I've just returned from delivering a couple of Bass Xylophones, a set of Wind Chimes, and a pair of Finger Cymbals to North River Elementary School. One of the cool jobs I've taken in retirement is to repair well-worn Orff instruments at local schools. I've adjusted Conga and Bongo Drums, rebuilt Temple Blocks, re-strung Wind Chimes, and added leather laces to Finger Cymbals. The most important part of this new job though, is repairing the Orff xylophones, metallophones, and glockenspiels.
My trip this morning was delightful. I walked into the music room just as the children were singing "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" as a part of a new program to be presented at a concert very soon. I couldn't help but smile and do a little bit of the double shuffle as I carried the instruments into the room. When the song finished, the teacher smiled and asked the kids to say "Hi Mr. Holl!" I waved and said, "Hi" and proceeded with my work. I have to admit that one of the aspects of teaching that I miss the most is the interaction with the students and today's simple hello just made my day!
I'm doing basic repair work on all of North River's Orff instruments. Anyone who has spent time using these beautiful instruments over a period of time knows that wear and tear can rob them of their tone and resonance. Most repairs are fairly simple and only involve replacing pins and bushings. Sometimes a little glue applied judiciously to a joint or two fixes a rattle or buzz. Structural repairs on chips, large cracks, and scratches are more involved but well within the capability of a woodworking hobbyist.
I'll be finishing up the instruments for North River very soon. I still think the coolest part of the job is walking in with the "new" instruments, trying them out, listening to the restored sound and hearing the students and the teacher all say, "Thank you Mr. Holl!"
You're Welcome! :)
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Banal or Beethoven, Is There Room in Heaven? The discussion Continues:
-- In Music-for-Children@yahoogroups.com, "John Handley" wrote:
Yes, John. I'm quite familiar with this scenario. I had the duty at my school of providing the music for the school dances. It was one of the most interesting and educational experiences of my professional career. You see, the school dances became the reward for all types of excellent student behavior. It was amazing to hear the kids talk about how they were going to "earn" the next "Fun Night."
In choosing the music for the dance, I was entrusted with finding pop music that the kids liked AND was acceptable in a public school setting with middle school kids. No blatant profanity (cut the list by 50%), no references to drinking, smoking, or drug use (there went another 30%), and I had to watch out for the love songs and the references to sex and violence... whew! Was there anything left? (I remember doing the Macarena for hours.... just kidding...Watermelon Crawl was a big hit.)
The magic part about all of this was that I ended up searching high and low, talking at length to many of the kids, discussing with them at length during lunch, before and after school, and occasionally during class just what music we could play at Fun Night. I called this the gathering of "requests." John, this may have been the discussion you were referring to that was so difficult to initiate in your classes. In my case, the students were highly motivated to make real choices about what they were going to hear.
Of course at the dances themselves, the scenario you mention was played out over and over. I insisted that the entire song be played and that every song had been "requested" by students. The kids of course were ready to play 5 seconds of each one until they got to the song that they had requested. They tested my patience many times.
My larger point concerning "Banal and Beethoven" is that teaching professionals have learned how to "filter" the music using all of the various criteria we learned during our training. Teaching children to filter their own music is one of the most valuable skills we can teach. In order to develop this filter teachers must be willing to meet the students where they are and acknowledge that, in the case of music, they come to us with much of their musical intelligence already highly developed. Each of them are (as is the general population of adults) experts in the music they like. Not just experts but passionate experts. If we don't meet them there, gain their respect and bring them along with us, success is difficult.
I failed with many students. They just plugged in their iPods and walked away. It IS sad. I never gave up on them though and sought them out to ask "Whatcha listening to?" whenever I saw them. They always cheerily told me what was playing along with the caviat, "Can't play this at Fun Night."
I smiled.
"EVERY song they brought, most of the class was bored with before it was finished, and there was clamour and uproar for the next one - which was equally derided."
