Pulling Together by David Demnitz

This How-to is a guide to bringing the culture of school closer to the ethnic and cultural backgrounds from which the students derive.

There are very important things that a music teacher can contribute to a program which can make students feel better about themselves and their world around them. Students like mine, living in a residential treatment center after, in most cases, having been placed in several foster care settings, suffer an extreme version of the sense of fragmentation all contemporary children know too well. We are especially well-placed to put the world back together with our students.

We can pull the culture of school closer to the ethnic and cultural backgrounds from which our students come, and we are positioned to provide continuity within the school itself. We do this when we acknowledge and celebrate the cultural backgrounds of our students, and when we work with colleagues to forge links between activities in other classrooms.

I found that the simplest way to create continuity between the school and the home is to find out what kinds of ethnic and cultural backgrounds my students come from, and to find out from them the kinds of music they associate with their upbringing. This isn't easy; often students consider the styles that their parents and other members of the community listen to embarrassing because they associate them with a provincial, immigrant culture. To break the ice, I compose simple classroom activities in the styles that my students are likely to have heard in their homes and communities. The activities convey the respect and admiration I have for my students' backgrounds. The songs reach out to students, and make of them experts in the styles my simple classroom activities allude to.

As for continuity in the school program, the best and the quickest way aren't always the same. It's always best to plan with colleagues who teach other subjects so subject matter is reinforced by being presented in different disciplines. At the outset this may be difficult, and sometimes, when you're new on the job, other teachers wait to see what you can do before they want to spend time doing in-depth planning with you. But you can imply coordination if you present styles when other classroom teachers are likely to be focusing on similar areas: you can present Latin music during Latin history month, Calypso music at Carnival time, Spirituals and Gospel music during African American History Month, a jig for Saint Patrick's day, and so forth. That way, the music reinforces what is going on in the other classes even if you haven't sat down with colleagues to plan it that way. And, after teachers find out how music can convey and reinforce material from other disciplines, they'll warm up to the idea of working with you to use music to reinforce what they are doing in class.

My students are moved in and out of classes relentlessly. So, to further create continuity, this time in my own program, I use the same activities in subsequent years, so at the same time each year, the students encounter the same activity. Each activity has a simple entry task, say, a simple, repeated rhythm or bass pattern, as well as more sophisticated tasks so that students can progress up through a hierarchy of skills when they're ready. This is helpful to students who may constantly feel displaced; they may be the new kid in class, but they can still participate in the activities immediately and participate alongside classmates who are more familiar with the repertory and the program. And because the simplest tasks in ensemble music are often the most essential, novices have at once a manageable but essential responsibility, thus making a valuable contribution from the outset. Then, if they return to the repertory, either the next year or because they have been placed into a different class, there is a higher-level activity for them to pursue, like playing the melody or the harmonic accompaniment. When students encounter the repertory in subsequent years they greet the activities like old friends about whom there is always something new to learn.

When I compose classroom songs, I try to present the lively and compelling aspects of a musical style in the clearest and most conceptual way, and to minimize curious twists and turns. But the music should still turn the heads of the novices, who may be inclined to reject instrumental musical training altogether. Although the songs I compose aren't really folk songs, they can be quickly learned and have elements that clearly identify them as particular folk styles. The music is meant to be learned by imitation and memory, and later can be read. The lessons yield satisfactory results in a very short time and the students can play together very quickly. My songs are written with the understanding that my students cannot take instruments out of the classroom to practice, and so practicing must be done in the classroom.

In addition to Orff instruments and rhythm instruments, I use inexpensive electronic keyboards. The kind of keyboards I'm talking about have all kinds of distractions, but they're durable and cheap. They can approximate the sounds associated with many musical styles if you select the appropriate voice, and the metronome that comes with the machine can be used to help the class play in time.

There are tools that every teacher discovers. Mine are:

• Activities which consist of a hierarchy of skills, and which include activities that are musically important but which are immediately playable. This way, novices can make an important contribution and can begin to play in the ensemble immediately. In addition to the Orff approach, this is something that students of Indonesian gamelan music encounter.
• Elements and skills that are used repeatedly, presented in different contexts, so the skills and even the same parts learned in one activity can be used in other activities.
• Musical sections and a sense of development created by adding and subtracting layered musical elements, while using a strictly repeated harmonic rhythm.
• Simple cadences. Cadences not only create a sense of period in an otherwise relentless chord progression, they also allow students to regroup to go on to the next repetition.
• Use of scalar passages in melody, accompaniment and bass.
• Melodies and accompaniments that are composed so that students begin playing on the downbeat.
• Relying on rhythm section for underlying interest and stylistic feel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: David Demitz is a teacher at Greenburgh Eleven UFSD school in Dobbs Ferry, NY.