The bands at Josiah Quincy Upper School celebrated Halloween last Friday with “creepy compositions.” Here is the lesson plan I wrote for the day:

All levels:

Objective: Compose a scary movie soundtrack and have some general Halloween fun!

The classes will be broken up into three or four groups and each group will be assigned one of the following kinds of scary movies:

• Suspense/thriller
• Gore
• Murder mystery
• Horror

We’ll discuss some of the musical aspects of scary movie music:

• What makes a suspense soundtrack so suspenseful?
• What happens in the music right before the attacker strikes?  Right when he strikes?  Right after?
• What about recurring thematic material (introduce leitmotif)?  Who could be represented?
• Which instruments could best represent a scream, the victim running, or a zombie approaching?
• What intervals are most unnerving?
• Do we need moments of consonance to make the dissonance even more pronounced?

After these ideas are presented and discussed the groups will be sent off to compose.  I’ll circulate between the groups to listen and make suggestions when necessary.  When they’re all ready they’ll perform their compositions and discuss what their ideas were and how they tried to portray them in their pieces.  I’ll ask the other students what they think could have been better and why (making reference to the aspects we discussed earlier), and have them demonstrate on their instruments.  A second, slightly modified version of the composition could then be performed, and we can then ask the class which they liked better.

If there’s class time left we’ll have a dance party!  “Thriller,” “The Monster Mash,” etc.  Should be fun!

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Although we only got to have a dance party in the final class, I think the students all enjoyed the activity.  The high schoolers broke into groups and came up with individual plots to base their compositions on; this worked really well, so I presented the idea to the 8th graders and asked them to write their plots down.  This helped them to have something concrete to work from and made the process go much more smoothly.  The opportunity to discuss consonance and dissonance, crescendo, and leitmotif all organically presented themselves, so a lot of spontaneous learning occurred.

The 7th graders are a really fun group of kids and, as always, surprised me with their creativity.  I took their teacher’s advice and let them remain as one big group for the activity.  The class wrote the following “scary movie” plot and composition:

THE VILLAIN: A sinister, masked creature who (while he was still a human) was heartbroken by Britney Spears and, in his anguish, turned into an evil creature who kills with his gaze.

THE VICTIM: Britney Spears.

The plot (and our composition): It’s Halloween night and our villain is trying to find Ms. Spears to take his revenge. He is walking down quiet alleys and asking everyone he sees if they know where Britney is; she wasn’t home and must be at a party.  After experimenting with different instruments the class decided that an even, slow, and quiet beat on the drums would best represent him walking down the streets. When they say, “I don’t know,” he raises his mask and they fall into the abyss. Two percussionists play slow, descending glissandi on the vibes and the band watches me carefully for the sforzando attack on a random high note.  It was surprisingly chilling. When he finally finds someone who tells him where she is, he spares them and quickly makes his way to the party.  The student on the drumset laid down a hip-hop beat to represent the music at the party. Once he makes it to the party he still has to find Britney amongst all the other people their in the noisy house. To build the suspense, the students followed my directions to pulse eighth notes in a crescendo pattern until I gave them the cue for the glissandi and a forte attack each time he raised his mask to a party guest. He finally finds Britney and takes his revenge.  A slow, dissonant crescendo following an accellerando until the final forte attack, when he raises his mask and Brittney falls.

They are pretty creative, aren’t they?

NewsBlog Editor’s Note: We are pleased to introduce to you Justin Stanley, a new CMIE Guided Intern working as Documentation Specialist for Larry Scripp’s Introduction to Music-In-Education course this Fall.

Professor Larry Scripp introduced a number of concepts this week in his class, “Introduction to Music-in-Education.” He began the lesson by drawing a matrix (as shown below) on the class blackboard and playing a recording of a piece by Bobby McFerrin. Professor Scripp, through nonverbal suggestion, portrayed the function of the matrix in the rhythm of the song, and added x’s in single cells to notate clapping or emphasis. Soon, the class was engaged in an activity in which we clapped along rhythmically to the piece in a unified perception of the function of the chart drawn on the board. Professor Scripp gradually added complexity to the exercise by using symbols to imply rhythmic groupings, words to apply to rhythms (antelope for a group of three, salamander for a group of four), and rhythmic solfege for the same.

