174 | Rote vs Note (In a Choral Setting) - HD 720p
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[00:00:00] Bryson Tarbet: You're listening to That Music Podcast with Bryson Tarbin, the curriculum designer and educational consultant behind That Music Teacher and the Elementary Music Summit. Each week, Bryson and his guests will dive into the reality of being an elementary music teacher and how music can truly be transformative in the lives of the students you serve.
[00:00:23] Bryson Tarbet: Show notes and resources mentioned in this episode can be found at thatmusicteacher. com.
[00:00:35] Bryson Tarbet: Hello everyone and welcome back to this episode of That Music Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about the benefits and the drawbacks of teaching by rote and teaching by note in a choral setting. So, first of all, the vast majority of my teaching career was in an elementary middle school. general music setting.
[00:00:52] Bryson Tarbet: But I did have the opportunity to do some student teaching in the choral, this choral realm, I guess. Uh, and then my last year of [00:01:00] teaching in the classroom, I did a sixth grade choir, uh, with about 50 kids, which is actually one of my favorite things that I've gotten to do in my career, believe it or not.
[00:01:08] Bryson Tarbet: So one of the things that I notice a lot when I talk about Especially upper elementary musicking, if we call it that. Primarily at the older grades, we tend to want to focus into more of an ensemble setting. Or maybe your school district has you do that, or maybe your class, your school has like a mixed grade choir or whatever.
[00:01:30] Bryson Tarbet: One of the things that I see and I hear from the teachers that I work with Is they feel like they need to do a complete shift. And I've actually talked about this before on the podcast, when I was basically talking you through the process of me starting that choir program. And it was one of the things where I also felt like I needed to, all right, we are in choir mode now.
[00:01:49] Bryson Tarbet: This is choir. We're going to do choir things. And I kind of left behind my general music lens completely behind. And one of the things that I would really urge you to [00:02:00] do. Is to not do that because, especially if you have a lot of experience in this elementary general music setting, a lot of those strategies of engagement, of spiraling the curriculum, of just giving them multiple opportunities to do things is going to be really helpful in the choral setting.
[00:02:17] Bryson Tarbet: So, what do I mean by that? Um, and first of all, I am not here to start an argument over, You know, wrote versus note versus, you know, every student should be able to read music period no matter what but one thing that I want to Really drive home is that you can get a really good musical product final product and experience Without having any music read off of like an octavo, right?
[00:02:43] Bryson Tarbet: You can use folk music you can have you can use a piece of music that you already views You know Maybe you taught through the oral tradition that you're able to put turned into around this that or the other thing But then there's also something to be said about zooming in to those [00:03:00] theoretical concepts You know that music theory of having a sheet of music in front of you.
[00:03:05] Bryson Tarbet: And I think what we can do as teachers is to combine the best of both worlds. A lot of the time when we get into this choral setting or when we have this new program, we, we don't have a lot of strong readers. So we have to kind of start from where they're at. And that's my first tip for you is Don't just dive right into Coralie things, start where they're at.
[00:03:27] Bryson Tarbet: So if they are doing a lot of rote learning already, that is where you should begin. So what do I mean by that? So when I started my acquire, I did a lot of. Taking the songs that they've been working on in maybe the previous year in their general music setting or even songs that we haven't, but we're kind of from that folk repertoire that were a little bit shorter, they weren't super complex and we were learning them by echoing by, you know, listening and things like that.
[00:03:52] Bryson Tarbet: So that oral tradition that wrote learning and then we would take that and we would kind of add a little bit of a spice, right? We, maybe we singing it around, [00:04:00] maybe we. We take it and we add, use that to kind of talk about dynamics. We're talking about tempo or, or really zoom in and kind of mess with these little musical concepts.
[00:04:09] Bryson Tarbet: But then I've also took it taken it where I give the students a simple sheet of music. It doesn't need to be necessarily a full Octavo. That's another one of those things. I think we, we get. Stuck and we feel like this is choir. I need to give them this octavo when really you could just give them a one sheet of music that has their part.
[00:04:26] Bryson Tarbet: And I think that when you do that, especially if you take something that they already know and then give them the music for it, it can help them make those connections. And what I would suggest you do is really take a moment. And make those connections. So don't just assume they're going to be made.
[00:04:43] Bryson Tarbet: Don't just assume that if you, students know a song, and you give them that song written out in music, that they're going to be able to make those connections. So really talk about, alright, in measure 5, what word are we singing? In measure 5, what is our last note? What solfa syllable are we using? Really [00:05:00] take them through and kind of deconstruct.
[00:05:02] Bryson Tarbet: That piece of music, because a lot of times the that music can be really daunting, um, to a student, especially if they're not a strong reader in general, especially if they're not strong musical reader. And if we take a moment, and we really kind of break it down into chunks and kind of show them how to.
