April 6, 2007 - Princeton Packet - The sound of music

04/06/2007

The sound of music
By: Pat Summers, Special Writer

Nick McBride of the Westminster Academy leads sixth-graders in a "patching" exercise at John Witherspoon Middle School. Staff photo by Mark Czajkowski

Westminster Choir College opens up a new world for the young

Moving from the Cinderella story to Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring," using music from a TV show the entire class knows, in under 45 fast-and-fun minutes: This is probably not your usual sixth grade music course.

That strange-seeming but purposeful transition begins when Nick McBride asks the students, "What's changing?" Then he plays a recording of "The Simpsons" theme music — first the basic, familiar version, then many others.

An instructor in the music education department at Westminster Choir College of Rider University, Mr. McBride is teaching a music class at John Witherspoon Middle School in Princeton, where the Westminster Academy — a kind of school within a school — is in residence.

It's a mutually beneficial arrangement. In weekly music classes that run for a semester, John Witherspoon's sixth graders experience cutting-edge music instruction, while Westminster faculty and students get a laboratory where they can try things out, practice-teach and observe one another at work.

It's called Critical Pedagogy for Music Education, or CPME.

'Theme and Variations'

Mr. McBride's lesson this day is about "Theme and Variations," although at this point, his sixth graders don't yet know it.

When they first came into class, students found a series of notes on the board — preparation for the first activity, a "rhythm reading." This includes talk about time signatures and how to read and say them. ("Four-four, not four-fourths! That would turn me into a math teacher and I don't like math!" Mr. McBride says.)

This is a focus activity, intended to "get the kids on the music side of their brain." Soon they are "patching" — clapping their hands and patting their knees in a form of body percussion, a kinesthetic activity Mr. McBride uses for a change of pace.

Class moves quickly as the teacher keeps things happening, walking among the kids, writing on the board, playing music excerpts. "Who can tell me something else? ... What a fabulous wrong answer! ... Stay with me!"

His direction to "pull out that listening log" leads to the "what's changing?" question as the Simpsons music plays. He jots their responses on the board: accents, instruments, time period, culture, tone/notes/pitch, genre, moods. All these elements differ from one version of the music to another.

Then comes the first Cinderella question: How many different versions of the story do you know? Up goes a list: in Japanese (and other languages), Disney's take on the story, a movie, an opera, even a penguin version. And the second question: What do all those versions have in common? Answer: The basic story remains the same.

Then he tells them: All this has been about theme and variation. Together, they write a formal definition for each word — the main idea, or theme, and ways to change the theme.

Enter composer Aaron Copland and his six variations on "Simple Gifts" from "Appalachian Spring." While their teacher plays the music, the kids note the changes from one part to another: more instruments, different stresses/timing, repetition/echo, volume, tone (solemnity).

They seem taken with the information that Copland's fourth variation became music for the Olympics and his sixth was borrowed for CBS News — two real-world applications they could recognize, like so much else in this lesson.

'No Child Left Behind'

Ending the class, teacher and kids perform body percussion together. Starting with a basic clapping pattern, they invent variations on that theme, bringing the lesson full-circle from attention-getting through intellectual engagement to performance.

Fast-paced and varied, with both right- and left-brain activities accommodating different learning styles — all this was carefully planned for the music class. First, it's good for sixth graders, "who can be squirrelly," Mr. McBride says. With a few years' experience teaching that grade level, he well knows that.

Second, such instruction is all part of the plan for Westminster Academy. Through it, the sixth graders at John Witherspoon School experience a music class quite different from the typical "general music" offering.

"We noticed the school music programs didn't connect with the kids' life," says Professor Frank E. Abrahams, chair of the Department of Music Education at Westminster. "They have a very rich musical life outside of school, and they know a lot about that music. But when they didn't know 'school music,' teachers took no time to find out what they did know, and often just assumed they knew nothing.

"When we went looking at school music programs, we were disappointed," he continues, discussing the evolution of Westminster Academy with Robert L. Annis, dean of Westminster Choir College, and a visitor. "Some kids had music every week since kindergarten and by high school, they still couldn't read music unless they took private lessons, too. They got all the way through school with very little in the way of skills."

