When it came time to visit Josiah Quincy Upper School this past week, I was forced to be extra creative; I was still recovering from laryngitis and, as a singer, I couldn’t risk using my swollen vocal folds for three solid hours.  I racked my brain (and my notes) and decided I’d follow a lesson plan that allowed me to not speak for the duration of the class.

In the Intro to MIE course I took a couple of years ago, Larry Scripp demonstrated a really cool rhythmic exercise that required the leader to be silent.  We assigned three different colored cups three separate rhythmic patters.  In the case of JQU’s bands, the yellow cup was a quarter note, the blue two eighths, and the red was four sixteenth notes.

Clapping

After establishing these values, the students would clap out the rhythms as they progressed through the order the cups were in.  This reinforced the concept of keeping a steady beat as they had to fit the cups’ different note values into the same amount of time.  I eventually added a second set of cups and began switching their order, changing the rhythmic pattern.  They had to be on their toes to keep up with the different patterns coming their way.  Once they had the hang of it I asked some of the more confident students to stand and clap the rhythm themselves; this got everyone excited and we went around the room taking turns.  They also got a chance to come up and arrange the order of the cups themselves, which made the activity more exciting and kept everyone engaged.  It was a hit!

The second half of the lesson was composing by scale degree, and we reinforced the musical concepts of consonance and dissonance.  I began by playing a three note, stepwise passage on the keyboard and directed the class to imitate it.  The first time was a smattering of notes; I didn’t give them a starting pitch or a reference point, so I knew it would be messy.  It only took three or four tries though for each class to locate the key, and the rest was easy.  I split the high schoolers into two groups and we experimented with short progressions, still only using the numbers 1-8 to denote scale degree.  I began by writing two progressions that I knew would result in a lot of dissonance and that didn’t resolve until the final cadence.  After playing through it once, the class returned my unsatisfied expression and we altered scale degrees until we built more consonant intervals and, ultimately, a satisfying progression.

We added rhythms to our numeric progression.

I went into this part of the lesson completely unprepared to deal with the percussionists.  The one percussionist who didn’t naturally migrate to the xylophones but stayed on the drum set was left with little to latch onto, so I had him come to the board and compose a rhythmic pattern that would correlate with our progression.  He simply wrote this underneath the numbers and it caught on.  I had a clarinetist from the other side come forward to compose a rhythm for his group, and soon we had a composition all our own.  I recorded them and we listened; they were great!

With ten minutes of class time to spare, I asked the classes to do some reflecting.  I realize the importance of time for written reflection and intend on making this part of the routine for the remainder of my internship at JQU.  One of the questions they could answer was: “What was your favorite part about a class that didn’t involve speaking?”  Many of the students really liked it, saying that the class was “more focused” and that they enjoyed how “quiet” it was.  I’ve noticed that students do most of their chatting while the teacher is talking; it provides noise for them to talk underneath.  I was amazed at how few “off-task” conversations were held during the class.

Other students were really uncomfortable with this new approach to band class; they were “confused” and “it felt awkward.”  I can imagine that it would be confusing for some students to be launched into activities without any explanation to begin with.  However, I think they had some fun and learned a lot last Friday, and I can’t wait for next time!

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