[00:05:20] Bryson Tarbet: To ask questions and things like that, that can really be helpful for allowing them to. Transfer that to when you give them something new. So what do you do if you have a new song that you want them to learn? I would highly recommend you still use some connection of rote learning. Um, but maybe you give them a piece of music and you focus on eight measures.
[00:05:39] Bryson Tarbet: And you say, all right, in these eight measures, we have X, Y, Z. You know, maybe in these X measure, in these eight measures, we have, um, what rhythms do we notice? And we really go around, right, what, do we see some rhythms that we'd notice? All right, we have some TT's, we have some tiki tikis, whatever, whatever we see.
[00:05:57] Bryson Tarbet: Um, are there anything in these eight measures we don't know? [00:06:00] That's a good question to ask. Uh, now look at the, look at the notes, look at the melody. Is it really, is it a large melodic range? Is it just a few notes? Are there a lot of repeated notes? These types of guided questions are what we naturally do as musicians when we see something new, even if we don't think about it, right?
[00:06:17] Bryson Tarbet: We notice, Oh. You know, we're kind of skimming through it. Oh, it's oh, it repeats here. Okay. You know, these are the same things that we need to guide our students through to like literally explicitly walk them through this process. Because just like when students are learning to read a book, we have been reading for a lot longer than they have, right?
[00:06:34] Bryson Tarbet: So we do a lot of things in the background, probably without even thinking about it, that we need to guide our students through, right? You know, if we read a passage and we don't remember what happened at the beginning, we go back and read it again, right? But our students might not necessarily do that if they don't have that experience, and if we haven't explicitly modeled that and taken them through that process.
[00:06:54] Bryson Tarbet: So I think the real kind of meat of today's episode is that [00:07:00] I truly believe that there is a time for teaching by rote and for teaching by note, both in the general music setting. And in the choral setting, I think just like a lot, you know, I don't get me too much on this soapbox, but I love teaching the recorder, but I think one of the worst things that we can do for most of us, at least in most situations is we feel like when we go teach recorder, we need to shift gears completely and we kind of it turns into like a beginning band, right?
[00:07:27] Bryson Tarbet: And that's not necessarily the best fit for every teacher for every student, especially if they're not used to that setting. So what can we do to you. make that transition a little easier. So in the case of recorders, I still use the recorders in the same kind of lesson structure that I typically have, or use them as tools.
[00:07:45] Bryson Tarbet: We're still using, we're still playing games. We're just using the recorders to play the games. And I think the same thing can go. In the choral setting, we've spent so many years, especially if you have been in the same school and they've been rotating through students through, [00:08:00] you've been teaching them musical tools.
[00:08:01] Bryson Tarbet: You've been really building their musical toolbox, and if they get to acquire, and then you just stopped using those tools and expect them to have a whole other set of tools. It's not going to be helpful for anyone. You're going to be frustrated. The students are going to be frustrated and it's going to become just not as fun.
[00:08:17] Bryson Tarbet: You know, in a previous episode, when I talked about this, about how I was starting my program, I realized that I shifted completely into what I, you know, lovingly referred to as choir director mode, which was, I, you know, I, I shifted everything. We started with warmups and then we read a music like. I just completely changed everything and was looking at it a lens of secondary down rather than elementary.
[00:08:41] Bryson Tarbet: And I think that lens shift was what allowed me to understand that there's a place for rote, there's a place for note, and weaving them together is what's best going to be work for my students at the time. And I highly recommend you figure out what that balance is for your students. If your students are really strong musical readers, if they [00:09:00] have, if you have really high levels of music literacy, Then maybe you, you do go a little heavier on the, you know, teaching a song by note, if they already know how to use those skills, if they're not really great readers, or if they're coming back, or if they're all coming in from different places.
[00:09:14] Bryson Tarbet: So some of them are some of them aren't, which was my case. We were all coming from different experiences. Then maybe we need to rely a little bit more heavily on road, at least at the beginning until we can get some sort of universal understanding. And that's what I want you to take away from this episode.
[00:09:31] Bryson Tarbet: So I don't have any like specific feedback for you, but what I want you to do is if you have a choir setting, I want you to think about the way you teach. Are you teaching elementary up or secondary down? And neither of those are bad. I think it's just important that if we notice that we're not getting the results we want to maybe try the opposite of what we're doing and see if that helps shift things.
[00:09:53] Bryson Tarbet: Thank you so much for joining us for this short, but sweet episode of that music podcast. If you have not left us a review on iTunes or wherever [00:10:00] you're listening to us right now, it would mean the world to us. If you would leave us a review, let us know what you're enjoying, what episodes you want to hear.
[00:10:06] Bryson Tarbet: And that helps us not only just make sure we're making episodes that you guys want, uh, but it also helps us get the episode in for in the, in the podcast in front of other music educators who are looking for. Some of this bite sized PD with that being said, as always, thank you so much for making a difference in the lives of the students.
