If Music IS a language.... Music + Writing

To continue discussing the idea that music is a language with its own set of rules (believe me, there are many).......................

English is my primary language.  I was first taught to speak it.  A few years later, I learned to read and write it.

How do people learn the language of music then?  Well, most of the human population learns to "speak" it.  It is very difficult to be raised in any culture without being introduced to music.  Children as young as 2 years old can sing along with Justin Bieber or (perhaps a more appropriate example) know "Twinkle Twinkle."

A much smaller number of individuals learn to read music.

Speak, Read, Write.  If you can do all three, I'd say you are fluent.

Here's the question that recently popped up in my brain:  Why is it that we require our students to be able to read music well... and play music well (equivalent to speech), but...... rarely ever do we have students write it???

This is what an English Class would be like if it required the same amount of writing as music:

• You could have high school classes capable of reading Moby Dick -  and carrying on detailed discussions about the book.  However, the only writing those students could do is single letters.  Perhaps even a few words and incomplete phrases if they are really advanced. 

It is so odd to me that a student can be an advanced musician, understanding several of the basic "grammar" rules of music, without ever being required to write it.   They learn how to draw treble clefs, eighth notes, quarter notes and rests (the ABCs of music).  But can they combine those "characters" together to make their own musical "arguments?"  Can they create phrasal (sentence) fluency in a composition?

I'm going a bit overboard with this thought... I know that it takes a lot of musical training to be a decent composer, but... Perhaps composing wouldn't seem so difficult if students were being taught to write music at the same time they were learning to read it - like with English.

-- Sarah Ruby Keene

Just to clarify:  I don't actually consider music a language.  I do think it is very easy to draw connections between it and actual spoken languages, though.   (This blog is just toying around with the popular idea of music being viewed as a "foreign language.")

Music Vocab....Also, Pop Music in the Classroom?

"Music is a foreign language."

People say it all the time.  While I've learned that it is not a universal language (as other cultures have music systems that do not translate to Western music), I am learning more and more that it is its own language with it's own set of rules.....and dialects I guess (I mean, Taylor Swift and Pavarotti can use the same notes and rhythms, but they are going to sound different and would probably have a difficult time understanding one another).

I heard a student in our class say "I teach a foreign language.  Everything we do is vocab." .....And I realized that there is a lot more vocabulary to teach in music than I've ever noticed.  To be honest, I don't remember my teachers focusing on vocabulary.  At least not in any creative ways.  I think we had a test once a year that would list 20 or so words and we were expected to write down what they meant.  When did I learn the definitions?   I have no idea.  I suppose it was just repetition.   After playing in band for four years, I was bound to figure out that rit. (ritard) meant the teacher would slow down.  

My teachers didn't leave us to figure out everything on our own - that's not what I mean.   They'd just teach us through performance.  Explain these things as they came up in rehearsal - or even prompt us to figure it out on our own and discuss it (briefly of course) as a class.    I wonder if that's the best way to go about teaching vocabulary in an ensemble setting.   If I have a specific set of related words I want to teach to my band, I could find specific examples in our music to assist in the process.

Something that was stressed at two separate workshops I attended at the Midwest Clinic in Chicago last December was the idea of using "WORD WALL" in your band program.   You have a wall full of vocabulary words.  When you use one of the words in rehearsal, you ask a student to pick it off the wall and place it on the board.  For the rest of the week, you can make reference to the words on the board.

I thought about the WORD WALL for a while, but I don't know if I like it.  Writing words on the board is fine by me, but.... When I picture a word all, I picture a first grade classroom, not a middle school band room.  The idea behind it is good, though.

And now, with no transition whatsoever, I'd like to discuss pop music:

For my IB Music Class in high school, we were led in a discussion about whether or not pop music should be used in high school curriculum.   Our teacher helped the conversation along sometimes, but avoided sharing her opinion.  There were students who strongly opposed using pop music (probably thinking they were pleasing the teacher) and there were students who thought some references to pop music were okay.  In general, however, we were of the opinion that there was little to no educational value in pop music.  

Then our teacher introduced the next unit.......Active Listening/Analysis.  Part of the testing process was listening to a classical piece of music and writing down information under the headings: Instrumentation, Form, Style, and Texture.  To introduce us to this kind of listening assignment, our teacher used Pink Floyd and film scores.  Those four music elements were present in the examples she used.  YES, you can learn an awful lot about texture and instrumentation from The Lord of the Rings!

I think we can learn from that - use what the students know to introduce new concepts.  We can then build a bridge that will connect the concepts to more "intellectual" repertoire - or the music they'll be playing in their ensembles.

- Sarah