"A Melbourne composer, Graham Leak has just noted in this morning's Age that young people today have 20,000 songs on their iPods, but only listen to about 5 seconds of each song before changing to another track. It was a very unsuccessful lesson for me though, because I was unable to get any kind of discussion going on why they found their own music so worthless. And sad to see as well"
Yes, John. I'm quite familiar with this scenario. I had the duty at my school of providing the music for the school dances. It was one of the most interesting and educational experiences of my professional career. You see, the school dances became the reward for all types of excellent student behavior. It was amazing to hear the kids talk about how they were going to "earn" the next "Fun Night."
In choosing the music for the dance, I was entrusted with finding pop music that the kids liked AND was acceptable in a public school setting with middle school kids. No blatant profanity (cut the list by 50%), no references to drinking, smoking, or drug use (there went another 30%), and I had to watch out for the love songs and the references to sex and violence... whew! Was there anything left? (I remember doing the Macarena for hours.... just kidding...Watermelon Crawl was a big hit.)
The magic part about all of this was that I ended up searching high and low, talking at length to many of the kids, discussing with them at length during lunch, before and after school, and occasionally during class just what music we could play at Fun Night. I called this the gathering of "requests." John, this may have been the discussion you were referring to that was so difficult to initiate in your classes. In my case, the students were highly motivated to make real choices about what they were going to hear.
Of course at the dances themselves, the scenario you mention was played out over and over. I insisted that the entire song be played and that every song had been "requested" by students. The kids of course were ready to play 5 seconds of each one until they got to the song that they had requested. They tested my patience many times.
My larger point concerning "Banal and Beethoven" is that teaching professionals have learned how to "filter" the music using all of the various criteria we learned during our training. Teaching children to filter their own music is one of the most valuable skills we can teach. In order to develop this filter teachers must be willing to meet the students where they are and acknowledge that, in the case of music, they come to us with much of their musical intelligence already highly developed. Each of them are (as is the general population of adults) experts in the music they like. Not just experts but passionate experts. If we don't meet them there, gain their respect and bring them along with us, success is difficult.
I failed with many students. They just plugged in their iPods and walked away. It IS sad. I never gave up on them though and sought them out to ask "Whatcha listening to?" whenever I saw them. They always cheerily told me what was playing along with the caviat, "Can't play this at Fun Night."
I smiled.
Banal or Beethoven, Is There Room in Heaven? A Response
Over at Music for Children, the following response from guest blogger, John Handley, was posted to the original thread. The discussion continues:
This is a quote that deserves further examination. Indeed the question is: "what is banal and what is instructive?"
If one bases one's philosophy of teaching on that line of thought then thatallows for any old rubbish to be accepted as valid music in the classroom.This argument says that for example "Achy Breaky Heart" deserves the same recognition and value as for example, "Let It Be". You may as well take the teenager's easy way out: "whatever".
My view is that it is simply not good enough for teachers to be guided by such simplistic cliches as "banal versus Beethoven". We are trained, and it is our responsibility, to decide and define what is of value for our students and what is bad for our students.
As Brent points out:
Because if the above is your guiding philosophy, this information, these skills and knowledge might as well be just as banal as they are important and valuable to know. And what is the difference and who cares?
"It doesn't matter, the kids enjoy it, it's entertaining". We're not talking about music education here, were not talking about education of any sort. This is what banality in education leads to: the dumbing down of the curriculum, and the dumbing down of the students, not to mention the teachers.
I had the pleasure of sitting above a park one evening recently and hearing a little girl skipping home in the evening dusky light, singing "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen in a beautiful clear soprano voice. This was an uplifting and inspiring experience for me, and provided clear justification for teaching quality music as opposed to music of poor quality and poor value. If, on the other hand, I had heard that little girl singing Britney Spears' "If You Seek Amy" I think I would have found be experience not uplifting but seriously depressing and discouraging and disheartening - because the one is "Beethoven" and the other "banal". (And by the way, if you do not know what "If You Seek Amy" means, ask a 12-year-old).
I have also seen a group of Muslim girls in primary school singing with great gusto and great amusement Aqua's "I'm a Barbie Girl"... a song which from my position I would have defined as banal, which in fact turned out to have quite a deep meaning for them, and a definite social value! We should not forget to turn to the wisdom of "babes and sucklings" from time to time.
