A REAL song - on DAY ONE?

Are you beginning to understand that you need a "real song" even on the first day? When you're teaching very young children, you can get away with "Mary Had a Little Lamb" but this just doesn't cut it with junior high age, and definitely not with high school. They may be beginners, they may even accept that fact, but they know that Mary Had a Little Lamb is baby music. And, although it's complicated, if you propose they PLAY Mary Had a Little Lamb, they feel that it's telling them something about you. You don't "get" them, you don't "respect" them, you don't really "care" about music, you're just an academic drone who does things by the book. None of this is true, of course, but they're kids - they're not taking the time to make fine distinctions about a carefully planned sequential curriculum. They don't care about the fact that they can only play two notes.

So here are some solutions that can SAVE that first day of class.

There are a couple of ways to approach it:

1. find songs with very simple melodies of only two or three notes for your first song, or

2. find songs with extremely simple accompaniments - sometimes a single note! - and you play the melody, or members of the class sing the melody. (Or you put on the CD and the class plays along to that. But I know that's not acceptable to some people. I confess I don't like to do that. I prefer the students be making all the music.)

Here are some examples of the first approach.

Kindergarten                   Scale tones                 R&B, Rock, Pop alternatives

                                         SD                      C Jam Blues (Ellington)

                                                                   One Note Samba (Jobim) actually has two notes!

Hot Cross Buns                  MRD                   Knockin' On Heaven's Door (Dylan)

Mary Had a Little Lamb                                 Karma (Alicia Keys) minorMRD

Fooba Wooba John                                       With or Without You (U2)

Star Light Star Bright          LSM                   I Hate Myself For Lovin' You (Jett) DLS

Lucy Locket                                                Seven Nation Army (White Stripes) DLS

Little Sally Saucer

Juba                                  FMRD                  Lean On Me (Withers)

Twinkle Twinkle(2nd phrase)                          Get Up Stand Up (Marley)

Oh How Lovely is the Evening                        Every Breath You Take (Sting)

Go Tell Aunt Rhody                                      We Will Rock You (Queen)

                                                                   I Love Rock & Roll (Jett)

If you have songs to add to this list, please let me know.

So I DO believe that a careful sequence is important, but within even the small list above I'd wager you can identify a sequence of songs that will accomplish your pedagogical agenda for the first few classes. Because I've learned it's so important to have the students feeling, from the very beginning, that they're playing "real" music. If possible, even music that they chose themselves. I often bring recordings of the songs I listed above and say "Well, we're going to have to find an easy song to play, obviously. Let's listen to a few songs I have here, and you tell me which ones you like best."

Part two: if even two notes is too many.

The other approach I mentioned is having the students play an accompaniment, while you play the melody. This opens up a lot more possibilities, but of course you need to identify some songs where even extremely simple accompaniments can still be effective.

I think the best thing for me to do here is just dive in with some examples.

In an earlier entry I elaborated what amounts to a lesson plan for teaching the song Karma by Alicia Keys. In that plan, I assumed the students could play three notes: D, E and F. But what if it's really the first day of class, and you're only going to have time to teach them one note? (Maybe you're a clarinet teacher, and assembling the instrument, teaching the embouchure, getting a nice toot out of them has taken almost the whole period...) There's still time to take that one note and put it into a song.

For example, even with a wind instrument, where your students need to take a breath more frequently on day one, the accompaniment to Karma could become something like this:

Then divide the class in half, to fill in the gap, like this:

When they can keep this going, you can play the hook, so we have this:

And you can send them out of the class with the promise "Tomorrow we'll play more of this song. I'll teach you the part I just played," and the kids leave feeling like they've really achieved something. And they have.

Here's one more example

If your students have any interest in rock from the 90s there's a good chance they'll like this song - "Come As You Are" by Nirvana.

A possible bass line can be just TWO adjacent scale notes. (I and bVII, but no need to get technical.) So there's a very good chance you can teach this on the first day. Here's what I would do.

Get the students to play straight quarter notes like this:

Then YOU play the "hook" - which is very easy for guitarists, but not so easy for other instruments. Here it is, combined with the bass line.

Then you can either sing or play the melody - only four notes! - and say "I'm going to teach you this very soon. We just need to learn a couple more notes." Here's what it sounds like together.

To keep them going just a bit longer on the first day, you might also want to try some rhythmic variations on the two note bass line. They can play it in eighth notes like this:

Or they can play a pattern. Lots of possibilities with this idea. Here's one:

Hope that gives you lots of other ideas about what to do on DAY ONE.

As always, you can write to me at    nycmusicteacher@gmail.com

Cheers,

-Nick