Pages

Thursday, 8 June 2017

Tito atu, tito mai - Composing & improvising

One of the biggest joys of teaching music is hearing students' creations when they explore and express their own ideas through composition and improvisation. This term (late 2019) my Year 7 and 8 students are working on developing their own waiata, experimenting with different strategies to compose tangiata (chords), rangi (melody) and kupu (lyrics). Instead of me leading lessons, my students have been working independently in groups of 2-3, taking responsibility for their learning and making their own choices around what they create - with some fantastic results!

Here is Anzack and Rangi Apiti's composition on xylophones, with me playing the chords & strum they chose. Isn't it beautiful? You can tell they were really listening and tuning in to the music to be able to produce these interesting complementary patterns:


Anzack & Rangi Apiti's waiata


Maioha, Tahiti and Terehia worked away in the library at creating their waiata, which Maioha later put graceful actions to. It was wonderful to have a group who were really on task, and all I had to do was pop my head in every once in a while to see what neat new things they had come up with to develop this fantastic composition:


Maioha, Terehia & Tahiti with their waiata

Improvisation is a particular passion of mine that I like to facilitate in class. I love the spontaneity and the way it can bring peoples' wairua to the fore as they tune in to the music and explore their own ideas. It's something we do regularly for fun and to develop listening and responding skills, using a pentatonic scale (all notes sound good together) to optimise success.

In this clip you can hear the group improvising in over a rōria (drone) which helps to anchor the playing, in between verses of my Pao pao pao waiata. Sometimes it's the quietest students who surprise you by stepping up and showing artistry in their mahi, and I was particularly happy to hear Ace getting into his groove in this session:


Ace & Zoe improvising over a rōria (bass pattern)


No comments:

Post a Comment