Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

Do I have any evidence of emerging technologies improving ensemble skills? Nobody has ever asked me this but I found myself reflecting upon the topic recently as a result of gradual changes in practice. In days gone by, I always began secondary school guitar ensemble rehearsals in Week 1. Increasingly, the result of this was that pieces peaked too soon and so, more recently, I’ve tended to start in week 3 or 4.

The single biggest factor has been pupils being able to access play-along midi files on this blog, facilitating more meaningful home practice. This year I hope to experiment by producing mp3s which pupils can import into their mp3 players. I don’t imagine that they’ll listen for pleasure, but they’ll probably drive their families not quite so far up the wall in households where the family computer is in the living room.

Freed from the rush to begin rehearsals, we have spent a little lesson time trying out a few ensemble pieces for size – playing along with Sibelius scores on a laptop with external speakers attached. This allows pupils to try out not only varied pieces, but different parts within the same piece – with some surprising results. Some pupils have bid for parts more difficult than they would have been allocated – the appeal of the part sweetening the extra practice required. Another surprise is that arrangements, shelved a few years ago as too ambitious for school use, are beginning to seem possible. Pieces with syncopations* and cross rhythms** intended to wrong-foot the listener can have a frighteningly similar effect on some players if sufficient familiarity does not materialise. As most instructors spend only one day in each secondary school, today’s technologies create a space where that familiarisation can take place.

* Int 1 concept                       ** Int 2 concept

I recently read something in Steven Mithen’s excellently written and thought provoking book The Singing Neanderthals which stopped me in my tracks. The passage concerned the research, by Professor Willi Steinke of Queens University in Kingston, Canada, into the melodic recall of a subject with amusia, following a stroke at the age of 64. The subject was unable to identify many well-known instrumental themes. However, when themes with lyrics were played, recall was normal – even although the lyrics were not present! Steinke and his colleagues concluded that melody and lyrics were stored in different parts of the brain – the prosody of the lyrics helping to summon up the tune, and the rhythms of the tune aiding the reverse.

Suddenly my mind jumped back 42 years to my first piano tutor book, in which every melody featured lyrics – added after the event by the author, John W. Schaum. At the time I regarded them as a slightly annoying irrelevance because I was six years old and knew everything. Now the aspiration behind them seems clear. I began to think that, although the beginners’ materials I use have no lyrics, there may be an argument for adding some – more particularly for asking the pupils to add their own.

By an amazing coincidence of timing, this topic was brought up at our in service on Thursday, by one of my colleagues who was keen to discover similarities and differences in our approaches to teaching rhythm. Recommendations and reservations were expressed – the latter concerning examples where words had been forced to fit rhythms in an unnatural way, and possible confusion arising from the differing prosody of varying accents and dialects.

Still – it’s something interesting to think about. Any experiences, views, recommendations to offer?

New Lesson Support Links have been added to the menu on the right of your screen.

My ears pricked up this morning at the mention of the Street Vibe Festival of Sound which takes place today in London’s The Scoop. The idea of the event is to highlight the appeal of science through music and other arts. The short report on Radio 4’s Today included efforts by Stephen Mesure (Director of The Creative Science Consultancy) and South African percussionist and composer, Eugene Skeef to produce music from carved instruments. The most convincing of these was a carrot built on the whole tone scale.

The report grabbed my attention, not because I plan to race down to London to take part, but because I have been thinking along similar lines. Discussions are to be opened up in a school I visit with a view to pupils and staff playing a more active role in assemblies. The possibilities for cross curricular links seem huge and I see music as being able to play a big part e.g. music & maths; music & science; music & languages – in addition to the more obvious pairings like words & music or music and dance.

The idea which immediately sprang to mind is a piece based on the harmonic series – the physical and mathematical reality which underpins the evolution of Western harmony and instruments over the last 1,000 years. Yes, start small – that’s my motto.

One of the bonuses of keeping this blog is that searching for useful hyperlinks – such as the one for the whole tone scale (above) leads me to interesting resources for pupils. From the same source come this short, interesting video about chord construction.

Thanks to Ewan McIntosh for pointing me in the direction of this post by Donald Clark. Citing 1976 research by A. H Johnstone and F. Percival into attention span in 90 Chemistry lectures, with 12 different lecturers, it describes the highs and lows of attention in a 60-minute lecture.

