Creating Original Music (and Dance?)

Reflections for Week 3... The readings and videos for this week got me fired up to find new ways to involve composition in my band program! The uniqueness of my teaching situation often makes projects and assignments difficult due to time constraints. I only have a rehearsal with my band once each week, so we’ve got a long list of things to accomplish at each rehearsal and I often feel that it will be difficult to be ready for our performances if we take time to do things other than working on our pieces. The other aspect of my program is a 20 minute private lesson for each student every week. That allows me to do some things with students one-on-one, which is great, but I often feel pressured to make sure we get through what they practiced at home that week so they aren’t “stuck” with the same assignment for another week. Neither side of the program allows for time in a computer lab where we can all work on projects at the same time. In the past I’ve included some small arranging and composition exercises. Each fall I would have my beginning band write a piece that would be performed at our first concert. It was always a short 8 measure piece that only used the first five notes, but we composed it together. I projected a blank Finale document on the screen and we voted on pitches and rhythms, usually only half and whole notes for that first concert. I could play it back for them immediately, and often times they would hear things they didn’t like and we would fix them. Once in awhile I had to guide them to the correct note at the end, but most of the time they could figure out what sounded right and what didn’t. I would take title suggestions and they would vote on that as well. This way, each group of beginners had a piece they could call their own. In the spring, we wrote a series of variations together on that original theme and performed it with those added variations at our final concert. I also gave those same students a copy of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star or Mary Had a Little Lamb, already transposed for them, with enough blank measures to write a variation to it. I would then pick a few of the more original ones and put that together as a theme and variations that featured some of our individual young composers. Everyone played all of it in unison, so there wasn’t a lot of depth to what we did, but it gave the students an opportunity to exercise their own creativity, within certain parameters to give them a better chance for success. Four years ago I moved to a different area and here I have a coworker who runs the beginner band. I still teach all levels of students from grades five through eight, so I do still have the younger ones for individual lessons. There are some neat exercises in our method book, Tradition of Excellence, but I would like to do more. There are so many neat apps out there, some of which I already have on my iPad, but I just haven’t taken the time to explore them enough to see what we could do with them. Just searching a bit today I found I have Loopseque, Looptastic, and Beatwave, all of which look like they have some great possibilities. Maybe I could take one lesson each quarter or semester to have each student use one of these apps to create something original. During my work with Soundation this week, I was reminded of an app called QDancer, which is included with the Quaver Music Online Curriculum and is available as a standalone app. With QDancer, you are able to create your own dance routine to different pre-recorded music tracks. You can set up a ballet routine or a hip-hop routine. There are over 50 stationary and travelling moves to choose from, and you compile the dance by dragging and dropping the actions onto a timeline. There are different backgrounds to choose from and lighting commands you can set up to enhance the performance. When you’re finished, you can watch the routine and save it to share with others. The video below shows QDancer in action.

There are a lot of great possibilities in the area of composition and I hope to explore those more in an effort to include more of this important aspect of musicianship with my students. If you have any favorite activities, projects, or apps you use, please let me know!