The basic form of the matrix used in class to show the basic form and rhythm of the song.

After the exercise and a discussion of what we did, students were asked to compile a list of mental processes that had to be integrated to take part in the exercise. Among many conclusions, students realized that processes of permutation, symbol association, cycle recognition, and grouping and parsing were needed to actively participate. We found that these concepts and brain processes that we used can be applied to a number of different subject areas. This led Professor Scripp to make the following comment: “If music is a fundamental medium and model for teaching and learning, from the point of view of integration, you could say that it is a fundamental medium and model for integrating.” Because of the subtle complexity involved in the activity, Prof. Scripp was able to keep the entire class (perhaps completely subconsciously had we not been conservatory music students) in a state of Flow (as shown in the chart below) during which we were all listening, questioning, creating, performing, and reflecting. Through this lesson, we as students were able to experience some of the cornerstones of the MIE program first hand: shared teaching and learning concepts, and teaching and learning processes. The integration of all of the learning processes exhibited during this exercise can help students create and strengthen connections necessary for all kinds of education. The subtle complexity of this exercise and any number of exercises like it that integrate music and other curriculum can create and strengthen connections in the minds of any student. Complexity in learning and comprehension can lead to any number of paths for a learner of any age. This lesson pushed me to do two things: 1.    I worked on a new unit plan for my internship teaching brass players at a local upper school that incorporated the use of a matrix to teach solfege. The initial lesson went incredibly well, with students learning how to create their own symbols to notate rhythm and melody. I hope to incorporate the following aspects into the unit curriculum for integration: a.    MATH: unit, sequence, fractions, special learning b.    LANGUAGE ARTS: symbols, syntax/structure c.    SCIENCE: measurement, documentation, inquiry d.    HISTORY: timelines, maps, contextual history e.    ARTS: creation, spatial learning 2.    I decided to focus on flow theory and brain processes/anatomy for a research paper for another MIE class at NEC, “Learning, Brain Development, and Music,” taught by Lyle Davidson.

Short Trailer for the MIENC (Music-In-Education National Consortium)

This is a short video we made to introduce people to the Music-In-Education National Consortium. Larry Scripp will be presenting about the MIENC at Singapore’s National Child Education Conference tomorrow!

We began this session by learning a few folk rounds. The first was a bluesy MoonDog tune that reads as follows:

Nero’s expedition up the Nile
Failed
Because the water hyacinths
Had clogged the river
Denying Nero’s vessel’s passage
Through the Sud of Nubia

(I found a transcription online if anyone is interested in joining along!)

The second was a curious tune that compared a frog to a strange form of bird. This piece reminded me of a showtune more than a folk melody. Its text read:

What a queer bird a frog are
When he sit he stand almost
When he jump he fly almost
When he sing he cry almost
And he ain’t got no tail
Hardly he ain’t got no tail
And he sit on what he ain’t got almost…
What a queer bird a frog are!

When we broke into canon (I believe at one point we were in 4 or 5 parts) I began to get so excited that I couldn’t help but sing at the top of my lungs and by the end I had definitly broken a sweat. At times I stopped (just briefly) in order to experience the composite harmonies and rhythms as they flew by. This is the music that shaped me into the man (and musician) that I am today. My mother sang folk songs from her youth to me when I was an infant (and in fact even before I was born). When I was older she bestowed unto me her collection of LPs that contained her favored renditions of these tunes (they are still in frequent rotation on my record player). There is a strange sense of community that is lost when these songs and their traditions are ignored and undermined.

