Tag: holiday

Halloween Repertoire

Every year, I always spend a chunk of time looking for Halloween repertoire for my students. It’s a tricky business to find something that is exciting and challenging, but not too challenging, for each individual student. Ultimately, the goal is to find several pieces for each student to choose from. They’re usually excited about this music, and if we start in the first week of October and if they actually practice at home, we often do all of their choices throughout the month.

At any rate, the links for this year’s Halloween music are below, roughly in order of difficulty. My thanks to the other teachers out there who are posting their own music. The pieces that don’t have a composer listed below were written by me.

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.​

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

The Giant Valentine – A Lesson Mashup

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I’m always on the lookout for ways to make lessons more interesting. Here’s what worked this week.

I cut out lots of hearts out of different colors of paper. On one page, I actually had a heart template, but I quickly discovered that it’s a whole lot easier just to make a random fold in your paper and cut hearts in random sizes.

On the back of each heart I wrote things like:

  • ​Sight Read
  • Improv
  • Student’s Choice of Past Song
  • Current Song – Right hand only
  • Current Song – Left hand only
  • Rhythm Challenge (this means they pick a random rhythm out of my rhythm cards and clap it back)
  • Note Challenge (this means we open a music book at random, I randomly place my finger on a note and they tell me what it is)

I also wrote some that were specific to each student, like a measure number or a phrase that was causing difficulty.

During the lesson, they picked hearts from the pile, do the challenge and tape it on to our Giant Studio Valentine, which formerly was just blank piece of poster board.. The picture above was early on in the week, but we ended up with it covered with hearts, and the kids enjoyed approaching the practicing in a new way.

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