We are nearing the end of the year at MusicLaunch. There are many things I could mention here and I will give a more all-encompassing report after the final class.

Today I would like to talk about something very positive! In the past few class meetings, I have finally begun to come closer to my original goals of getting students to use their ears and not rely on the page. Although this has come about in some ways that I didn’t expect, I’m so excited that I can finally report this. When I first began at MusicLaunch, my plan to help students develop their ears had to be shelved for a little bit so that I could help them develop more fundamental skills on their instruments and on playing in time.

About half way through the semester, I periodically asked them to do a simple 4/4 call and response with clapping (while stomping out the 4/4 with their feet). This originally served the purpose of helping their time, but I realize that it helps their ears as well! Also around this time, I was given the opportunity to create a melody with Solfege blocks in our large ensemble and I introduced the students to the song “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers. Finally, last week while I was in charge of running the large groups, I gave students some rhythms to clap that were a little more challenging. This lead to me writing some of these rhythms out on the board, but from there, something else happened: I had them create their own 4/4 rhythms on the board. While this is not directly ear-related, it is still a chance for them to create their own little piece of music, which is a huge win in my book!

I wasn’t immediately able to categorize this stuff as creative success or ear-training success right away, but after thinking about it for a little bit, I definitely see it that way now. Besides giving me some encouragement, this definitely gives me some great ideas for the future.

Stay tuned for a complete report about my MusicLaunch experience in the next few days! It will cover tackling music fundamentals, maximizing productivity, dealing with behavior problems, and keeping students engaged, to name a few topics. Thanks for reading!

Tyler

Hi Everyone! My apologies for the very late introduction to my internship this semester.

For Spring 2012 I am doing my MIE guided internship with NEC’s MusicLaunch Program at the Wang YMCA in Chinatown. MusicLaunch is a program with 13 students between the ages of 4 and 15 who meet every Saturday morning to learn music for an hour and a half. With these students, we use both traditional and innovative teaching techniques to work on basic fundamental music skills (rhythms, pitch, solfege) as well as learning instruments. Coordinating the program is Devin from NEC. The other instructors include fellow intern Salinla and middle school music teacher Johnny.

We spend a lot of time splitting the students up in small groups determined by age and instrument. In my small group I have four students from ages 10 to 13. Two of them play clarinet, one plays alto saxophone, and one plays trombone. When I first started I noticed that the students already had a decent amount of experience reading music and understanding notation. However, the students had very little experience playing their band instruments. I immediately saw the challenge in meeting in instrument groups for such a short time once a week: the students would not get reinforcement as often as most people get when learning these instruments. With band instruments, it takes such a long time and a lot of practice to develop the muscles for the proper embouchure, to reinforce good position/posture habits, and to get comfortable using so much air.

The other main challenge I noticed coming in was negative behavior in the class. Fortunately two of my small group students showed me right away that they were very polite and cooperative, but unfortunately, the other two showed me the opposite. One of the uncooperative students is the disruptive, antagonistic type. He constantly complains, talks back, and is not shy about saying that he doesn’t enjoy being there. His younger sister barely speaks, doesn’t want to participate, and has been known to cry in previous semesters in order to get out of participating. Neither of these students had shown any evidence of ever having practiced the material between classes.

I noticed immediately that my personal goals for this semester would need to be modified. As you all may have seen in my proposal, my main interest was getting the students to be comfortable using their ears in addition to what was on the page. Because of their lack of experience on their instruments, and because of the importance of reinforcing practice and study on these instruments in order to make progress, I had to put that main goal on the back burner. I am hoping that, in time, I will be able to reintroduce ear training of sorts into my lesson plans.

Thank you all for reading and please stay tuned for more posts!

Tyler

The video below shows a peak into one of our first explorations of using ‘Multiple Representations’ to teach musical concepts at the YMCA in Chinatown. The video shows intern, Pui, taking the lead in demonstrating rhythmic concepts, numeric pitch identification and solfege using Lego blocks that we found in the classroom at the YMCA. The students were surprised by this use of the Lego blocks initially, but caught on quickly.

