March 13, 2010::Forgotten Post from March class

March 13, 2010

Well, I guess the weather finally cooperated and we were allowed to come to class! I am glad we had the opportunity to come today because I had a lot of things clarified with what we should be doing. In my first session of the day I went to the Teacher as Artist block. We spent time discussing what we would do for the next class in regards to Pink. The majority of time we spent discussing a new form of composition that the whole class will be cooperating on. I have done this technique somewhat in classes of the past. However, in elementary school things like this take time and that is something I find I have very little of. We spent time in this class going over this technique of creating a composition s a whole class, transforming and defining it, and eventually performing it. We posted a piece of paper on the board and told the class things we were thinking about. Items such a rush hour traffic, springtime, and waterfalls were mentioned. We then spent time discussing and labeling sounds that might correlate to what these items were that we had listed. We identified car horns, conversations, and buzzing bees that would help to identify the items we had already labeled in the previous step. Upon completion of this step, we were asked to identify a complete sentence that would encompass everything we wanted to incorporate into our composition. This was definitely an interesting process. I like the fact that we are doing this as a whole group and not having to do it individually. The group also discussed how we would perform this piece and where. As I mentioned before, I have done something like this in previous years. When I taught middle school, this was something I used periodically with guitars. Kids seem to really like this and get a kick out of composing something that they are so involved in. The final step that we were asked to come up with was to create a sentence that encompassed everything we and discussed for our piece of music. The sentence the group came up with was: Love and unity will cancel out fear, as you receive earth’s seasonal symphonies just listen and you will hear. I look forward to seeing what the rest of the group members come up with to actually take what we discussed and put it to actually performing a piece.