Key Idea's in Music Education

 In this blog you will see the score for my Orff presentation designed for young primary school children. I picked a very well known, fun and exciting nursery rhyme called 'Old MacDonald Had a Farm'. I decided to choose this song as kids absolutely love singing it and being musically interactive with it. I remember loving this song as a child as it was so much fun to sing and make all the animal noises. In my tutoring this is also a song I teach young kids how to play on guitar as it is always a hit with them.  I made sure I used very easy rhythms that's kid would be able to instantly memorise and perform with easy. Simple yet effective. I tried my best to incorporate different sub divisions. In my score you can see I used crotchets, minums and quavers.  Today's class was great as Belinda split us in to groups and within those small groups we got to practice Orff delivery (chunking, teaching parts etc). This was highly valuable as it made me realise I had a alot to work...

 After a refreshing week off uni due to STUVAC week I and feeling very refreshed and wanted to centre this blog post about an incredible speech/article I found by Robyn Stavely called 'Orff Schulwerk and Learning' This article talks about how music makes us want to move and this is instinct built in to us. It talks about how a baby/toddler will hear music for the first time and it is the baby's natural instinct to want to react with a head bop or some form of movement. In her article she references other great pieces of work support the huge benefits of Orff. Hearing Make's us Move: "One only has to observe a baby’s natural inclination to bob or bounce in response to music, the engaged “light in the eye” as an action song is played and the miraculous coordination of not only clapping hands in “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” in the correct place, but for the hands to actually meet is an amazing feat of coordinated movement, spatial awareness, music cognition, tem...

 Through the semester we have been lucky enough to be engaging in many Orff based activities but today we did one that has been my favourite so far. Today's activities was Keith Terry's 'Clapping System 123456789' This game involved each number having its own sequenced body percussion with a matching amount of hits as what the number is. From this the class then put together a sequence of number eg 4653. As a class we then had to perform the body percussion of those numbers in order. This activity was super fun and interactive and a great challenge. I personally think number based musical activities are great as it works on timing and forming different groupings of time.  After class I was very curious and interested as to who this genius Keith Terry was. When I got home I searched him up only to find out that body percussion is a specialty of his. After binge watching a-lot of his videos on youtube I thought I would share this one on my blog as it will give you an insi...

 In todays class we were lucky enough to had a Persian music specialist come in and teach us about the the cultures fascinating musical harmony and then get us to perform some the of repertoire that displays this unique harmony. This was very enlightening and opened my eyes up to a bigger picture of what music is and can be. In western music we are very use to and very comfortable with our scalar system and what harmony should sound like. Persian music encompasses quarter tones in their scale and their scales. We learned that the scalar/modal system used in Persian classical music is called 'Dastgah'. Full understanding of Dastgah is extremely important as it the key to composing and improvising in a traditionally and stylistic correct manor. "Dastgah in traditional Persian music is a complex of musical pieces called Goosheh (Naqmeh). Goosheh is formed in different Maqams (positions) and is interconnected according to a particular order (they are harmonic in scales, tunes,...