Bucket of Songs & Family Concert (from our Feb 26 newsletter)

Learning about the guitar at our first Creative Music Kids group class

IfCM headquarters has been buzzing with activity this month with lessons and classes 5 days a week! Students and teachers are having fun, being creative and experimenting, and learning tons of songs and musical vocabulary in the process. We’re all inspired to listen to unfamiliar music and make songs that are familiar more understood by learning them inside out and out. It’s really exciting to feel like I have a bucket of songs inside me that I can take wherever I go and I think our students feel that too! To be able to sing and play instruments like this is truly a gift (to give and receive).

Click the graphic for the link to our Facebook event!

The Denton Jazz Workshop has been learning a foundation of these tunes so that we can play them at the Emily Fowler Library next month for a spring family concert. These “easy kids tunes” are super essential sources of melodies, patterns, and progressions that make learning new jazz tunes much more familiar. If we can perform and improvise on “Wheels On the Bus” and “John Henry” we’re going to understand “Take the A Train” and “Equinox” much more. (While I was preparing for a piano lesson with a 5-year-old student this morning I realized that there’s a pattern in “The Farmer in the Dell” that is included in Thelonious Monk’s “I Mean You.” What a gift for meeeee!!!!) My jazz band at the Selwyn School (made up of 6th-11th grade students) played for a group of pre-school students last week and the performers noticed how fun and low-stress it was to play for an audience of 3-5-year-olds. Their natural response to hearing live music is to sing and dance, especially if the music is familiar and they’re encouraged to follow this intuition by their caregivers. I’m looking forward to facilitating this experience for our DJW students and community members of all ages next month. We hope you can join the DJW on March 23rd at 10am for our first family concert of the year to move, sing, chant, and improvise with us.

I’ll close with book and podcast recommendations.

Podcast: "Keys to Music Learning: Running an Audiation-Based Music School: Deep dive with Sarah McCaffrey Ritchie Part 1." Krista Jadro and Hannah Mayo are incredibly clear and precise when they discuss piano instruction and Music Learning Theory. They also have excellent guests including this interview with "Songs With Sarah" founder Sarah McCaffery Richie. I learned a lot about what I want to improve upon with Creative Music Kids, community outreach, and prioritizing joy in music learning. 

Book: "Dr. Eric's Book of Songs and Chants (for Ages 0-9)" by Eric Rasmussen. I've had the pleasure of taking classes with Dr. Eric and consider a HUGE amount of my learning and teaching philosophy and process to be based on his work. I wish that I'd learned this way earlier but glad I have found it now! From his description:

"Most music teachers, after they watch a video of a couple of my students demonstrating their ability to audiate these functions in major tonality—I, V7, IV, V7/V, vi, ii, V7/vi, V7/ii—say that they wish they had been taught this way. Well, if my second graders can do it, why can’t you? You absolutely can, but it will take time working on what’s laid out in this book, simply teaching it to the children, and along the way, learning it for yourself. That’s how I did it anyway."

There are countless hours of Eric and Beau Taillefer discussing these concepts and more on their podcast, "Audiation in the Wild."