Later that night, after our class, Joanna and I took a couple friends up onto a friend’s rooftop deck. We taught them the songs that we had learned, and while a number of intoxicated college students stumbled home on the streets below, we rounded off the roof above them. This type of community is profoundly valuable. The sense of sharing is so unique and there is such a strong energy of liberation from all things ego. It is as though the music soaks into your skin and you feel such ecstasy from its internal resonance. These moments are rare (and increasingly so). We speculated in class on what life might be like if the price of gas escalated to an unreasonable and unaffordable height. Luxury as we now know it would cease to be an option. Touring musicians and ensembles would become rare and would force our community into a tighter knit microcosm. I believe that our scope of perception would narrow and we would begin to look inwards for entertainment. It is likely that our culture would return to an orally driven tradition with a focus on sharing, trading, familial communities, and the immediate experience of being. It is possible to speculate that within our current global community these things become insignificant and tend to disappear.

I would also like the mention the great attention devoted within our current cultural machine to the standardized process of test taking. This continues a conversation we began in class that Jenny also spoke of in her previous blog. As Jenny mentioned, learning to take a test, such as the SAT, targets strengths that you might use when balancing a check book. The strategies you learn when training for these exams in no way helps one to develop into a better artist, writer, musician, or creative thinker. Much of the way that high school English classes are conducted reflects this. Conversations surrounding literature and higher art are more often than not guided towards a specific end result or “correct answer” as defined by a teacher’s handbook. These so called ‘guided conversations’ are not real conversations and do not express anything but a prescribed formula and its subsequently derived answer. It leaves little room for creative thinking and no room for a student to learn freely. In tighter knit societies, we want people to sing with, to talk to, to be part of a community with.

We discussed in depth how much of what we learned as students was not what our teacher had been attempting to teach. For many of us, we learn in a variety of free-associative ways. We make connections and draw conclusions based upon previous experiences and our current understandings. It seems obvious, with this in mind, that our system of education can many times create a barrier for the minds of learners. In my view, education is something that cannot be prescribed. It is something that, when most effective, is coordinated with the specific needs and current situations of each student group (and in the most ideal situations, for each student individually). We have a long way to go in fulfilling the needs of our students, but I believe that in-depth speculation on the unique qualities of folk based communities will yield positive and provocative results.

This Fall marks the beginning of several changes we’re making to the CMIE Guided Internship program at NEC.

One of the most exciting developments is that Guided Internships are now being formally recognized by the Conservatory’s Registrar; this means that students who successfully complete internships will get those internships listed on their academic transcript. To register for a guided internship, students should meet with me prior to their academic advising appointment and present a Guided Internship Proposal. Upon acceptance and review of the Guided Internship Proposal, Larry Scripp and I will sign a Special Enrollment Permission Form that the Registrar uses. Registering an internship with the CMIE Office and the Registrar guarantees some very important things:

1. Your internship meets CMIE program guidelines;
2. You promise to complete your Guided Internship within the semester of registration;
3. Your internship will count towards the CMIE Concentration;
4. You will receive credit for your internship on your academic transcript

IMPORTANT: These guarantees only apply if you register for your internship in advance of doing it. From this point forward, you can no longer tell us about your internship “after the fact” and expect to receive credit for it. Also, all internships MUST be registered for by the completion of ADD/DROP period; we cannot honor requests or proposals past the Conservatory’s ADD/DROP period for the semester that the internship work is planned for.

Other exciting guided internships await in new partnerships we are forming with our community partners. Through a new relationship with the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, we are able to offer MIE students opportunities to work with Boston’s Asian immigrant population. If you are interested in teaching workshops or classes that align music learning with American cultural studies and/or English Language Learning, or you would like to teach vocal music, come by the CMIE Program Office and speak with Randy Wong.

I’m pleased to announce that we have launched a beta version of our new CMIE website! New site features include:

Anyways, please comment here if you have any suggestions!!

-Randy

Welcome to our new MIE NewsBlog! Check here for stories and news from the Center for Music-in-Education at New England Conservatory. You’ll be able to find first hand accounts of the work that goes on in our internship programs, in our MIE classes, and in partnerships with local arts organizations and public schools. Our contributors include current MIE guided interns, MIE@NEC faculty members, guest Artist-Teacher-Scholars, alums of the MIE@NEC program, and special topical guests. If you are interested in being a contributor, please email MIE Program Coordinator Randy Wong.