What's Up in Music Class?

Kindergartners have been doing the Chicken Dance and playing the singing game "Jump, Josie".  They're singing "You're a Grand Old Flag", and also singing "Pudding on the Hill" and getting ready to play its scalewise passages on tonebar instruments.  Yesterday they began listening to "The Hut of Baba Yaga" from Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and showing its ABA form by turning around and around like the house, then sitting down to pantomime stirring a cauldron, and then turning around again.

First-graders are adding eighth notes ("ti-ti") to their rhythmic repertoire of quarter notes and rests.  Next week we'll begin our study of Johann Sebastian Bach in earnest, with his Toccata in D Minor (often heard around Hallowe'en time!) for organ.

Second-graders have been doing a lot of singing!  After hearing the story of how Francis Scott Key came to write the words, the children have learned where the melismae are (and are not!), so that they can sing our national anthem correctly.  They've been working to detect the sensations in their throats from their vocal cords, and how the feeling of going up in pitch differs from the sensation of going down.  And we've been applying those findings to help us sight-sing melodic fragments composed of G, E, and A.

Third-graders began their study of Beethoven by talking about the Age of Enlightenment.  It was strange to think that the new respect for education which began at that time meant that education was not particularly highly valued in the previous age!  They learned that the sound of mi-re-do is one that ends many songs, and they have been trying to find songs which end that way.  Next week they will begin learning "This Pretty Planet", a song which Third Grade traditionally performs in a round with Fourth Grade a day or two before Thanksgiving.

Fourth-graders read rhythms which included syncopations and sixteenth notes this week in music class.  Next week they will have an opportunity to use some of those rhythms as they improvise four-beat phrases on percussion instruments.  Then they'll learn an old English song called "The Keeper", which the kids always enjoy for its call-and-response phrases while they are practicing reading two-part music and multiple verses.