I can’t believe how easy it is. Not like you make it seem easy, but like it really is easy. I keep going: ‘oh, I could do that!’
This quotation came from a teacher who participated in my doctoral research study, which was a 14-month artist-researcher residency in a primary school classroom (see Shannon, 2021). The research in my study was done as a series of music lessons and the teacher commented that music lessons are very doable. By the end of this post (about 600 words from now), I hope you will say exactly the same thing: “Oh, I could do that!”
Lots of research says that doing music is good for children for all manner of reasons, such as helping their reading and maths etc. However, for me, all this undersells the main advantage of doing music, which is that doing music is good for children because it’s good for children that they do music: for its own sake, and even if it does absolutely nothing else (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). Yet, there is an equally large literature that suggest primary school practitioners are often too anxious to teach their own music (Hennessy, 2000). More than any other subject, it leaves practitioners anxious because they think:
· Music requires knowledge they could never learn: “I can’t play anything!” “I can’t sing!”
· Music lessons are difficult to manage: “It’ll be noisy!” “I’ll lose control!”
This chapter takes its name from “CHEAP BUT GOOD ADVICE FOR PLAYING MUSIC IN A GROUP,” which was a Masterclass given by five-time Grammy Award-winning
jazz musician Chick Corea at Berklee in 1985 (see Kidder, 1985). Below, I’ve expanded upon some of Corea’s original propositions to consider how we might take them up in the primary school classroom to make music more doable.
15. “Create space-- then place something in it.”
Start small. Start with silence. Explain why we need silence. Teach them what you will do when we need silence (an action or something: wiggly fingers in the air perhaps?). Then, and only when you’re confident with the silence, add one instrument: a single floor drum, one xylophone, a lone triangle. Keep coming back to silence. See how it goes. Then, add one or two more (or don’t). But keep coming back to silence.
6. “Make your sound blend.” But…
16. “Use mimicry sparsely.”
Make listening central to playing. First, learn how to listen yourself (listen to something you ordinarily wouldn’t: how did you do it?). Then, teach your children how to listen. Listen actively: dance; or draw; or sculpt. Then, teach them how to listen to each other: echo each other, creatively; dance with another child’s playing.
5. “Leave space--create space--intentionally create places where you don't play.”
Make silence part of ‘playing.’ Teach them to rest: to value the silence.
10. “Use contrast and balance the elements.”
If you understand contrasts, then you understand composition: high and low, loud and quiet, spacious and crowded, metal and wood, acoustic and digital, voices and plastic, light and dark, sticks and stones.
12. “Play with a relaxed body. Always release whatever tension you create.”
A fraught music classroom is a non-musical one. Make it spacious. Take breaks. Take care. Take care of yourself and teach them to take it too.
9. “Guide your choice of what to play by what you like - not by what someone else will think.”
Generalist teachers are often anxious to teach music because they’re ‘not experts.’ But we all bring musical expertise to the classroom: What do you listen to? What do you like? Most importantly, what might you want to learn to like?
8. “Don't make any of your music mechanically or just through patterns of habit.”
You can’t do Lil Nas X or Beethoven or Ravi Shankar or Miles Davis or Christine Sun Kim or Chick Corea every single week, but you can definitely do all of them in the same week. Google them: What are the synergies? Where do they sound different?Introduce the widest possible canon of ‘great composers and musicians’—then trouble it!
14. “Never beat or pound your instrument--play it easily and gracefully.”
Primary school instruments are a notorious mish-mash of appropriated instruments from ransacked civilisations. Learn to play each as you would a violin. How should you hold it? What’s its name? Where’s it from? Do any of your children already know more about it than you? (Definitley.) Always be ‘specific’ not ‘inclusive’ (Robinson, 2020).
3. “Don't let your fingers and limbs just wander--place them intentionally.”
None of what precedes this is to say there’s no knowledge or preparation involved in teaching music. Planning is everything. Plan what you’ll compose, perform, listen to, and improvise (and what you won’t). And, once you’ve planned, you can do music.
References.
Gaztambide-Fernández, R. (2013). Why the arts don’t do anything: Toward a new vision for cultural production in education. Harvard Educational Review, 83(1), 211–237. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.83.1.a78q39699078ju20
Hennessy, S. (2000). Overcoming the red-feeling: The development of confidence to teach music in primary school amongst student teachers. British Journal of Music Education, 17(2), 183–196. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265051700000243
Kidder, R. M. (1985). Corea keynote: ‘Play only what you hear.’ Christian Science Monitor. Available: https://www.csmonitor.com/1985/0422/lchick.html
Robinson, D. (2020). Hungry listening: Resonant theory for Indigenous sound studies. University of Minnesota Press.
Shannon, D. B. (2021). A/autisms:: a “queer labor of the incommensurate”: holding onto the friction between different orientations towards autism in an early childhood research-creation project. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2021.2003894
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