"We thought if music education was going to survive, it needed to connect better to the greater global goals of schooling. It couldn't exist on its own — it had to connect with what schools were trying to do, and (the federal mandate) 'No Child Left Behind' was part of that."

Making connections

Professor Abrahams speaks of Paulo Freire (1921-1997), the Brazilian education theorist, whose approach influenced development of the Westminster Academy's program. Mr. Freire was very successful teaching "oppressed, illiterate adults to read Portuguese by connecting the material they would read with the things that were germane in their lives."

So, since music is also a language, Professor Abrahams recounts, "We thought by connecting what should be happening in school music with the kids' life experiences, we'd have a better chance to do something meaningful."

With his colleagues at the time, "we looked at learning and teaching styles," including the concept that "the only time kids really learn something is when they teach it to themselves." They decided on an approach called "critical pedagogy (Paulo Freire's term) for music education," and developed "a set of lessons to connect the kids' world with the school world."

And then, since "we greatly value the community we're in, and we want to reach out to them," as Dean Annis says, he and Professor Abrahams laud William Johnson, John Witherspoon's principal for 31 years, for his vision and help. Years ago, when the three met to talk about a partnership between the choir college and the community, he suggested his school's rising sixth graders for the general music pilot. Mr. Johnson thought it would serve as a good transition for them into Witherspoon, which he proudly calls a "performing arts" school, where kids can also elect choir, band and/or orchestra.

"Usually in middle school, general music's the throwaway course for kids. Now they can't wait to get to it," he says of Westminster Academy, now in its fifth year and reaching more than 220 sixth graders. It also reaches him: He often sits in — "It just gets so exciting in there." He likes the mix of "a good prof who brings college students in; they keep the energy going." And the two schools' proximity doesn't hurt, either. The Westminster reps can easily move back and forth. "Even when the weather's bad," Mr. Johnson says, "they're better than the mailman!"

Madonna and Mozart

Madonna and Mozart: There's an unlikely pair. But consider: One might be kids' music and the other, school music, yet starting with one can bridge to the other. Or as Dr. Abrahams put it, "If you know and understand all there is to know about Madonna, then you know all there is to know about Mozart."

It starts with the kids learning about Madonna and the stages her life and music have gone through. She was outrageous, Dr. Abrahams points out, as Mozart, who may have had ADHD, was. "We draw parallels and give kids the problem: What if we were to cast Madonna as Queen of the Night, the most challenging role in Mozart's 'Magic Flute'?"

Listening carefully to both Madonna and the opera, "the kids get very excited" in the segue from pop culture to opera.

Still another bridge built by the music architects of Westminster Academy: "If you understand rap, you understand Gregorian chant." Pairing these two music forms prompts exploration of parallels between them, such as treatment of melody and rhythm, consideration of cloistered societies, expression of emotion and spirituality.

Nor does Beethoven escape scrutiny. Are the sections in his Ninth Symphony out of order? Should the fugue be at the end? To resolve such questions, the sixth graders use technology to re-order all the sections before invariably deciding that Beethoven didn't make a mistake.

But, Dr. Abrahams emphasizes, in the process they learn about the form of the symphony, the decisions composers make and their thought process — the same as those needed when reading language, he adds. In reading a poem or book, one still needs to recognize the sequence and development, find the theme, uncover embedded messages.

'We've done a lot to integrate reading strategies into the music lesson without compromising the lesson," he says, alluding to its connection to the reading comprehension requirements of "No Child Left Behind."

Westminster's CPME curriculum model has wider applications than sixth graders' weekly music lessons. "We've also involved our music education students with it," Dr. Abrahams says. They observe classes and sometimes write lessons for them.

In short, CPME "has become the foundation of our undergraduate music education program and the focus of graduate music education."

The power in the classroom has shifted, he says — it's not just the teacher teaching the students, but vice-versa. Teachers involved are more satisfied, and kids are remembering more.

"Because we're connecting to things kids already know and bring into the classroom, and we're connecting to the way we think a musician thinks, those two together may have more lasting power," he theorizes. When the barriers between "kids' music" and "school music" dissolve and kids "know what they know," music learning occurs.

The operative word in Westminster Academy's CPME is "conscientization." It refers to the "inner knowing" that changes both students and teachers.

And "we make the kids spell that before we let them out," Dr. Abrahams jokes.

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