Composition Club

This club is my baby.

I love this club.

I have been wanting to do this club for ages and would (shh, it's a secret!) totally do it for free.

It's a group composition club with 9 year olds, and the whole thing warms my heart so much that I bounce up and down when I think about it. Or talk about it. Or type about it.

Want to hear what we did the first week?
I have this book that I bought with Mical last year from the remainders section at the U. Bookstore in Seattle. I would link to it, but I totally don't remember the title. Suffice to say it matches up paintings with tracks from famous and evocative pieces of music. So for instance flight of the bumble bee with a Japanese print of dahlias and a bee. Or Vivaldi's "Winter" with a landscape painting from the 1700's of Flemish ice skaters.

I wanted to write a piece our first week of club so that we really jumped in head first and got right in to the making of things. I figured that building a soundscape would be the easiest way in and I knew that we could build something fairly quickly. We started by looking at 4 of the paintings in the book and discussing what we expected the music to sound like based on the paintings. This aquarium scene is underwater and has a lot of fish. Do you suppose the music will be legato or staccato? Do you think it's going to be loud or quiet? What sort of instruments would you use for this scene? Based on this painting do you expect the music to be scary? happy? authoritative? calm? angry? Something else?

We only had two girls the first week, so I left them lying on their bellies on the carpet, waving their feet gently back and forth in the air while they flipped through the pictures and listened to the pieces in order to guess which one they were listening to.

Having discussed all four of the chosen pictures I was only going to play one piece for them to guess and sort out, but they were enjoying themselves so much that they asked if they could do all of them. You bet you can!

Once we'd finished looking at the book and they'd correctly deduced all four pieces (we even had a bit of a knights' duel during the march) it started to rain very, very heavily. This was *perfect* as it meant that when I brought up making a soundscape, the first thing they wanted to make it about was the rain. (How ideal.)

We went out into the hallway where the instrument store closet is and picked out some percussion that we thought might be useful including two rain sticks, some bongos, a slit drum, a thunder drum, and a clacker thing that probably has a proper name but if it does I don't know what it is.

We brought the instruments back into the room, had a bit of time to experiment, and then discussed and tried playing the story that our soundscape would be structured on. We begin with people walking around slowly (bongos), then the rain starts (rain sticks) and the people hurry away. When the thunder starts (thunder drum) the people knock urgently on doors in order to be let inside (slit drum top and sides to make two different sounds). Then, since we are doing this from the storm's point of view- there is a thunder drum solo accompanied by the rain sticks. The thunder dies away and the first brave souls venture out again (bongos). Then the rain stops and all you hear are footsteps.

Our piece is called "The Big Storm."

We wrote it all down, stuck our written text score on a music stand, and rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. I was willing to quit way before the girls wanted to stop. We even performed it for one of the Year 3 teachers who happened to be walking by. I had the girls initial and date the score and gave them each photo copies to take home with them.

Excellent.

This week we started by analyzing three more paintings, welcoming our 3rd club member, and reviewing last week's piece. Our newest member learned/was taught two different parts (the rain sticks and the slit drum) which we rehearsed extensively before recording. (They're each going to get a CD of their work at the end of the term.) That took up so much time that we only had 15 minutes to make a start on our next piece.

Apparently this club is half music and half art appreciation (with a bit of Earth Sciences thrown in: for some reason we had a big conversation about the Pacific rim of fire before club got started today). The next piece we're working on uses as its starting point rhythm and pitch instead of location and environment. Rhythm and pitch are the two most basic building blocks of music and maybe a sculpture or picture of neat architecture would have been better to look at- but the first thing that came to mind was Piet Mondrian with his lines and colours. Shapes and colours? Pitch and rhythm. Let's work it.

So that's where we're at right now. (Just wait 'til we start using poetry as a starting point!) This club makes me so. so. SO happy.

The Kids Sing A Song

Sunday was a busy day. I was doing the project management for the Continuing Professional Development weekends for Guildhall again (read: moving stuff about and making sure everyone had enough tea and biscuits and lunch) but had to leave in the middle in order to get over to Kensington for the the Kid's recital.

This recital was very elaborate- the theme for this term has been "animals" and the children have been learning animal related songs, drawing pictures to be used in the programme, and writing pieces for their instruments about various animals.

In my class we wrote a song- It is called "Legato and Staccato" and I'm way super proud of it. We wrote it in a month and all of the kids were involved. I was avoiding making a structure for what they had written for the longest time, caught up in thinking "Oh, but I'm NOT a composer and it's going to sound bad, and blah blah blah" which is silly because a: it is their song and b: it was really good!