We walk where angels fear to tread.
However we do have guidelines to assist us in deciding this. Orff, Kodaly, Bettelheim, and many others have suggested ways of determining whether or not a text or piece of music is "good". Here's a suggestion from Doug Goodkin "Play, Sing and Dance, p157.", and he points out that "alone, each point may not be helpful, but in combination, give a good working guide".
(italics mine).
Doug goes on to elaborate these points in some detail, and it is worth a read.
In some cases the distinction is easy: for example compare the Walt Disney Winnie the Pooh with the original A.A. Milne. With blissful disregard for quality, the Disney Company destroyed all originality, and all meaning from the original brilliant stories and poems.... "The feeling was these timeless characters really needed a breath of fresh air that only the introduction of someone new could provide," Nancy Kanter of the Disney Channel .
It is the very timelessness of the characters which makes them work in the original. Disney has modified and qualified each of the original characters, thus removing their usefulness and integrity, to which children need to relate.
And it is our responsibility as teachers and, if you like, guardians of the faith, as well as educators -- those responsible for not only maintaining the culture but also developing the culture which is so important to us.
There's a major battle in Australia at the moment, and it's been going since about 1960, and you're facing the same problems in the States, about justifying the validity of teaching music in the National Curriculum. Comments such as "one man's banal is another man's Beethoven" hardly support the integrity and the importance of our subject. We need to be doing a lot better than that.
"What we [are] fighting for at the moment is the integrity of music as a subject in its own right and not a subject which needs other subjects to help it out. I am very protective of the idea, and we have to fight very hard for music as a subject. You know currently that there's this thing called creative arts, and performing arts. Often they're all seen as being the same, they all link and they're all related and they're one and the same. And that's not true. Music is not visual arts, visual arts is not drama, drama is not music." Richard Gill, in Keys to Music, May 2009:
<http://www.abc.net.au/classic/keys/>
Richard Gill again (n.d.) "My view is children should have access to all my view is children should have access to all music: rock pop, classical, jazz. They need a broad experience of music so that they can make decisions and make choices. A diet of uninterrupted hip-hop, is as interesting as a diet of uninterrupted Vivaldi concerti.
Biasing a music program to one type of music is not music education. There is such a wealth of extraordinary music in the world, going right back to pre-Christian if you like, to now. Why shouldn't children have access to all of that over their time at school?
By listening to lots of music, different type of music, different styles, they can make comparisons: see where there are similarities, see whether differences, and through the comparisons they start to develop an appreciation for music. To develop wisdom to make choices. ...
.. were I the teacher teaching it, I would say: the nature of the Beatles is that they sang harmony, they sang songs in parts with instrumental accompaniment. So I go straight to the Bach cantatas, and I'd look at, an example of text which is accompanied, sung by two or three voices, and then you look at all sorts of vocal music right through from the beginning of chant to madrigals. Because, what the Beatles are doing is part of the tradition. And so with the Mozart chamber work, we can then look at all sorts of other chamber music coming right up to now, the evolution ensembles. So I would see music like that which is set as a syllabus is a trigger to study all sorts of other music."
Although this is slightly off my main point, the implication is that with good music, it is possible to teach music. In the case of music that isbad, there is very little that can be taught.
There is no place for the banal in our classrooms, or for that matter in our culture. If we do not teach the difference, then how will our children know how to discriminate between excrement and food? What will they eat?
Zoltan Kodaly: "real art is one of the most powerful forces in the rise of mankind, and he who renders it accessible to as many people as possible, is a benefactor of humanity."
That would be our job. How lucky are we?
John Handley
Mosswood Music
mosswoodmusic.com
"One man's banal is another man's Beethoven".Thank you Brent for a once again deeply insightful analysis of one of the elements of music education.
This is a quote that deserves further examination. Indeed the question is: "what is banal and what is instructive?"
