Kodály Christmas 2
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 they already had a dance for the stable and they wanted a song for the birth of Jesus so they didn’t use Sleeping in a Stable! I decided to share it in case someone else will benefit from it. Here’s a link to it.
What was lovely to find out was that teachers looking for a Kodály nativity song have already used it, even someone in Saudi Arabia! I even spoke to a teacher who said they built their whole nativity around the song! So I don’t mind that the school I wrote it for didn’t use it. It’s easy to sing, kids love it, teachers love it. They love corniest, cheesiest bit, the animal sounds!
Winter Time
Winter Time is such a great composition, I thought I’d tell you more about it!
I wrote this in 2019 because I needed something to sing with a group musicianship class. The class I wrote it for had learnt do, but not re and we’ve already talked about how Christmas is not the time to introduce new concepts! The class sung it in their Christmas recital and it went down so well I taught it to piano students too!
Here it is for the words and score.
There are four verses and the tune is quite intuitive so everyone will pick it up quickly.
It has no Christmas references, so it’s completely secular which is great if you have students who don’t celebrate Christmas. It talks about holidays because there are the school holidays, it’s wintery, all cultures have a winter festival where people come around and bring gives which predates Christianity and regardless of whether you celebrate there will be lights up and hopefully they’ll look forward to reading brand new books they might have had.
It’s really easy to play on the black keys, so great for piano lesson, you can just sing it in musicianship, use tuned percussion, play a so-do ostinato on glockenspiels or chime bars.
Helen’s students made up actions which was really sweet. They didn’t do it in class it for many weeks and but they picked it up so well they were able to sing it in a class recital!
Winter Elves
I decided to make Goblins Are Around Tonight cute and Christmassy and changed the words! I’ve talked about it in detail in this blog post. Have a look here!
Traditional Songs
What do you think to teaching the traditional songs in your lessons?
Jingle bells isn’t too bad because it’s do re mi fa so, so they don’t need to move their hands but the rhythm is tricky. You’d think they can cope with it because they know the song, but at “oh what fun it is to ride” there are too many of the same notes to cope with! It was also a minstrel song so might be on the list of questionable songs and it was never a Christmas song, it was a Thanksgiving song…
The start of Silent Night also has so, la and mi but the rest isn’t suitable for our beginners on Sing and Play Piano. Perhaps an adaption of it will work? It is in triple metre so if they’ve done Bells in the Steeple in Sing and Play piano they could identify the time signature…
Compose!
Composing is such a fun activity and Sing and Play students do quite a few composing activities which will make this easy for them.
Ask your students to make up their own Christmassy song inspired by Christmassy imagery like snowflakes falling. They could also make up their own words and compose something with the toneset they’ve been playing around with.
A Doremi member has used familiar concepts from traditional songs and composed a piece from it. If there are pitches the student hasn’t learnt yet, the rhythm of the words can be a great starting point.
If you try this with your students, I’d love to hear what you come up with!
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