How architecture informs composition

I have just watched an illustrated lecture by David Byrne, he of Talking Heads fame, entitled How architecture helped music evolve. It lasts a mere 16 minutes but seems much shorter. It's a very good introduction to the relationship between composers and the venues for which they wrote. The presenter infuses it with his own perspective and inimitable style. Recommended!

Divided We Fall - Arranging children into groups

There are several ways of dividing a class of children into smaller groups. It is fun, but time consuming, to have them arrange themselves in alphabetical or age order. If you believe in star signs, and opt for the age thing, you may wish to mix them up a bit afterwards to avoid having all the leading Leos in one group and the recalcitrant Capricorns in another.

My own favourite, because wherever possible I begin work in a circle, is to give each child a number. If I want five groups, the person on my left is number 1, next to them is number 2 and so on round. The child next to number 5 is number 1 again. Once numbered, all the ones gather together in their group, as do the twos, threes and so on. I like this because it's fast, transparently arbitrary, breaks up subversive cliques and mixes boys with girls.

The other day I found myself working with eleven Year 5 children (aged 9/10). It was my first time in the school and we had 45 minutes to produce some music for a performance based on Creation myths. They nearly all had formal instrumental lessons and most were obviously very bright. Being young enough to 'play' they took to improvising very well. I would give each sub-group a title and they would play a convincing 'Sprinkling Stars' or 'Building a Mountain'.

Twice I split them into groups, using the method described above. The third time, when we chose groups for the imminent performance, they asked if they could choose their own groups. I was dubious about this but they had worked very well so, after a brief discussion about the potential pitfalls, I let them get on with it. This gave me a strong group of three and an able and reasonably cohesive group of four. It also left four less able and apparently low status children who were not a group. None of the others wanted to work with them and they didn't especially want to work with each other. Fortunately this was a selective school (albeit on religious grounds) in a well-to-do area and the 'less able' students would be shining beacons in many other establishments. The four remaining children accepted the result of the process to which they had agreed and coalesced into a functioning group. Each group produced wonderful music in the final showing to their peers and younger children, much to my relief.

Most of the schools I work in tend to be in less favoured areas and the proportion of socially able, high achieving children is lower. I am not in a hurry to repeat the 'sort yourself into groups' experiment in any of them. The fact is that able children, and I mean able both academically and socially, want to work with each other. They are usually capable of cooperating in ways less able children simply can't. But they are also capable of leading and inspiring the less able and can derive benefit from this. If there is a small amount of dumbing down from their perspective it is greatly outweighed by the overall rise in quality. And ultimately, in music at least, the session has to work for the whole class for it to work at all.

A taster session

I've just finished a busy but rewarding week in which, with other artists, I accompanied a bunch of kids to Wells-next-the-Sea. Two groups, two consecutive days. The main thrust of the visit was to introduce the concept of land art, as made famous by Andy Goldsworthy, and provide a great location in which to try it out. While half the children were given a start on this in the pine woods, the other half were taken off to a sand dune for a short game of adjective charades, using the dune as their stage culminating in a descent in the manner of the adjective they had chosen for us to guess. The adjectives were along the lines of happy, angry, sad etc. After this they went back into the woods to learn all about land art.

Friday, back at school, was a taster day in which each of four artists gave a session to a quarter of the year group in turn so all the kids got to do some movement, some music, some book making and some kite making. Time was very short and of the two afternoon sessions, fifty minutes long in theory, the first was cut short by fifteen minutes because of registration. It felt a rush to get through to some meaningful work with instruments but I wanted to build on the adjective charades by adapting a game of Colour to five emotional states: excited, happy, sad, irritated and angry. We went through a round of names then played Hide and Listen (a big hit and May's Game of the Month) and a couple of games of Detective for familiarisation with the instruments I had provided.

Finally I could split them into four groups of three or four children and flash them the name of an emotion written on a card. Then they could choose their instruments, compose their piece and finally perform to the others, who had to guess which emotion was being portrayed. As expected, one or two children had to play a particular instrument at all cost, even asking to change the emotion to make it easier to incorporate their vehicle of choice. (Imagine trying to convey anger on a delicate (non hammer-) dulcimer.) But in general I was impressed by how many children preferred a mundane instrument, like a stick tambourine or coconut shells, over something more exotic because it was better suited to the mood they were expressing.

I have mentioned the sweet shop syndrome in the past and I think that had all the children had better exposure to the instruments in the past all their choices would have been driven by the requirements of the sound they were trying to create. But that's the nature of a taster session - and a taste is no substitute for a full meal.

Balafon Game

Many schools still have a xylophone knocking about. I have seen some fine examples but, with the steady rise in popularity of the electronic keyboard, they have fallen into disuse. Their presence is the result either of historical accident or of an appealing photograph in a catalogue. Along with the cabassas, guiros, vibra-slaps and glockenspiels they have become musical toys largely ignored by the school music curriculum for anything beyond colour and sound-effects. Teachers recognise the beauty of the xylophone: a wooden instrument in an increasingly plastic world with a real sound of its own. But how can you use them today?

April's free music game at www.playwithsound.com is based on West African balafon technique. I have taught it to primary and secondary-aged children as well as adults. It's versatile, educational and very interactive. It's an instant compositional tool. It provides a new avenue of approach to a number of issues, musical and otherwise. And that's largely because it's great fun.