• 2-3 minutes to settle down
• 10-18 minutes of attention
• progressively shorter attention periods, dropping to 3-4 minutes towards end

These conclusions were not formed by an impression of attention but by the subjects’ ability to recall content.

The reason this grabbed my attention is that, following a long period of evolution, all my lessons across a 5-school orbit, last 30 minutes. Allowing time for pupils to travel from the previous class, unpack and then reverse these features in order to return punctually, the hands on instrument time must be around 22 minutes. For many pupils, this feels about the right time.

All Guitar Group rehearsals, except those of the East Lothian Guitar Ensemble*, last 30 minutes. If pupils arrive on time, set up quickly, engage and play well it’s not unknown for them to be released in 15-20 minutes – particularly as the concert approaches and the spectre of staleness taps at the window (where the luxury of a window exists).

Yet, curiously, the reason we migrated from 35- or 40-minute lessons to 30 minutes, is that general school timetabling has gone in the opposite direction – all periods in the secondary schools I visit are now 60 minutes long. Apart from this simply being too long for an instrumental lesson and too long for pupils to be out of class, this would permit only six instrumental lessons per day and so it seemed natural to opt for 12 x 30-minute lessons-per-day – so natural in fact that I can’t recall discussion seeming necessary in any school.

Does this mean that we have been blessed with the ideal length by virtue of our colleagues veering blindly in the wrong direction? Well, only if it was still 1976 and if school teaching resembled the kind of university lecture where one person was active while the others listened in reverential silence, their most dynamic input being the taking of notes**.

Donald Clark writes interestingly about Tyrannies of Time one of which rings a bell with me – the dip in performance which some pupils seem to experience when their lesson immediately follows lunch. In such cases, I ask the pupils if they’d mind my asking what they had for lunch, and my fears that a matrix of E-numbers has brought about the cognitive dip are usually groundless.

* Contrastingly, and for purely practical reasons the six annual East Lothian Guitar Ensemble rehearsals take place from 1:30 – 3:30 – minus time for pupils, transported from distant schools to walk from the drop-off point to the venue – minus tidying up time – minus a break in the middle – well it is a Friday afternoon, after all.

** During my five years at music college, my note-taking habits changed from the frenzied assembly of a wretched, illegible and barely revisited scrawl, to simply listening, empty-handed. In the end, I could no longer see the point in inaccurately recreating what already existed in the library, at the cost of my ability to concentrate and enjoy the lecture.

New Pupil Performance mp3s have been posted on the Knox Academy & North Berwick High School pages.

Guess who got me into etymology. Perhaps surprisingly, it was Malcolm X, in his autobiography. Rather than looking up definitions, it soon seemed preferable to attempt to divine them through familiarity with the constituent parts of the word – making it nearly impossible to forget.

In a subject like music, the bulk of whose vocabulary consists in old and foreign words, an etymological outlook can offer a key to these baffling terms and associations. With this in mind, I’ve created a new Lesson Support Page entitled Music & Etymology. I must stress here that this is not really my own work but simply a series of links to a fantastic online etymological resource. At the moment the work is at the brain-storming stage and I feel that further developments (and perhaps suggestions from users) will help me decide which of the following options to choose:

• alphabetical – favouring those looking for a specific term
• thematic – grouping together related words e.g. interval; triad; chord – favouring browsing

I’ve also yet to decide what to do about words which do not appear on www.etymonline.com. Should I provide my own pointers? Leave them blank – encouraging reader research? Omit them from the list altogether?

Clearly, this will an ongoing project requiring constant updating. However, there’s no rush and it’s important to bear in mind the following proverb of Lao Tzu at the outset of a seemingly huge task:

“ A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Reckless behaviour is often the domain of those with nothing to lose. However, when it comes to pupils making recordings for this blog, the reverse appears to be true. Pupils generally play very cautiously, striving to avoid error in the hope of a perfect recording. This is perfectly understandable. Nobody wants a permanent record of an under par performance hanging around for eternity and this thought can stalk pupils throughout a recording. Only when they have a good one in the can that they can be persuaded to go for a more relaxed, abandoned and, where appropriate, up-tempo version. I find the psychology of this interesting. It’s as though the confidence required for the more spirited performance has been generated solely by the existence of a successful recording, now tucked out of harm’s way. Perhaps, in addition to the buzz provided by an audience, live performances owe their increased vitality to escaping the tyranny of posterity.

New pupil performance mp3s have been posted on the Musselburgh Grammar School page

I love it when this happens: Hilarity