Learn this beautiful Japanese song with the steps below to develop your musicianship skills. Tsuki Performance Watch this beautiful performance of Tsuki: Learn Tsuki It’s such a beautiful song. It’s one of my favourites and the above video is such a gorgeous arrangement. I’ll teach it to you now. Below is the Japanese version and […]
Tsuki: A Japanese Folk Song Read More »
In this post I’ll give you take you through an approach to teaching the intervals in the pentatonic scale.
Pentatonic Intervals Read More »
Sleeping a in Stable I’d like to tell you a sad story about my composition, Sleeping a in Stable… with a happy ending! I wrote Sleeping in a Stable for a school nativity and the brief was they needed something for them to sing in the stable part of the nativity. The school later said they’d forgotten
Kodály Christmas 2 Read More »
I LOVE Goblins are Around Tonight which appears in David Vinden’s Songs for Singing and Musicianship. I changed the lyrics to make them cute and Christmassy. I found that my students really took to the Winter Elves. I showed them pictures of different winter elves and they had to choose which elves they thought this
Winter Elves… are out tonight! Read More »
The most frustrating thing about Christmas songs is being suddenly asked to teach repertoire with concepts our students haven’t learnt yet; Jingle Bells with dotted rhythms anyone? And if they have a version that has changed the dotted rhythm, we have more problems because they know the sound of the dotted rhythm version! Just before Christmas is not the time to learn new concepts just because it happens to be in a Christmas song.
Winter, Holiday and Christmas Repertoire Read More »
As well as being a beautiful sea shanty, it’s excellent for teaching the dotted crotchet and quaver rhythm: tam-ti. Below I’ll give you ideas for teaching this song, preparing the rhythm with an ostinato, presenting tam-ti, working out the rhythm and finally the solfa. A Capstan Shanty This is a sad song about heading off
I’m Bound Away: A Shanty Great for Tam-ti Read More »
We’re going to explore an English folk song and use it to help our students discover new elements.
We’ll be using Rocky Mountain to:
• Practice the rhythms ta, titi and ta rest
• Practice do, mi, so and la
• Discover a new note! Re
Rocky Mountain: Perfect for Pentatonic Read More »
My last few blog posts have been about more complicated rhythms and how we can guide our students to discover them using a Kodály inspired approach. The most important element of the Kodály approach is singing, using our voice. It really comes into it’s own with the rhythm that appears in the sone Step Back Baby.
Step Back Baby: Teaching ti-tika and tika-ti Read More »
Microsteps to Syncopa: as easy as uno, dos, tres, cuatro…
Microsteps to Syncopa: as easy as uno, dos, tres, cuatro… Read More »