Singing to Learn
I had another magnificent teaching experience yesterday in Warrenton, Virginia. Debbie McGuire and I traveled from our homes in Bridgewater to lead 75 All-County Middle School Honors Choir singers in a day of singing. Ms. McGuire accompanied and I directed the students through a day of singing, laughing, speaking, moving, and learning.
After some mercifully short introductions, we began our first rehearsal with a discussion of correct choral posture. I had arranged a short ostinato piece for my classes many years ago using the dictionary definition of posture. "The position of the limbs or the carriage of the body as a whole." Using this to also begin working with choral diction and expression, we added the elements of good posture, "back straight, feet on the floor," and "head and shoulders in neutral." The elements became ostinatos and the definition was turned into a canon and we were experts on posture in a little less that 10 minutes!
Into the music we dived. I chose to start with Cheryl Lavender's great treble choir (SSA) arrangement of "Singabahambyo." I have to admit that a director's worst nightmare happened at this precise moment. I asked Ms. McGuire to start into the introduction, the kids were all sitting up nice and tall, as they had been taught, I counted down the four measure introduction, gave the signal to begin the song and..... silence...... Nothing happened! This is the moment that director's dread the most. Are they prepared? Do they have a different song ready? Do I have the right version? What's going on? All of these questions flashed through my mind in a nano second and all I could think of was the story of Stravinsky's birthday, when the New York Philharmonic sang "Happy Birthday" as the maestro gave the downbeat for the first piece on the program!
I don't know if that settled things or not but we tried again and the kids got in pretty well and away we went. The first run was pretty shaky, but we just went back and fixed things and made it through pretty well. I used one of my favorite tricks for learning the lush three part harmony. The middle part is usually the most problematic, so I just asked everyone to sing it! The kids all kind of blinked, swallowed hard, gave a little collective grin and jumped right in. Because of the repetitive nature of the tune, we were able to get on a roll by repeating the part several times. For this song, I was then able to ask the Part 1 singers to switch off to their part for a duet, followed by the Part 3 singers so that we soon had some rich, full sounding three part harmony. This piece was done after we reviewed the pronunciation of the Swahili language.
This whole session set the mood and style for the day, as we worked very hard with the students remaining focused, working hard, and enjoying every moment. Highlights of the rest of the day included some solo auditions for Stuart Calvert's arrangement of Allistair MacGillivray's beautiful song, "Song for the Mira," some great drumming added to "Three African Songs," by Cheryl Lavender, a Tevye-esque dance demo by the director for Allan Naplan's "Hine Ma Tov," and some fantastic dynamics, diction and harmony in John Leavitt's "Festival Sanctus."
My personal highlight of the day was rehearsal session with John Barr's new octavo, "If I can stop one heart from breaking." If you haven't seen or heard this piece, make sure you get to the concert by the Daughters of Song on April 15 at Parkview Mennonite Church or go to the publisher's website and give a listen. It has a great melody with swirling harmony and a punchy groove in the accompaniment. Teaching the students to sing in 6,7,8,9,and 10/8 was a trip. We worked for thirty minutes breaking down the grouping and learning how to place the words and accents. The kids accepted the challenge with only a little grumbling, worked very hard and happily, and the performance came off very well.
The concert came at the end of the day for a nice audience of mostly parents and friends. The kids sparkled and performed wonderfully, with confidence and grace. Parents were encouraged to keep their kids in music classes and were told that "music class is THE most important class your child can take!" Congratulations to Fauquier County Schools for a very successful All County Honors Choir.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Teaching again..
Teaching again. What a great feeling to once again lead a class of general music students through a series of activities, discussions, and tasks. These kinds of opportunities are very special now since I've retired from full-time teaching. To be relieved of the class management responsibility, the burden of paperwork and bureaucratic claptrap that was such a big part of my career was especially enjoyable. Pure teaching! Walk in to the class and go straight to the lesson and straight into each child's brain. What a joy! This is what I am and what I was born to do!
Last fall, I was invited to teach a series of drumming classes for Eastern Mennonite University as they began to prepare for a spring drama production. In order to have drums enough for all the participants I borrowed a set of Tubanos® from Stewart Middle School in Augusta County. In return for the favor, I volunteered to teach sixth grade music for a couple of days. We worked at focus, beat training, hand/eye coordination, reading, and composition. Students were cheerful, happy to be learning, in fact, in all likelihood not even totally aware that they were learning so much!
For two days I trained the students to work as a cohesive drum community. We established group focus with a simple imitation exercise, "Do what I do, when I do it." I played various beats and drum strokes at various tempos and dynamics as the students imitated my every move. After some shaky moments as students began to get the idea, a nice unison was achieved. There was no need to correct or highlight mistakes as it slowly became evident to the students that the real payoff in sound and rhythm was a result of almost perfect focus by the class.
