Happiness on the Music Floor

Happiness on the Music Floor I’m sure it’s never happened to anyone else, but on occasion my daughter is a trifle upset during music practice. She’s actually quite good about coming in the first place, but sometimes she’s mad at me because I asked her to do something she didn’t want to do and sometimes she’s mad at herself because she isn’t automatically perfect at everything and sometimes she’s mad for no discernible reason at all.

I’ve tried various tactics to deal with this, but the one that’s currently working is this handy little poster.

I’ve laminated it and posted it on the wall by our piano. Every day after music practice, I update the number of days of happiness. if we’ve made it through without an argument, it goes up. If we haven’t made it through, it goes to zero. When she reaches 20 days, we have a Mommy-Daughter date to the dessert location of her choice, which we have done. If she can reach 20 three separate times, we’ll go out to dinner at the restaurant of her choice, which we haven’t managed yet.

As a side note, I’m always somewhat interested (and depressed) at how parents manage practice (or fail to manage practice, as the case may be). There’s more than one way to do it, but here’s what works for us. My daughter is 8 right now, but we’ve been doing this for several years.

We practice in the morning before school. Yes, that means I wake her up early. There are no exceptions. If it’s a school day, we practice. If it’s a week day but there is no school, we almost always practice anyway, though I don’t wake her up early for it. We take weekends off.
Theoretically, we practice for 50 minutes, roughly split between piano and cello. We alternate days on which instrument goes first. In reality, we’re often a little late getting started and the end time is fixed by the school bus schedule, so no wiggle room there.
We do lots of games, improvisation, composing, etc. to keep it interesting and to spend at least part of that 50 minutes standing up or moving around.
I always, always, always spend the entire time there with her. I have never sent her to go practice by herself. That day is coming, but not at age 8.

I have often wondered how much progress my other students would make if I could convince their parents to maintain a schedule like this. I do realize it’s harder if you have more than one child or if you’re not a natural morning person or if you have very little musical knowledge yourself.

Even so, practice really does work.

Silly Composition

Piano blogs are full of composition exercises for kids, but most of them include lyrics that are so inane, I’m too embarrassed to use them with my students. My kids are capable of appreciating a slightly higher level of literary quality. Silly is good. Clever is good. Insipid is bad.

For our earliest composition attempts, I give the kids a choice of texts. They are all very short so as not to overwhelm anyone.

Ice Cream
Six Slippery Snails

I also offer The Catsup Bottle and The Duck by Ogden Nash. He’s a great poet for this. He’s brief. He’s witty. He’s brilliant. Unfortunately, he’s also under copyright. So I have not included the texts of these poems, but they’re quick to create yourself. You can find the text of the “The Catsup Bottle” here and the text of “The Duck” here. I use only the first half of “The Duck.”

(The graphics come from http://thegraphicsfairy.com/ and https://pixabay.com/)

Method 1:
The kids write in finger numbers in the circles above the words. (We don’t worry about rhythm. They improv that.) If they are up for a challenge have them add a chord in the left hand.

This method is the easiest for kids who aren’t totally confident with note names yet. It’s also really great for kids who are learning different key signatures or positions because then you can have them transpose it into all the keys or positions they know.

Method 2:
The kids write in note names. This is better for reviewing those note names, but not as good for transposing.

*** This post originally appeared on my older site here.

Musical Alphabet

These cards print up the musical alphabet 15 times, in various colors and fonts. They include sharp and flat signs. Here are just a few ideas for using them that have worked well for me:

Student draws a card out of the bag and plays that note on the piano.
Use sticky tack and hide them around the room. When they find one, they play that note.
- If I’m on the ball, I have them hidden before the student arrives. If I’m not, no worries. I have them play their song for the week while I hide them. They’re too busy to see exactly where I’m putting them.
- If it’s taking too long, we play Hot and Cold to find them.
- It’s also possible to have them hide a few for me. Then I find them and play them, but they have to watch to make sure I don’t make any mistakes.
Student draws several cards out of the bag and lays them out. Then they play the sequence of notes they have drawn.
Very young students can practice putting the cards in order on the floor.
- We practice it both forwards and backwards.
- We also try building a tower that is longer than they are. (If you do this, make sure that A is on the bottom of the tower and build up, just like the notes on t he staff work.) Periodically, they lie down on the flower next to their tower to see if they need to build it any higher.
More advanced students can play a major or minor scale starting on the letter than they draw.

Naturally, there’s no limit to the different ways you could use these, which is the only reason I was willing to go to the effort of creating them.

Silent Night

“Silent Night” was meant to be simple. Franz Gruber took a text by Joseph Mohr and set it for voice and guitar, and it was first performed on Christmas Eve, 1818 in the village of Oberndorf, near Salzburg, in Austria.

To my thinking, a large part of the beauty of this carol comes precisely because it is so simple. I have tried to reflect that in my setting for violin and piano, which I have uploaded here.

When we lived in Europe we never made it to Oberndorf, but the original St. Nikola parish church is no longer standing anyway. Salzburg itself was one of our favorite places. The Salzburg cathedral below is probably a bit more grandiose than the church where “Silent Night” premiered, but it has an illustrious musical history of its own. Mozart was baptized here, and he served as organist from 1779 to 1781.

*** This post originally appeared on my other site here..

The First Noel

”The First Noel” is a traditional English carol. It has an unusual structure which made arranging it a little difficult. It essentially only has one music phrase. That phrase is repeated twice in the verse, and then it is repeated again in a slightly different form for the chorus. All of this is just fine in a vocal setting where you have different lyrics to distinguish these phrases. It works well enough, that I had never even noticed how repetitive the melody is until I tried to set it for solo piano. Without words, it quickly verges on . . . boring.

My own arrangement has three verses: one with a simple arpeggiated bass, one with altered rhythm and meter, and one that is partially set in a canon. If you try to sing along the words you will find that my technique for avoiding boring was actually to mutilate the traditional structure. I don’t repeat the phrase before the chorus. Each verse is quite a bit shorter than it would have to be if it were sung.

Below is a typical English scene, except for the fact that it’s technically in Scotland. This was the park around the block from where we used to live, with a view of the parish church just across the hedge. I have no doubt that “The First Noel” has been sung there many, many times.

***This post originally appeared on my old site here.