At the beginning of the video is the initial introduction of rhythmic concepts. One sees intern MusicLaunch intern, Pui, pointing to a block and together with intern Devin Ulibarri demonstrating the desired action – in this case, clapping according to the size of the blocks. The clapping patterns were introduced separately (1,2 and 3 beats), but were combined to create an 8 beat pattern consisting of three of the smaller patterns. The students were then asked to manipulate the blocks in order to come up with their own structures. For example at 0’53” in the video, one observes Kayla’s pattern (2+1+3) and then her brother changing the pattern (2+3+1). This moment is important because it empowers the student and demonstrates that musical concepts can be mastered and manipulated – it develops their creativity.

At 4’22” into the video, one can see the culmination of the entire lesson. In this final review, Pui asks students to identify the solfege names of the notes by hinting at the numeric name. Pui asks the class what the second pitch in the scale is to which a student answers, “Re”. Pui then asks the class to answer using pitch to which the class accurately sings the intended pitches that she is identifying using her fingers (numeric name). At the end of the review, Pui tests the students mastery by asking them to skip “Re” and accurately sing “Mi” from “Do” – the students have some difficulty doing this, but this is their first time and subsequent videos will reveal their progress.

The video ends with quick demonstrations of other types of multiple representations that we have used in the break off sections of MusicLaunch. Future blog posts will keep you posted on the significance of these other forms of multiple representations and how they have helped the development of the students in MusicLaunch at the YMCA in Chinatown.

During my guided internship in spring of 2012, I am interested in accomplishing the following goals:

1. I want to explore and test my interest in working with middle and/or high school aged musicians.
2. I want to gain a better understanding of how to teach student musicians how to use their ears for various purposes (improvisation, learning music and musical properties, composition, etc.)
3. I want to gain more experience in conducting a lesson or rehearsal in an efficient and focused, yet lighthearted and enjoyable manner.

I believe that in my efforts to meet these objectives, I will be putting past and concurrent courses to practical use. I have taken Educational Psychology as an undergraduate at the University of Miami and I am currently taking Models for Teaching and Learning here at NEC. Along with my internship next semester I will be taking Improvisation in Music Education, which will provide me with great insight in how to work with my students.

In my own experience, I’ve found that it is very important to have a solid foundation in both reading music and in using one’s ears. Although there are exceptions, I’ve found that students are generally more likely to rely more heavily on written music and less likely to be able to use and trust their ears to learn music, improvise, or compose. I believe that this is due to several possible factors, the most noticeable being:

• Students can feel bashful or vulnerable performing music in this way.
• Students don’t really know what to listen for because they haven’t immersed themselves enough in the music they are studying. These observations are based on my own private teaching of high school jazz students in my hometown of Gainesville, Florida, as well as my experience with other students while playing in middle and high school ensembles.

My goal as a teacher would be to help my students grow into musicians who play their instrument(s) with good fundamentals, have solid reading and written-music skills, and can use their ears for improvisation and learning music aurally.

Some of the most important questions I would like to explore during this coming semester are:

• How do beginning improvisers first get comfortable with playing what is not on the page?
• How can an improviser transition from “plugging in licks” to playing in a more spontaneous way?
• How to students learn material by ear rather than with written music?

All of these questions are inspired by my desire to understand more about how students can learn to train their ears. In my experience, I know that being able to hear intervals and also doing extensive listening to the type of music that one wants to play are two crucial aspects of developing the ears, but I would like to develop more specific answers and more specific techniques in this matter. Based on past experiences, my concern for the ability to transfer this information gives me question, “How do I use effective language and communication to better explain musical concepts, and how does this change from student to student?”