If one bases one's philosophy of teaching on that line of thought then thatallows for any old rubbish to be accepted as valid music in the classroom.This argument says that for example "Achy Breaky Heart" deserves the same recognition and value as for example, "Let It Be". You may as well take the teenager's easy way out: "whatever".
My view is that it is simply not good enough for teachers to be guided by such simplistic cliches as "banal versus Beethoven". We are trained, and it is our responsibility, to decide and define what is of value for our students and what is bad for our students.
As Brent points out:
Musically, we are the experts. Our filters are the ones being used to pass the best of our culture on to the next generation.To do so requires a better founding philosophy than: "one man's banal is another man's Beethoven". This view accepts that poor expression, for example, in English writing skills is OK, that is all right not to know your multiplication tables, what the hell: we've got calculators for that; what does it matter if you don't know what causes the seasons?
Because if the above is your guiding philosophy, this information, these skills and knowledge might as well be just as banal as they are important and valuable to know. And what is the difference and who cares?
"It doesn't matter, the kids enjoy it, it's entertaining". We're not talking about music education here, were not talking about education of any sort. This is what banality in education leads to: the dumbing down of the curriculum, and the dumbing down of the students, not to mention the teachers.
I had the pleasure of sitting above a park one evening recently and hearing a little girl skipping home in the evening dusky light, singing "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen in a beautiful clear soprano voice. This was an uplifting and inspiring experience for me, and provided clear justification for teaching quality music as opposed to music of poor quality and poor value. If, on the other hand, I had heard that little girl singing Britney Spears' "If You Seek Amy" I think I would have found be experience not uplifting but seriously depressing and discouraging and disheartening - because the one is "Beethoven" and the other "banal". (And by the way, if you do not know what "If You Seek Amy" means, ask a 12-year-old).
I have also seen a group of Muslim girls in primary school singing with great gusto and great amusement Aqua's "I'm a Barbie Girl"... a song which from my position I would have defined as banal, which in fact turned out to have quite a deep meaning for them, and a definite social value! We should not forget to turn to the wisdom of "babes and sucklings" from time to time.
We walk where angels fear to tread.
However we do have guidelines to assist us in deciding this. Orff, Kodaly, Bettelheim, and many others have suggested ways of determining whether or not a text or piece of music is "good". Here's a suggestion from Doug Goodkin "Play, Sing and Dance, p157.", and he points out that "alone, each point may not be helpful, but in combination, give a good working guide".
(italics mine).
1. Children and adults equally enjoy it.
2. It bears repeated experiences.
3. It has withstood the test of time.
4. It invites something new.
5. It is created with good intention.
Doug goes on to elaborate these points in some detail, and it is worth a read.
In some cases the distinction is easy: for example compare the Walt Disney Winnie the Pooh with the original A.A. Milne. With blissful disregard for quality, the Disney Company destroyed all originality, and all meaning from the original brilliant stories and poems.... "The feeling was these timeless characters really needed a breath of fresh air that only the introduction of someone new could provide," Nancy Kanter of the Disney Channel .
It is the very timelessness of the characters which makes them work in the original. Disney has modified and qualified each of the original characters, thus removing their usefulness and integrity, to which children need to relate.
And it is our responsibility as teachers and, if you like, guardians of the faith, as well as educators -- those responsible for not only maintaining the culture but also developing the culture which is so important to us.
There's a major battle in Australia at the moment, and it's been going since about 1960, and you're facing the same problems in the States, about justifying the validity of teaching music in the National Curriculum. Comments such as "one man's banal is another man's Beethoven" hardly support the integrity and the importance of our subject. We need to be doing a lot better than that.
"What we [are] fighting for at the moment is the integrity of music as a subject in its own right and not a subject which needs other subjects to help it out. I am very protective of the idea, and we have to fight very hard for music as a subject. You know currently that there's this thing called creative arts, and performing arts. Often they're all seen as being the same, they all link and they're all related and they're one and the same. And that's not true. Music is not visual arts, visual arts is not drama, drama is not music." Richard Gill, in Keys to Music, May 2009:
<http://www.abc.net.au/classic/keys/>
Richard Gill again (n.d.) "My view is children should have access to all my view is children should have access to all music: rock pop, classical, jazz. They need a broad experience of music so that they can make decisions and make choices. A diet of uninterrupted hip-hop, is as interesting as a diet of uninterrupted Vivaldi concerti.