I even played piano for it. This is a big deal, I'm not a confident pianist, and this part that I wrote was very easy, but still- there were chords in the left hand, melody in the right, and I was singing and conducting the kids with my head all at the same time.

Of the five kids who showed up to the recital one was poorly with a sore throat, one had just joined the class when we started to write the song and his brother informed me in no uncertain terms that he was not prepared to perform the song, and a third is being bumped up to a higher class next term and has decided to distance himself from the rest of us. So there were two singers, and though we were a small group- we were mighty. Gap toothed smiles and everything. (C. was very excited to be singing, very excited to have just lost her first tooth that morning, and kept grinning all day long.)

Today in my singing lesson with Jilly she asked me how my teaching had been going. I excitedly told her about the success that the song had been on Sunday and then played/sang it for her. Because it is *such* a charming little tune, she asked me if she could put it up on her song resource website. Isn't that so cool? And such an honor? When it goes up, I'll let you all know.

The Kids Start To Write A Song

I took a different approach with The Kids today. There is a music service concert coming up in a couple of weeks and so instead of trying to bash rhythm into their heads (with bats!) (not really.) I decided to usethat degree I've got and do a workshop style thing with them. So we're writing a song.

I was hoping to get four phrases today. It took us an hour to get one, I definitely should have started this process earlier. But It worked, and the music we produced is great- though I realized as I was leaving that in singing it all together we had shifted the rhythm over an eighth note- so now it is all jazzy and syncopated- which is fabulous and much more fun to sing and play, but it is no longer technically what rhythm they wrote down- and I'm not sure if that is a big deal or not...

Anyhow- we've been working on writing down and playing back four beat rhythms on the white board so we started with that and then took the first two bars and figured out how to tap them together as a group.

Then I took the keyboard and put it on the floor so that we could all see the keys and for each note in the rhythm I asked them if the pitch should stay the same, go up, or go down. I played each version and sometimes we voted on which we thought sounded best. We tried singing it just like that, but it turned out that it was very difficult to sing the tune without words- so we did a big brainstorm about legato and staccato and what animals or things were like that.

We didn't end up with the most inspired lyrics ever, but I like them anyway:
"This one is smooth, this one. Legato, Staccato!" Then we practiced singing that all together- the jazzy way, one eighth note displaced.

(I've spent the last 45 minutes trying to figure out how to make a picture of what I mean, but I haven't figured out a good way. I've got the lick typed into Sibelius so if anyone knows how to do a screen shot or how to turn something into a graphic that I can then insert into the blog as a picture... that would be keen.)

The kids were humming the riff on the way down the stairs to their parents and I sighed with relief- finally. A good lesson.

Composition Class

We just spent a grueling yet fun morning playing through all of the compositions that we brought in. Usually, as a group, we don't actually write down what we're composing. It tends to be more along the lines of "So, keep that going until the flute comes in and then drop it a third, yeah?" So making a proper written score is a bit of a change. Also then reading the score...

My brief was to write for 6 members of the group using all extended techniques or sounds that the instruments don't usually make. I ended up also creating my own instrument using a metal goblet, a metal bowl, a chopstick, and a pitcher of water. Water sloshing around in ringing metal? Best. Sound. Ever.

I was up until an embarrassing time last night getting the score all in order and handwriting everything because most computer composition programs don't let you invent new shapes for note heads, which is one of the things that I needed to do in order to make my score work. It should have been tedious writing everything down- but I got the biggest kick out of it.

Ella, my composer flatmate, let me use a couple of pieces of her HUGE manuscript paper, so I was sitting there taking up the ENTIRE kitchen table with my paper and my notes and sketches and my pencils and pencil sharpeners and multiple erasers. Moises and Latana came in and had supper while I was working which was really lovely- to have comfortable conversation going on around you that you can join or not while you're working.

I think my score is beautiful and will probably post pictures of it later. We had 9 scores to get through so we extended class time a half hour earlier and half an hour later. We all have recordings of our pieces now which is really exciting too. Would have been even more exciting for mine if there hadn't been a wind quartet rehearsal next door that was drowning out some of the sounds even through the wall. Oh well, still wonderful. It was fun watching people's faces as their music came to life. Emma at one point even said, with a huge grin on her face, " I wrote in and they're playing it!" Which seems kind of obvious, but is a tremendous feeling.

Off to Cornwall now! We're performing at the Tate St. Ives on Sunday! And I'll tell you all about it on Monday.