We all seem to struggle with limited contact time in music, and a debate has been ongoing on the Teaching Music forums recently about the importance or otherwise of talking about music in light of Ofsted’s latest recommendations around music being the dominant language in the classroom. I'm reminded of that famous quote "dancing about architecture".
I teach music in KS3 as part of wider trans-disciplinary and project based subject called Create, which combines music, media and drama. In Create we focus on the associated skills of each discipline coupled with a desire to sensitise students to the creative process and to help them to be more creative. At the moment we are focussing on storytelling and my media teaching partner and I are doing a project called "Frozen Moments". Inspired by the display of some of John Martin's apocalyptic paintings at the Tate & Laing we are asking our students to create moving paintings or “Frozen Moments”. They will use After Effects for the visuals, and creating soundscapes using a combination of synthesised sounds and samples laden with audio effects. The idea is that they will capture the essence of their favourite moments from their favourite stories in an image that moves almost indiscernibly, creating the illusion of a camera moving slowly through the picture.
An (imperfect) teacher model
I have digressed from my opening gambit somewhat but they are related. In planning the very first starter activity for this project I fell back on old friend, the analogy. We use the term connect the learning at our school for starters, partly due to our close affinity with research into accelerated learning and the associated terminology, but also because starters should not just be busy work to settle students, but it should also link to existing work or knowledge and preview the task to come.
As students enter the door tomorrow they will be greeted with a slide asking them to say how a great story is like… a mirror, a window, a friend or a tattoo (thanks Joni!). In my experience of using this type of starter the quality of conversations and creativity in the explanation of thinking is always superb.
Just now this has got me to thinking about the problems we have with vocabulary in Key Stage 4 in music. We tend to focus on practical music making at Key Stage 3 and encourage the development of vocabulary through internalisation of sound first, then hanging language on this experience. In the limited time we have with the students concentrating on musical endeavours, too much talk seems out of place. I still don’t really know where the boundary between too much and too little is, but I know I haven’t got it right yet, evident in the quality of talk and appraisal in our GCSE classes.
One strategy that I certainly intend to use more is analogy. Students often come up with really good analogies for musical concepts, and it is something they do naturally. After all learning is about connecting new stuff to existing stuff and making sense of it, at least that’s my take anyway. For example my students have told me that imperfect cadences sound like a cliff edge; brilliant!
Whilst we’re on the subject, as an aside John Lennon once said that Aeolian cadences sounded like exotic birds. He was in fact referring to the words rather than the sound; shame.
So for a while I have been looking for a more holistic analogy that could incorporate the terminology from the musical elements in something self contained rather than lot of disparate analogies. I have been toying with one particular analogy for a while and love to hear your thoughts. I know I am also opening myself up for ridicule here as educational analogies devised by adults can be painfully bad as illustrated in OldAndrew’s recent blog post. I disagree with OldAndrew on many things but have to admit I am happy to concur on just how awful they are.
I’m still not happy with the analogy and think it might not be suitable at all. One of the wonders of music is its place in its own intangible world yet still with the ability to conjure extra-musical responses. A significant part of me wonders if attempting to reduce it to something concrete detracts from it, over simplifies it, and maybe even belittles it. That said in the cases where I have tried it, it has worked. I would also often use length to explain duration with younger so maybe if the shoe fits?
So… here goes. The analogy I have been using from time to time… is a slice of cake. There I said it!
The idea being that the rhythm and metre are the shape of the slice of cake, i.e. square or pointy or triangular or round or whatever we decide.
The harmony and tonality is like the flavour, derived from the choice of chords.
The timbre and instrumentation are the ingredients that go into the cake and the recipe for their combination results in specific textures and colours.
Structure is achieved by lining up contrasting slices of cake along side each other.
The bass line is the base or foundation on which the cake sits and dynamics are the size of the cake (this one seems to have a shoe horned shaped imprint on it I know).
The melody is like the decoration sitting on top of the cake. Not sure if I like that one so much, too easy to confuse top with high pitch and what I really mean is that often the melody is the thing that is noticed first, but even then not always. I definitely still need to work on this and refine it if I am going to use it regularly.
So, your thoughts? Does this or could this work? Cake. I know. Cake.
I demand cake!
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