Make Music Historical past Enjoyable and Interactive

I took my first music historical past class through the second semester of my junior 12 months. We went in chronological order and acquired about midway via the Baroque interval. When the tip of the semester arrived, it was like turning off a film when it was simply beginning to get attention-grabbing. Yes, I used to be that nerdy pupil who cherished music historical past. There was no method I used to be going to attend 4 months for the subsequent classes.

That summer time I labored as a performer on the circus at Great Escape in Queensbury in upstate New York. We had three exhibits a day with breaks in between. Every day throughout my first break, I discovered a quiet, shaded little nook of the amusement park and browse my music historical past textual content and listened to CDs that I ordered from the Columbia House “12-for-a-penny” deal. It was below these bushes with the Adirondacks behind me, the odor of funnel truffles within the air and contemporary off a efficiency with elephants that I fell in love with the music of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Mahler.

Launching Composer of the Month

When I started instructing center college, I needed to share my love of the basic composers and their music with my college students. I created a “Composer of the Month” program the place I featured a unique composer every month throughout rehearsals. Each week, I spent 10 to fifteen minutes to speak in regards to the composer and play a recording. I created a three-year rotation of 9 composers every year, which meant that in my college students’ center college years they’d study 27 composers.

Taking It To Another Level

After a pair occasions via the three-year rotation, I tweaked the curriculum. At the start of the 12 months, I assigned a composer to every pupil. When their composer’s month arrived, they ready and delivered a presentation for the band, corresponding to:

Presentations: Students usually gave biographical data or performed recordings of their composer’s most well-known items. Sometimes, college students would get extra artistic and costume up just like the composer and act out scenes from their lives. Or, college students would possibly carry out one of many composer’s songs on the piano or their band devices.

Videos and Podcasts: Over the years, college students have made movies or podcasts utilizing a digital audio workstation (DAW) like Cubase or BandLab and a video-editing app like WeVideo or iMovie. I particularly loved podcast initiatives the place college students faux to interview an skilled or the composers themselves. Sometimes, college students truly interviewed an skilled. (So far, no person has interviewed the precise composer of the month!)

Posters: Another enjoyable venture — and one which works very well once you want plans for a substitute instructor — is to have college students create a poster on one of many composers of the month that features their title, biographical data, well-known tune titles, compositional methods, what instrument they performed, their inspirations, footage and paintings. I normally show the posters across the band room.

Concerts: We have featured Composers of the Month in live shows. Students carry out their repertoire both as a full group, solos or chamber ensembles. Students introduce the songs and share some details about the composers. Slide decks or movies might be proven whereas the ensembles are performing.

Composing: A extra superior venture that I’ve solely began exploring is having college students attempt to write music within the type of the Composer of the Month. This is fairly superior for center college the place I’m simply making an attempt to get the scholars to discover ways to compose basically.

Making it a Cross-Curricular Project

Composer of the Month is not only an exercise in my band classroom. I additionally educate it in my basic music courses. In the previous, my choir and orchestra colleagues have carried out it as effectively. The different two center colleges in my district have additionally been on board.

Composer of the Month has even been a cross-curricular venture with language arts, social research and artwork departments collaborating. We have scrolling bulletins on screens across the college the place the Composer of the Month is featured. We have bulletin boards and show instances the place you can too discover data on the assorted composers we research. These shows are sometimes put collectively by college students.

Diversifying the Project

Fast ahead to proper earlier than the pandemic. I used to be working with two superb music colleagues — Mari Rathke and Maggie Zeidel — who have been very concerned within the Composer of the Month venture and urged a big change. Most of the 27 composers we studied have been European male composers who lived between 1600-1900. Mari and Maggie did some in depth analysis to diversify the checklist of composers.

Mari, who’s now instructing orchestra in suburban Chicago, remembers, “We were trying to make it more diverse. We looked for new composers that students could learn from but also composers who students were familiar with like Lady Gaga and Kesha who did more than sing on stage — they had a background in music.”

Maggie, who has since constructed a tremendous program in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, provides, “We knew that we would hit the male African American demographic with jazz artists, and we wanted to make sure we caught more than that when diversifying the program. I recall wanting to include Latinx and LGBTQIA+ composers, as well as female composers and female composers of color. We really dug deep into the underrepresented demographics, not just stopping at the surface level.”

Mari and Maggie’s analysis was superb. They created an inventory of 27 composers from world wide and included superb musicians who don’t get the eye and credit score they deserve. The checklist additionally contains a variety of genres and eras. Here is the checklist of composers we’re studying about this 12 months:

In April, I actually loved speaking about Diane Warren, who has written 9 No. 1 songs and dozens of Top 40 hits. We listened to a number of of her songs together with Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” and Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.”

A dialogue adopted about issues like: 1) artists who write their very own songs versus those that don’t, 2) how Warren is among the best songwriters of her era with out being “famous” and three) if Warren had lived throughout Mozart’s time, she would most likely be remembered extra as a result of composers from that period are higher recognized than performers (which is able to lead into our dialogue about Mozart in May).

Composing A Curriculum

We cowl a number of continents, eras, genres, genders and types with our Composer of the Month checklist. After three years of band, choir or orchestra, it’s as if our college students have taken a world music historical past class, too.

The initiatives, discussions, performances and compositions add a lot to the music schooling my college students are receiving. An enormous shout out to Mari and Maggie for all of the onerous work they put into this venture in addition to contributing to this text.