Weird Instrument Day

Today was weird instrument day in my music appreciation class. This was a tradition I started several years ago when I was teaching elementary general music. One of the occupational hazards I have had to endure is that any time I am near a "weird instrument," I feel the need to add it to my collection. Among others, I have acquired a set of Indian Tablas, a Tibetan prayer bowl, several ocarinas of various shapes and sizes, udu drums, a thunder drum, and (always the students' favorite) a nose flute. I am currently working on adding a Chinese Pipa to the collection (basically the Chinese version of the mandolin). 

Now that I am teaching High School, I still find the "weird instrument" day a fun tool to use in the class. By about 2/3's of the way through the course, the students are feeling pretty burned out from covering 1000 years of Western Musical History, so they get to decompress for a day while I bring in the more bizarre specimens of my collection. I give the students a chance to try a couple out (not the nose flute, though, for I dont think any of my students want to share my nose...), and in general, just try to open their eyes and ears a bit about the variety of instruments that the world musical traditions have produced. 

It has occurred to me as I do these presentations, that the average student has such a limited experience when it comes to exposure to various sounds of instruments. The pop world is filled with the sounds of essentially 5-7 instruments, and unless a student goes out to involve themselves in more, that is about it. It is always fun for me to see an otherwise "jaded" high schooler, suddenly get very interested as I make a piece of PVC and a spring make thunder, or a clay pot sound like an entire drum kit.

Some may look on my weird instrument day as simply a "filler" class with little educational value, but I know otherwise. Sometimes it takes a little "weird" to bring the mundane back into focus.

Coming Along, with Adjustments

A quick update on the progress towards my CCSU project. I have migrated my Mandopelli site over to Dreamweaver, and have become more comfortable with the user interface of that program. I am still not as proficient as I was with GoLive, but it is coming along. The basic framework for my instructional unit page is done, using the Spry elements, particularly the tabbed panels widget. This approach is greatly simplifying the navigation across my unit. My enrichment podcasts are almost finished. I am providing one with each unit focusing on a different world percussion instrument. The podcasts were created in GarageBand and will be finally processed as flash video files for posting to the site. The videos are proving to be as complicated as I thought. The ChromaKey is pretty easy to use in Final Cut Pro, but the difficulty lies in creating the visual connection between the live an animated characters. I dont want to get too hung up on this, so my fallback would be to go back to all Flash animation, and just use Nick Beat by himself, along the lines of the work I did in the Flash class at CCSU. Other odds and ends are coming along as well. 

More later

Thoughts on rhythm

I wanted to take this post to talk a bit about the philosophy behind my approach to the teaching of rhythm. My educational instruction background was focused heavily on Gordon-based learning theory, which when applied to music, basic means that you start music instruction with the most basic of elements, and then work towards synthesizing those elements together into ever more complex and involved music tasks. For example, rather than sitting a fourth grader down at their first lesson, putting an instrument in their hands and a music book on the stand, pointing to a note on the page, showing them what fingers to put down, and then telling them to blow, this approach would first teach the elements separately, such as reading skills apart from fingering skills, etc.

I have tried to adopt this approach to my teaching of rhythm and pitch in the general music classroom, by attempting to break down rhythm and pitch into the simplest and most separate elements and dealing with each as a single skill. Only once a student has demonstrated a mastery of each item, do I move on to putting those elements together.

Specifically with rhythm, I start by separating the writing or notation of rhythm from what rhythm actually is, which is sound in time. I then further break down the sound of rhythm into six basic concepts, two being foundational, and the other four, constructional. The first two are Steady Beat and Meter, which I approach from a performance-based direction. Once these two are understood, and can be used to provide the foundation for rhythm construction, I deal with the four rhythm tools (LIA, Scissors, Glue and Eraser). I purposefully use common household items as my descriptors so that the perceived mystery behind rhythm construction can be overcome.

As I point out in my instruction, with these six simple concepts, along with their performance tools, one can approach rhythms of any complexity with a greater understanding and a greater level of success. Start with the basics, unencumbered with non-essential concepts or distractions, and success will follow.