Composition! Or, The Colors, Man, The Colors!

Greetings, internet!

I really am trying to be better about regularly posting, but it is a struggle.  It's funny how working three jobs gets in the way of writing blog posts.  And by funny I mean causes ridiculous amounts of angst.  I was reminded recently of just how much I'm not at home when I looked around the house and counted the number of projects that still need finishing.  I spent most of my Sunday afternoon cleaning up our rabbit cage because it had gotten nasty, a direct result of me not being home enough to keep up with it.

But I digress.

I assume you're here for a post about music education, right?  After all, this is The Mobile Music Mansion, not Mr. Earley's Dysfunctional Rabbit Farm.

AWEEEEEEOWEEOOWEOMUMBAWAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY......

So here we go.

I have gotten back into using a resource that I had created last year - the Boomwhackers Song Collections.  There are currently two available on my Teachers Pay Teachers store

(Collection 1 and Collection 2), and I am working on some new ones.  If you haven't clicked over to see what those activities are about, I'll give you a brief rundown.  Essentially I started using squares and rectangles that were color coded to match the Boomwhacker colors as a means of introducing notation to my youngest students.  I am not a fan of using the little pictograph representations of notes, since I've never seen music notated with smiling bees or anthropomorphic suns and hearts and stars.  Instead, I wanted to use something that would make a logical sequence of reading left to right, grouping by beat, and applying what is read to the instruments at hand.  This works great with Boomwhackers, and even better when scaffolded into Orff instruments.  All of my barred instruments have color coded labels to match the Boomwhackers as well, and students can make a logical transition to playing those instruments after a little time spent practicing on the Boomwhackers.  This can then lead to using traditional notation with colored note heads, and then purely traditional notation.  I am still in the development stages of this plan, so there is a long way to go with implementing this and seeing/measuring the results, but I have high hopes.

Some day I hope to have matching mallets for each instrument

I'm starting to think that maybe I need to spend some more time with Kindergarten and first grade earlier on in the school year to develop the sense of steady beat and tracking the beat while listening.  This is something that my students frequently struggle with, and is at least partly (stereotype warning!) a result of having middle-class Caucasian students forming the bulk of the student body.  These are kids who don't grow up experiencing music as something that they do, but instead as something that exists beyond them, perhaps on a shelf only to be taken out on days they have music class.  I want to move my students to a place where music is part of their everyday life and expression, something that they do without thinking, without hesitating, and without fear of whether it is "good enough."  (I think of this as the "American Idol Phenomenon" - what if we grew up thinking that we weren't good enough because some celebrity judge said we weren't any good?  What  complex to create in young people. But that is another rant for another time,)

Simon says that was the worst improvised ostinato he's ever heard paired with Mary Had a Little Lamb.  You should just stop.

The more students are experiencing music in a hands-on, applied, real sense, the more it becomes a part of who they are.  My goal is to foster that as much as I can in as many students as I can.  It kills me to hear students talk about music like it's some mystery.  Music is all around us, music is a part of what makes us human.

If I can use a bunch of colored rectangles and squares to help reinforce that integral musical part of all of us, I am 100% in.

So then what's next?

Well, in my view that would be composition.  But gone are the days when I would just hand out staff paper to my oldest students and have them write meaningless combinations of notes.  I have been working with students creating ostinatos, which has been nice, but let's go several steps further.  What if students were creating something that had meaning to them, as well as its own musical meaning?  By all means, let's do it!

So I give you color coded composition.  Also, alliteration.  :)

What I am trying now is to have students use construction paper cut to the same relative sizes as the squares and rectangles in the Boomwhacker Song Collections.  I spent a little time working out the measurements I could use, then cut them out of red, orange, yellow, dark green, and purple paper, thus making a C pentatonic scale.  At first I am planning to introduce the concept by giving students a few pieces to work with and having them see what they can come up with.  No rules - anarchy in the music room!  We will arrange the pieces and then perform them for the class, discussing what we hear.  Then, I plan to given a worksheet/template to each student giving some guidelines - mostly beat groupings (hello, time signatures!), but also reinforcing Do as the tonic note.

With my youngest students, it will just be practice to get used to the idea of organizing notes by how they sound, reinforcing Do, and getting to use the Boomwhackers and Orff instruments to create music.

For my second graders, I hope to have them really apply their knowledge of staff notation and transfer what they have done by color onto the treble staff, thus creating true compositions that they can give to anyone and have it played.

Long term, I hope to never again have a student look at a piece of music then look at me and say "I can't read this."

Fingers are crossed.

I'll keep you posted!