So what are you going to do? Twinkle Twinkle Little Star? That's six notes! Yikes. Not sure we'll be able to learn six notes on day one. Hot Cross Buns? That's three notes. Three adjacent notes. Mi, re, do. You're pretty sure they could manage that...
Are you really, seriously, going to offer them "Hot Cross Buns?"
I wouldn't do it, man.
These are NYC kids. They're all wearing headphones, shuffling through their iTunes music collections, googling the lyrics to the latest Kanye release on their smartphones...
I always start by asking them what they're listening to at the moment. Beyond that, what are their favorites? Are there songs they've always wanted to play? It's good to know these things about your students. Music is so bound up with self-image these days. That's good for us as music teachers. Music is important. Maybe not Hot Cross Buns.
A lot of my students are into R&B and hip hop. Rihanna, Kanye, Nikki, Usher, 50 Cent, Alicia Keys.
Alicia Keys has been around for a while now. At a time when a "classic hit" can be a song from five years ago, Alicia has some classic hits. I know some of them are very simple musically. Her song "Fallin'" (2001) is based on a two-measure, two chord loop that repeats over the course of the ENTIRE track. Her song "Karma" (2004) is very simple in another way - a lot of the song is built from three notes. (Mi, re, do again, this time in minor.)
If my students are at all into R&B and hip hop, I can usually get away with suggesting we try a classic Alicia Keys song "because it's pretty easy." Here's what I do with Karma:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I like to find songs built from a four-bar repeating structure. It's easy to structure the teaching and learning in a way that will differentiate instruction (there are easy parts and harder parts) encourage a practicing style of "no stopping, keep the music going, listen to the group and keep up" which, according to neuroscientists, gives the greatest return on time invested - our fingers or vocal chords being forced to "keep up" with our ears and minds.
If you don't know the song, you should probably listen to it now:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6TvLsXMcuA
I usually start with the chorus section ("what goes around comes around") and create a four-part canon.
Here's the bass part. It works as an ostinato in just about any register.
One note, and a simple, repeating rhythm. I find that this 3-3-2 rhythm is very easy for students to hear and reproduce. It seems to be as ingrained as "shave and a haircut - two bits" because it's been used so often in popular music for the last sixty years, I guess.
Next, I introduce the "hook" - the melodic or accompaniment motif that listeners identify with the song:
At this point, I can already divide the class in half and have them play these two parts in canon. The little melodic hook is so powerfully conjuring up the atmosphere of the song that they already feel like they're "playing the song."
The melody and lyrics of the chorus actually seems to be referring to the canon concept: "what goes around comes around; what goes up must come down." Happily, Keys' melody itself actually works as a canon, to boot. I put the 1st entrance, 2nd entrance marks above the melody here to show you.
This part does have more than three notes (it has five) so I might ask only some of the most dexterous students to play this part, and suggest that some students might want to sing rather than play. They aren't as self conscious about this as you might assume. Especially when I proceed to sing it with my own man-on-the-street, unprepossessing voice.
So now we have:
I've put the vocal canon on two lines so you can see how it fits together.
The melody of the verses does, in fact, only use those same three notes as the hook. And it fits as a fifth voice to the canon we've already created! Here's the verse melody:
So here's what it looks like all together:
As you can see, this arrangement would work well with 20 guitars, an acapella chorus, an Orff instrumentarium, a clarinet class...
Maybe you'd like it in a different key for clarinets? Here you go:
Now here's a collection of TEN classic rock, R&B, reggae, and even contemporary tunes using only four notes. Try out the techniques described above with these songs, if you're stuck for repertoire. Have fun with it. Send in your arrangement, and I'll print it here.
Cheers! - til next time.
-Nick
...and don't forget to write. nycmusicteacher@gmail.com