Biasing a music program to one type of music is not music education. There is such a wealth of extraordinary music in the world, going right back to pre-Christian if you like, to now. Why shouldn't children have access to all of that over their time at school?
By listening to lots of music, different type of music, different styles, they can make comparisons: see where there are similarities, see whether differences, and through the comparisons they start to develop an appreciation for music. To develop wisdom to make choices. ...
.. were I the teacher teaching it, I would say: the nature of the Beatles is that they sang harmony, they sang songs in parts with instrumental accompaniment. So I go straight to the Bach cantatas, and I'd look at, an example of text which is accompanied, sung by two or three voices, and then you look at all sorts of vocal music right through from the beginning of chant to madrigals. Because, what the Beatles are doing is part of the tradition. And so with the Mozart chamber work, we can then look at all sorts of other chamber music coming right up to now, the evolution ensembles. So I would see music like that which is set as a syllabus is a trigger to study all sorts of other music."
Although this is slightly off my main point, the implication is that with good music, it is possible to teach music. In the case of music that isbad, there is very little that can be taught.
There is no place for the banal in our classrooms, or for that matter in our culture. If we do not teach the difference, then how will our children know how to discriminate between excrement and food? What will they eat?
Zoltan Kodaly: "real art is one of the most powerful forces in the rise of mankind, and he who renders it accessible to as many people as possible, is a benefactor of humanity."
That would be our job. How lucky are we?
John Handley
Mosswood Music
mosswoodmusic.com
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Banal or Beethoven, Is There Room in Heaven?
Yes, Is there enough room in heaven for all of it? I loved the statement from a recent discussion on another board, that "one person's banal is another's Beethoven." We've seen in another thread that an innocent hand washing song is both banal and very useful as a teaching tool. We've heard the point made that using silly songs in school should not be construed as "serious" instruction. We've also heard that they are pragmatic and useful for certain, specific functions.
The quality of material one chooses for curriculum is largely determined by one's education. The materials gathered over the course of an academic career and in our particular case, Orff training courses, are the basis, the "materia substantialis" of a teachers curricular repertoire. To that core of materials are added the required materials for standards and objectives, all subject to local and state requirements.
Selecting material for use in the classroom is also subject to cultural and personal taste. Given the incredible diversity of music and culture throughout the world, there will inevitably be some filtering going on. The question then is "What's banal and what's instructive?"
J.S. Bach was thrown in jail because he thought the "old hymns" were banal. Pete Seeger cut the chords to Bob Dylan's guitar because he thought the distortion was a disgrace to folk music. Tomatoes thrown at Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." "Banal or Art" has been with us since time began. Musically, we are the experts. Our filters are the ones being used to pass the best of our culture on to the next generation. (No pressure...)
What are the criteria to determine the value of works of art, from the silly to the sublime? Is there room in heaven for all of it?
crossposted at Music for Children
The quality of material one chooses for curriculum is largely determined by one's education. The materials gathered over the course of an academic career and in our particular case, Orff training courses, are the basis, the "materia substantialis" of a teachers curricular repertoire. To that core of materials are added the required materials for standards and objectives, all subject to local and state requirements.
Selecting material for use in the classroom is also subject to cultural and personal taste. Given the incredible diversity of music and culture throughout the world, there will inevitably be some filtering going on. The question then is "What's banal and what's instructive?"
J.S. Bach was thrown in jail because he thought the "old hymns" were banal. Pete Seeger cut the chords to Bob Dylan's guitar because he thought the distortion was a disgrace to folk music. Tomatoes thrown at Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." "Banal or Art" has been with us since time began. Musically, we are the experts. Our filters are the ones being used to pass the best of our culture on to the next generation. (No pressure...)
What are the criteria to determine the value of works of art, from the silly to the sublime? Is there room in heaven for all of it?
crossposted at Music for Children
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