To record the contents of my internship, I will update on the MIE blog as well as add to my portfolio. My specific ideas for recording these experiences include at least 5 video recordings of my teaching practice as well as a written account of each time I go to my internship. This will include the events of the day, what techniques were used, and an evaluation of what went well, what didn’t go well, and why.The Artist-Teacher-Scholar model very accurately represents my long-term goals as a professional musician. As an artist, I plan to continue to play and write music my whole career, and continue to grow and evolve from my musical experiences. While I consider myself a jazz musician, I have no intentions of limiting myself to a specific genre and I want to have the most fulfilling musical experience as possible, regardless of genre. As a teacher, I want to pass on my knowledge and my musically diverse spirit to young students, helping them develop into inspired, eclectic, multi-faceted musicians. My specific interests would be more in small group and private studio interaction. I would be interested in teaching primarily in the late middle school and high school levels, but eventually, I would be interested in teaching at the college level as well. As a scholar, I am interested in continuing to research, listen to music, and try to elevate human understanding of music as much as possible, which would help me as both an artist and a teacher. It is my hope that this internship proves to be a valuable learning experience, giving me a promising launching point into the life of being a teaching artist.

Editor’s Note: This post is in a series of several by undergraduate composition major Juhye Lee. Read Juhye’s previous MusicLaunch posts here. Or you can also see the whole MusicLaunch blog archive.

11/19
The kids got to learn the two notes of ‘Do’ and ‘Sol’ on the staff and they also get to learn the solfege. It was interesting that learning the notes on the staff required three actions. The things would be seeing, hearing and memorizing. Kids got to see the notes that’s on either line or space. They will determine the notes according to which line or space. Then they will be introduced what it’s sounding. Once they get to know the notes, they will think about the pitch. Based on the two things, they would memorize them. Each kids would have different pace to absorb the teaching. I though their acquire ability might be related to agility. Depending on how fast they can connet the three actions, they will get it fast or slow. For some kids, the things would be easy to learn but for others, it would be a hard task that’s hard to get.

Editor’s Note: This post is in a series of several by undergraduate composition major Juhye Lee. Read Juhye’s previous MusicLaunch posts here. Or you can also see the whole MusicLaunch blog archive.

11/12
I got to meet Andrew for the first time at the meeting on Thursday and today I got to watch his teaching for the first time. It was interesting that he brought some real fruits for the class. The concept of it was similar to the last week’s singing block things. He used the rhythm/syllables of Le(1)-mon(2), Lime(1-2). I think It’s the way to teach them duration. Both words are saying in 2 beats but for Lemon, there are two saperated beats in Le and Mon. For Lime one should hold the word to be connected, so the word Lime is like a half notes duration while Le-Mon is like having two quarter notes in two. Even though I’m not a native speaker, I could clearly feel the duration and rhythm and could get to understand the concept. It was like a finding music elements in our actually life.

Editor’s Note: This post is in a series of several by undergraduate composition major Juhye Lee. Read Juhye’s previous MusicLaunch posts here. Or you can also see the whole MusicLaunch blog archive.

Today Devin and Pui tried to teach the rhythms and pitches with the blocks. They started to clap according to the blocks. For instance one block means clap once (which could be quarter note) and the longer block of the two is followed by clapping twice(which could be two eighth notes in quarter note). Singing the pitches were followed by the rhythms. Singing One-Two-Three (which is Do-Re-Mi) was added to the rhythms they were clapping. Do (in a quarter note), Do-re( in a quarter note, so there would be two divided notes of quarter notes, which are two eighth notes), Do-re-mi(Each do-re-mi is an eighth note singing in two quarter notes as (8th rest)-do-re-mi). I was curious when they sing do, do-re, (rest)-do-re-mi, The do-re and (rest)-do-re-mi has eighth notes in each, not a quarter note as the first Do. The next step would be building a harmony on Do-re-mi as singing the thrid above them(Which is mi-fa-sol). The kids will naturally learn about the sounds of thrid intervals.

In Pui’s Class, most of them were beginner and I could see that every kid’s ability (understanding, time that take them to get Pui’s teaching) was different even though they all are in the same situation.