Week Two: Composition & Improvisation Tech Ideas

Creativity is a puzzle to many people as well as students. How does a new piece of art or music come to exist? In the text, Music Learning Today: Digital Pedagogy for Creating, Performing, and Responding to Music, (Bauer, 2014), Bauer states  “A reason for these perceptions of creativity as magical and mystical may be that people experience only final creative products; they don’t witness the process used in developing those products.” This is a process that can be achieved through technology. For music educators, we are presented with a monumental amount of activities that can cultivate a student’s creativity. Bauer offers broad ideas such as developing an interpretation of a musical composition which involves creative thinking, however the focus is developing musical ideas through two strategies: composition & improvisation.  After reading week two’s assignment, it has compelled me to reflect on my own strategies of teaching those two strategies (composition/improvisation) and how to improve the success rate with a new technological insight.

Over the short course of five years, I have gone from seeing my classes once a week to barely once a month. Due to shortage of substitute teachers, my elementary music classes are constantly being canceled and I am put into a regular education classroom to cover. After reflecting on this week’s reading, I was able to think of a strategy to work with these time constraints by using composition projects. Although, this would only remedy the grades who are able to use notation software, it would also provide a way to continue their music education through the use of technology. The Noteflight program from this week’s Music Notation Assignment would be a great example to work with. After creating project ideas & producing rubrics, my students can access their projects at any time and share them with me on a regular basis. I can still cultivate their creativity this way and my students won’t have to wait until the next time we have music. The introductory lesson in the computer lab would occur before the chart below. Also, another helpful idea would to add tutorial videos for each assignment. Here is a generic example for the first month.

Fifth Grade Weekly Composition Assignments

Week One: Notate Row, Row, Row Your Boat (example would be provided)

Week Two: Add voices & bass line to Row, Row Your Boat (example would be provided)

Week Three: Create an ostinato (list requirements- voicing, measures, rhythms, key)

Week Four: Create a melody to go with ostinato - Share & Peer Review

The following weeks can focus on recreating pieces, composing original works and critiquing other students’ works.

During the school year, I teach saxophone in an after school program called Students in Concert. The program offers private lessons and large ensemble opportunities. It is also keeps me up to date in the instrumental world by interacting with band directors and participating in the festivals we host. Two years ago, high school students in the band volunteered in our program by helping with things like playing along during sectionals, provided one on one time during group lessons and ushering at festivals. I had a small group of high schoolers including two alto, one tenor and one baritone sax. They were all obsessed with jazz and were excellent at improvisation. When it comes to jazz improvisation, I had a good amount of experience in college but I hadn’t the opportunity to teach it in this way. So as a reward at the end of our large group practice, we would do mini lessons on jazz improvisation and had our own “jam” sessions where we would go around the circle taking turns improvising. It was beneficial not only to the younger students but to the high school kids and myself as well. I would love to take that idea and incorporate technology into it especially since it only lasted a year and it was so beneficial to everyone in the room.

After doing some research, I have discovered a few strategies to bring back jazz improvisation to the saxophone ensemble. In the text, Bauer lists common curricular outcomes for musical creativity some of which include: echo rhythm and tonal patterns, perform familiar melodies and/or their bass lines by ear,  improvise rhythmic and/or melodic variations on a familiar melody, and improvise an original melody to a given accompaniment (Bauer, 2014). This particular outcomes will be the focus of the lessons. The following are two useful tools/strategies for implementing improvisation into band lesson:

Teacherspayteachers.com -

          Jazz Lesson: Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar

          - Detailed and sequential lesson plans to introduce Jazz improvisation, scatting and swing feel.

          - Includes mp3 files to enhance game play and swing feel

Youtube -
           Jazz Listenings & Backing Tracks Lesson
           - Listen to various artists perform one jazz piece
           - Find instruments parts (museScore)
           - Study and practice
           - Go to Youtube - search for backing track for the instrument including chord progression
           - Example: Misty
                 

When I reflect on how I am implement these tools for composition and improvising into my own classroom and how technology can play a role, I believe there is going to be a significant improvement on student success. Even with time constraints, there are ways to provide students with some form of music education and technology can be the tool to I need to survive. Using compositional projects and web based sharing, I can maintain a musical relationship with my students. Improvisation has always played a role in my general music classroom for years but discovering new ways to implement it outside the classroom will add to productivity of my curriculum.

References

Bauer, W. I. (2014). A conceptual framework for technology - Assisted music learning. In Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music (pp. 16-17). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.