Update on pitch work

Back at Pelican Primary School for Term 2, and the year 4/5 class are continuing to develop their arrangement of Gotye’s Somebody I used to know. This first week back, we revised what they remembered of the opening melody, and started to develop an accompaniment figure.

There were a couple of interesting developments this week. One occurred when we were revising the melody. We did this as a group, away from instruments, with me at the whiteboard asking questions like, “What note does the melody start on? What note is next – does it go up or down in pitch?”

Whenever the group hesitated or seemed unsure, we sang the melody together. We used the words from Baa Baa Black Sheep:

Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?

Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.

Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?

Yes sir, I’ve got some. [Gliss!] (We invented this last line to match the fourth phrase of the introductory melody)

I stopped the singing on the word/syllable immediately before the pitch we were trying to identify. There was an exciting moment when I realised they were all hearing the missing note in their heads and starting to visualise or ‘map’ its direction. It was suggested in the way a large number of them all called out the right answer at the same time, after a moment of silence that was as long as the missing note would have been. I was so thrilled by this development!

For the accompaniment, I’ve created a marimba line:

D – AD – C – G (ta ti-ti ta ta)

I decided to teach it using the body-pitching approach I’ve used in the body. I taught it to the group, rather than asking them to figure a version out for themselves. They sang the note-names while patting each body part in turn:

D (knees – left hand) G (head – right hand) D (knees – left hand) C (floor – left hand) G (shoulders – right hand)

I knew that the challenge on the marimbas would be to go from the note D to C with the left hand – I anticipated that they would instinctively continue a left-right-left-right mallet pattern and would thus struggle to find the C. Therefore, I told them to use their left hands to touch D and C, and the right hand for A and G, and got them to practise this in a focused way on their bodies.

We practised the gestures together as a group. Then I set up the xylophones and marimbas and a small number of students got try out the accompaniment pattern.

This time around though, I added an explicit instruction:

“Your aim now is to transfer the information about notes and hands, up and down, from your bodies to the instruments. Keep the same hand pattern, and same pattern of up-and-down gestures, as you have on your bodies.”

I think this proved to be a helpful step. In any case, with this kind of group task, we only need one person to figure it out – they can then model it for the others, they will learn by watching, the watching will also help create a visual memory for them, and hopefully the body-contour work will help create a physical memory. We’ll see!

This class is such an interesting group. They always come in scowling, sneering, and with a lot of bravado towards me, my co-teachers, and especially towards each other. But they do take their learning quite seriously. Enough of them are motivated to create something of a critical mass, so we make progress, most weeks. My plan is for this Gotye piece to be ready to perform in 3 lessons time.

More thoughts on teaching the ‘pitch’ concept

I find that for many of my students, pitch is the most intangible, hard-to-grasp concept of all the musical elements. I’ve experimented a lot with different ways to help children make sense of it and to get greater satisfaction from working with pitched instruments. Rhythmically the students are usually very strong, but I think that multiple pitches (indeed, multiple sounds) are often very chaotic for them.

Last week, leading workshops for the City Beats program, I worked with students from four different schools. I found it interesting that students from 3 of the 4 schools used the words ‘high’ and ‘low’ to talk about the difference between different string instruments (eg. violin is smaller than double bass and therefore makes a higher sound). The much more culturally-diverse group of the 4^th school were more hesitant and unsure about the language to describe those same differences, instead using ‘loud’ or ‘big’ and ‘soft’ or ‘small’. Work I’ve done previously with musical contour has not transferred across to understanding how to find the higher and lower notes on tuned percussion. It’s as if the concept of ‘high’ and ‘low’ don’t translate into musical concepts in some cultures and languages. That’s my suspicion; it is based on my own observations.

Pitch, implicit learning, and innate understanding

I had another ‘moment’ in my exploration of teaching pitch concepts today. (I’ve been posting on this topic, see below). Today at Pelican Primary School I introduced the Slit Drum to the prep class.

I invited one of the children to come to the front to play. She wasn’t sure what to do, so I suggested she hit each of the ‘tongues’ of wood, one by one, and see if they sound the same or different.

“Hit this long one, and then this short one,” I suggested, pointing to the tongues I meant. So she did that, and one of the boys in the class called out happily, “I can hear that it is short-long-short-long!” And as she continued to play, he sang along with her – “short-long-short-long” – and some others in the class did the same.

It was a happy moment for me. I have been puzzling over ways to build students’ understanding about the concept of pitch, highs and lows. I try to find ways, in the musical environment I create in the lesson, for these concepts to be available to those children who are ready to connect them to their own innate understanding about how music works. Young Will, calling out his observation to me, was doing exactly that. After the puzzles of the recent weeks it was satisfying to be reminded that some children are ready to work with these concepts, and will make the necessary initial links in their own time, if I provide the right environment. I think of this as providing strong environmental scaffolds.

More on pitch contours

Further to the post below about my work with pitch with Middle Primary students at the Language School, I had a very pleasing experience with the class last week. When we came to the point in the lesson where we were preparing to play our melody on the glockenspiels, the students (who were all sitting on the floor) spontaneously broke into singing through the melody, patting the assigned parts of the body as they went. This was the group that I felt the whole exercise hadn’t worked for at all, and here they were, performing it with confidence and accuracy and strong recall.

We got the glockenspiels out quickly and tried it out on the instruments. I also played a few games with them, where I would touch one part of my body (eg. the top of my head) and they would play the corresponding note that we had assigned to it (eg. high E). I did this quite a few times with high and low E, to try and establish the octave, and the difference in the sounds. We worked in small groups, and those who weren’t playing copied my gestures and said the appropriate letter name, while their classmates played the appropriate notes. Then we swapped over, so that everyone had a turn.

However, this doesn’t mean that the concept of pitch is now understood by the class. (Jackie Wiggins gives some compelling and thoughtful argument to what it means to have established true musical understanding in her book Teaching for Musical Understanding). But hopefully they now feel a little more confident with the task, and with this confidence will come the mental space for new concepts to take hold.

What this experience demonstrates too, is that some things just take more time that you anticipate. Or, alternatively, that if the energy in the room isn’t right on the day, some tasks just won’t take root. And that, even when it seems like nothing is really working, nothing is going in or making sense, it probably is!

Pitch contours and other puzzles

I’ve been thinking a lot about how you build an understanding of pitch among young students. Regular readers will know that I teach a lot of students in primary (elementary) schools that don’t have a lot of English, or who speak English as a second language. Because of this, I put a lot of thought into ways of teaching and establishing musical concepts without resorting to verbal explanations.

With pitch I’ve tried lots of different things. Firstly, I should explain that all my classroom work has a compositional basis, so we rarely isolate pitch as a context. Mostly, it comes up because I want children to develop their aural and inner hearing skills so that they can learn, recall, and figure out melodic lines more easily. To do this they need to have an awareness of the way the pitches in a melody relate to each other – whether they are moving up or down to the next note, by step or by leap, etc.