhythms on body percussion and vocal sounds but indicating changes of section and instrumentation with a Gong sound (vocalised or using an instrument)
• Developing new rhythmic phrases using new words
• Creating new interlocking rhythms using the phasing technique.

The group that chose to explore this idea worked on the third suggestion, and invented three new rhythms/phrases (continuing the princess story), and played them on instruments in addition to vocalising. With more time available to explore, I’d be keen to encourage groups to work on the fourth suggestion, and explore first the idea of inventing a new rhythm (perhaps taking inspiration from the 2-2-1 grouping of the Kecak rhythms, and selecting different numbers of beats and maintaining an eighth-note rest in between each group), and then how to establish the phasing technique. These new rhythms could then be applied to instruments, and a composition developed that used only material from the original Kecak and the new rhythms, exploring different options for voicing and arranging the material.

Activity 3 – Work chant

Our last activity explored the rhythms of an East Timorese work chant. We discussed first the way that much of the traditional Timorese music that I learned about while living there evolved as an accompaniment to work, rather than as music for ritual, celebrations, or social gatherings. Work chants and songs eased the tedium of repetitive work, and also enabled workers to turn their work into a social interaction. I taught the MTeach group the Cele Cuku corn kerneling chant that I’ve used in a few workshops now. We learned the chant (I’d written the words up on the whiteboard so that people could read it and needn’t memorise it), and then explored the rhythmic properties of different verses by developing partnered clapping games/pieces to go with the words.

The partnered clapping patterns were great fun – by now people were being very inventive and playful, and their patterns included beats tapped on the floor, cross rhythms, and patterns that aligned particular sounds with particular words from the rhyme (creating yet more hocketting effects).

Ideas for extending the work chant idea into a larger composition included:  exploring ways of presenting the original chant and rhythms in canon; aligning particular pitches to particular words; and inviting students to write their own work chants, and build compositions from the rhythms of these chants. The latter is the idea that I explored in a jam in November last year with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Once you allow the possibility that the original game or activity is only a starting point for composition, and that the resulting new work might not necessarily include musical material from the starting point, then options really start to open up. I think it’s important to hand over that kind of ownership to participants quite early in the process, and it was interesting in the MTeach group that their interpretation of the task was (initially at least) one of needing to stay with the original musical material.

Rich tasks

Yesterday I had the pleasure of taking a group of Master of Teaching students through some music games and tasks that I’ve collected from different parts of the world. The idea was to start with games and activities, but to then extend and develop the games into composition outcomes.

I think of the games that I use in workshops as ‘rich tasks’. That is, they have content that can be superficially fun and enjoyable, but when you look below the surface there is a whole lot of skill development and learning going on. They are also ‘rich’ because despite seeming easy and playful, they require you to keep on your toes and maintain your presence and focus. Break your focus, and you will start to falter.

Take my favourite warm up, for example. We start by passing a clap sound around the circle, one by one. Swiftly! I remind the group, and encourage them to make eye contact with the person they are passing the sound to. Then I ask them to change directions whenever they want, sending the sound either to the left or to the right. Then we change sounds – I love to use a ssshh sound, because this adds a further playful element, as people start to get into character, and offer very communicative, expressive sshhh-s. Around this time, as the sounds and directions change unpredictably, the group is beginning to improvise. They are responding to the sounds that have come before their own, and start to respond to the tension, release and arcs that are being formed.

Later you can add a sound that is sent across the circle, which requires steely eye contact, and invites a new, energised sound to be made (zap, zip, whoosh and ping are frequent suggestions). If someone makes a ‘wrong’ sound, sending it either across the circle to their left or right, this too is embraced, and becomes part of the ‘sound vocabulary’ of the game. Following this rule, you can have different sounds coming from every person in turn – the variety adds to the delight that the group feels then, when one of those new ‘sound offers’ is repeated by someone else.

Groups  that are working well together, where everyone is participating fully in the game, can continue with just these rules for quite extended periods of time, often developing some very interesting musical outcomes. However, I also like to add what I think of as powerful ‘whole ensemble unison’ moments into the texture. These work as question-and-answer moments. The person whose turn it is makes and agreed call and gesture (one I am fond of is a martial arts-inspired Hi-YAH!), to which the rest of the group responds with a stern and resonant Huh!, stamping one foot to the floor like a member of the All Blacks.

The sound-passing game is my first ‘rich task’, and I know lots of people know it already. It surprises me sometimes, when colleagues say things like, “Yeah, but I only do it with primary students”, as if it is inappropriate for older students, or “We were doing that back in the seventies!”, as if it is old hat. I find this game so effective precisely because it is such a stayer, and because there are so many ways to you can add to it and extend it.

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).