As we worked together, we tried out many drum strokes and techniques eventually working into patterns of rhythm. We started with the names of the drums, speaking the words then playing the rhythm. We moved on to Heartbeat, a drum song from Bill Matthew's great book on drumming Conga Joy, eventually learning how to start and stop all together using drum signals. We finally learned some techniques for solo improvisation which grew into student drum circle compositions.
At the end of the session, I observed the students leaving class energized, alert, and feeling good about themselves and what they'd learned. Their regular teacher, who had sat in and participated in all the classes, told me that she'd had a great time too, and had learned a lot about how to lead this kind of activity. She was please to have a new, valuable technique and a complete sample lesson plan to add to her repertoire.
Last fall, I was invited to teach a series of drumming classes for Eastern Mennonite University as they began to prepare for a spring drama production. In order to have drums enough for all the participants I borrowed a set of Tubanos® from Stewart Middle School in Augusta County. In return for the favor, I volunteered to teach sixth grade music for a couple of days. We worked at focus, beat training, hand/eye coordination, reading, and composition. Students were cheerful, happy to be learning, in fact, in all likelihood not even totally aware that they were learning so much!
For two days I trained the students to work as a cohesive drum community. We established group focus with a simple imitation exercise, "Do what I do, when I do it." I played various beats and drum strokes at various tempos and dynamics as the students imitated my every move. After some shaky moments as students began to get the idea, a nice unison was achieved. There was no need to correct or highlight mistakes as it slowly became evident to the students that the real payoff in sound and rhythm was a result of almost perfect focus by the class.
As we worked together, we tried out many drum strokes and techniques eventually working into patterns of rhythm. We started with the names of the drums, speaking the words then playing the rhythm. We moved on to Heartbeat, a drum song from Bill Matthew's great book on drumming Conga Joy, eventually learning how to start and stop all together using drum signals. We finally learned some techniques for solo improvisation which grew into student drum circle compositions.
At the end of the session, I observed the students leaving class energized, alert, and feeling good about themselves and what they'd learned. Their regular teacher, who had sat in and participated in all the classes, told me that she'd had a great time too, and had learned a lot about how to lead this kind of activity. She was please to have a new, valuable technique and a complete sample lesson plan to add to her repertoire.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Censorship in Higher Education
from:
Censoring Our Educators - A nationwide effort is underway in statehouse to foster intellectual diversity by censoring professors —By Mary O'Regan, Utne.com
More news today from the Right Wing Freedom Fighters. Because of their fear of Liberals, a concerted effort to reform higher education and restore balance to the curriculum is underway. These folks would seek to prohibit professors from espousing a specifically partisan solution to any intellectual debate.
No taking sides or pronouncing biased answers, no promoting of ideological agendas. These are CONSERVATIVES! This whole attempt is highly partisan in that it is, as they freely admit, a response to the perceived liberal bias of college professors! They are promoting this as "intellectual diversity" and the "Academic Bill of Rights."
and...
Hypocritical? What would these same conservatives say about racial quotas and profiling? They seem to be quite happy about profiling and imposing affirmative action principles on Liberals. How does the Intelligent Design/Evolution debate play out in this scenario given that the whole ID concept is in itself a highly partisan issue. If I wasn't laughing so hard, I'd be crying... It's simply nonsense to assume that an ideology can dictate its terms or "create reality." They will try.. they will fail.
Censoring Our Educators - A nationwide effort is underway in statehouse to foster intellectual diversity by censoring professors —By Mary O'Regan, Utne.com
More news today from the Right Wing Freedom Fighters. Because of their fear of Liberals, a concerted effort to reform higher education and restore balance to the curriculum is underway. These folks would seek to prohibit professors from espousing a specifically partisan solution to any intellectual debate.
"The Arizona legislation, Senate Bill 1542, would forbid school district employees from advocating "one side of a social, political, or cultural issue that is a matter of partisan controversy." Those who take up such stances would face a fine of up to $500."
No taking sides or pronouncing biased answers, no promoting of ideological agendas. These are CONSERVATIVES! This whole attempt is highly partisan in that it is, as they freely admit, a response to the perceived liberal bias of college professors! They are promoting this as "intellectual diversity" and the "Academic Bill of Rights."
"It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects."
and...
In Montana, based on only "anecdotal evidence" civil rights style affirmative action legislation is being proposed that would require each university to hire an ombudsman to monitor enforcement with the whole program costing taxpayers over $350,000 per school. The legislation being proposed is asking to insure intellectual diversity by hiring equal numbers of conservative and liberal professors. Of course it's conservatives that are feeling persecuted, again because of the perceived liberal bias in higher education.
Hypocritical? What would these same conservatives say about racial quotas and profiling? They seem to be quite happy about profiling and imposing affirmative action principles on Liberals. How does the Intelligent Design/Evolution debate play out in this scenario given that the whole ID concept is in itself a highly partisan issue. If I wasn't laughing so hard, I'd be crying... It's simply nonsense to assume that an ideology can dictate its terms or "create reality." They will try.. they will fail.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)