Music Musing Monday - What is it about the taas and titis?

For many years I have enjoyed asking people about what, if anything, they remember of their primary school music education. Each year I pose this question to the class of 1st year acting students I teach at WAAPA. And when running workshops for primary classroom teachers over the years, I have always posed it to them as well.

For many of my generation in Western Australia, the only school music education was the weekly ABC singing broadcast to schools. On Friday mornings at around 11.30am the crackly classroom wireless set was cranked into action to deliver the song to be taught that week. My classmates would sigh and then drag themselves into reluctant submission to the alien classical songs being offered for their musical education. By contrast I always enjoyed – or pretended to enjoy - the broadcasts, but then I was already learning piano from my grandmother and listening to my mother practise art songs and German Lieder for her next ABC broadcast. I suspect I was a young musical upstart.

In the 1980s the Education Department in Western Australia introduced music specialist teaching into primary schools. It was a political decision to support the teachers’ union demand for DOTT (duties other than teaching) time for classroom teachers. To support the appointment of so many specialist teachers (many of whom had had limited actual specialisation in music themselves), the department developed music syllabus materials to support them. “Music In Schools” was developed, based on the Kodaly approach to music education, and on the work of Deanna Hoermann in NSW. Deanna was one of Australia’s pioneers in bringing the Kodaly approach into an Australian context.

So back to my original question. Many of the students and fellow teachers I have worked with over the past 20 years were educated post-1980s  - and in the Kodaly approach (which emphasizes solfa and time names and a methodical approach to intervals through singing.)

The taas and titis are the very first, basic rhythmic steps of this approach – closely followed by tika -tika, timka, etc. And paralleled by the learning of simple melodic intervals such as the falling minor third. It is a sequential program of learning.

Yet it is those first two rhythmic patterns that are remembered best  - both as sound and symbol – along with anecdotes about marking the rhythms with claves, making rhythmic patterns by making the symbol shapes with pop sticks and so on.

Is this another example of our fundamental human instinct for beat and rhythm? Or is it simply that beat and rhythm are less complex to teach than melody, so therefore more students Australia-wide have been exposed to the taas and titis?

What was your experience?

Music Musings Monday - Saying goodbye

At this time of year across Australia secondary teachers are saying goodbye to their year 12 students as they prepare for final exams and departure from the school system.

Those of us teaching music (or for that matter any of the arts) know the special nostalgia of farewelling students after sharing years of arts-rich teaching and learning experiences with them - experiences which both student and teacher will remember for many years to come; probably for life.

Over the past weekend I had two opportunities to reflect on the power of music and the arts in our lives.

On Friday as I packed up to leave school, a colleague and friend mused on the coming week when she would say goodbye to her year 12 singing students. A number of these kids had done weekly voice lessons and several choir rehearsals with her for the past five years. In time the weekly lessons may retreat to the back recesses of their collective memory, but it is likely that most will carry memories of their choir performances for life.

 On Saturday I attended a reunion of my own old school year group. I attended an all-girls school and back in my day music was not offered as a subject at the school. Our school music experience involved some half-hearted group singalongs with a well-meaning volunteer teacher in the old stables building at the back of the school. Although I was learning piano outside of school, I probably played the school piano fewer than five times in as many years. Nevertheless, at the reunion several old girls asked me whether I was still playing piano. I was pretty amazed that they remembered at all – but obviously they saw the piano playing as part of who I was.

 There is no doubt that we tend to remember our school arts experiences – music concerts, drama productions, musicals, dance shows and so on. What do all of these experiences have in common? I think that part of the positive memory is tied to the discipline, practice and training that precedes the performance and contributes to the satisfaction of getting to performance standard – being stage worthy. Best practice in the performing arts is hard fun. And that is what creates those lifelong memories.

Music Musing Monday - Toy Pianos

One Saturday recently I drove from home to WAAPA listening (as I do most Saturdays) to Andrew Ford’s Music Show on ABC Radio National.

The featured guest that day was Margaret Leng Tan, known for her work in championing the work of John Cage since the 1980s but also in more recent times, for her use of the toy piano as a serious musical instrument.

During the program Margaret Leng Tan spoke extensively about the toy piano as a musical instrument in its own right. She also performed pieces composed for the instrument by Jed Distler and Phyllis Chen.

You can catch the program on https://www.abc.net.au

As I listened, I mused on several things.

Firstly I have never thought of using a toy piano as an actual musical instrument. I thought of them as cheap, rather tinny and unattractive-sounding Christmas gifts for children from childless relatives – the family members who would also give a toy drum kit gift to a toddler.

A quick online search revealed a number of sources for buying better quality toy pianos, though it should be noted that Margaret Leng Tan considers that the toy pianos being manufactured today are not as good as those from the last century. 

My second train of thought started when there was brief discussion about the toy piano being the perfect instrument for scoring the soundtrack for a horror movie. As I listened to performances on the instruments during the show I could definitely hear how the quality of the sound – very different from a full sized piano - could invoke tension and suspense.

As I reflected on the show I wondered - could a toy piano make a useful and versatile addition to a school performing arts department? The music department could certainly use it in improvisation and composition projects.

The media department could utilise it in sound effects. And no doubt the drama department would get in on the act as well.

Toy pianos – who would have thought!