Music field trips

We are extraordinarily lucky to be located within 10 minutes of Hill Auditorium, where UMS brings world-class performers on a regular basis. SK students will be taking advantage of this by going to three of their special youth performances in 2011-2012. We are also in need of chaperones for these events, so please contact me or your child's classroom teacher if you're a parent interested in attending.

The upper school (3-6) will be going to A Night in Treme featuring the Rebirth Brass Band of New Orleans on Friday, November 11 at 11 am. According to UMS, Rebirth Brass Band is "known for combining traditional brass band sound with funk, jazz, soul, and hip hop and for embracing the quintessential New Orleans art form “second line,” whereby the band is followed by jubilant dancing." I'm hoping this will not only be great fun, but also drum up even greater enthusiasm for the SK Winds program that we're working on putting together for the middle schoolers.

Speaking of drumming (couldn't resist), in April the upper school will also be going to see Zakir Hussain, one of the world's greatest percussionists along with the dancing drummers Meitei Pung Cholom. Integrating music and movement is one of the core principles of the SK music program, so it should be exciting and rewarding to see professionals do what we've been struggling toward throughout the year.

The lower school (K-2) will be going to see one of UMS' all-time most popular performers, Sweet Honey in the Rock on Friday, February 17 at 11 am. Sweet Honey in the Rock is an African-American female a cappella group that focuses on exploring social issues and reaching children through music. And boy, can they sing.

Finally, the whole school will be going to the Ann Arbor Symphony's youth performance, Once Upon a Timpani on Wednesday, March 14 at 12:15 pm. The A2SO is a high quality, professional orchestra that puts on a great show. We're also extremely fortunate in having two of the orchestra's musicians, David Ford and Sabrina Lackey, offering private violin, viola, and cello lessons after school right in the SK music room.

The Music of Our Backyard

This week in K-2 music, the weather finally cooperated with my lesson plans and we were able to go outside for parts of music class.

Kindergartners have been tasked with building their own instruments by EcoFair, and had their first materials collection session on Wednesday. Before going out for collection, we had a great discussion about kids’ hypotheses about instrument-making. Ideas about different materials were endless. One of the students’ conclusions was that they could use just about anything to make an instrument … except for poisonous mushrooms and fire. Priceless. Next week, we will continue materials collection, test our hypotheses, and perhaps investigate the properties of flutes. (Kindergartners were especially excited about flutes, perhaps because the older students have started working with recorders.)

Students in the 1-2 classes will be putting together a musical performance inspired by their backyard, to be video-recorded at the end of the month. We’ve already sampled some music and poetry inspired by other people’s backyards. This week we focused on gathering ideas for our performance and collecting sounds in our backyard. This allowed us to explore properties of sound, such as pitch, duration, and timbre. I also read the students excerpts from W.A. Mathieu’s The Listening Book and we discovered how our hearing is improved by closing our eyes. Each student got a miniature composition book to record his or her song ideas. Some students described sounds with words, while others wrote or drew the source of the sound, and still others used creative onomatopoeia. Many heard birds, leaves crunching, buses, their fellow students, and their teacher playing the recorder to get their attention :).