Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Ellsworth and a different approach
After reading the Ellsworth article I had something of a random/experimental idea. Perhaps it is just my education at WCC or the subscription to their "institution" that has influenced my teaching, but when I look at learning music, specifically choral music in my classrooms I, and I suspect many of us lean toward imitating. We read what is on the page and emulate it in our world. In essence many music educators feel that imitation of the original musical performance is best and most desired. It would be interesting to adopt Ellsworth's approach of having her students submit paragraphs framing their writing in a musical sense. That we take a look of where we (teacher AND students) are approaching the music in question and use the music as a medium to create a new representation of that medium. Perhaps instead of looking at music in the absolutes of "This will make my choir sound good," or "This will challenge my choir" we could and should approach music for our classrooms as "How will my choir understand this?," or "How do I understand this?" Just a thought
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2 comments:
Interesting Shaun- the problem I always have with the arts and particularly large ensembles is that you as the teacher are trying to promote creativity and autonomy while in the end all the members of the group must follow the conductor in order for the performance to be musically succesful. Conductors are also notorious for working an ensemble until they begin to match the recording the conductor has playing in his or her mind
I really liked the questions you posed. I have to admit that I do pick music based on what I want my choirs to learn musically. However, what would happen if we chose music based on our students diversity within the classroom? Take a survey of the students in your class and their various cultures...then enable the students to help pick some of the pieces. In this way they are involved in the process, the student becomes teacher, teacher becomes student, and we gain new insight into each others lives. This would also enable us to look at different pieces from various points of view. We can ask the students which way is the preferred, not correct, way of performing this piece?
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