Subject assignment ("Ontwerpopdracht") nr. 4: West Side Story "graffiti-board"

The following assignment is something I am working on now with my havo 3 class at Laar en Berg.
I am devoting a thirteen-week "class-block" to the musical West Side Story. I chose this musical because it satisfies my personal need for integrating "classical music values" within a school music curriculum, while the subject matter (teenagers, street gangs, young love, feeling misunderstood) also very much appeals to a teenage sensibility.
On the very first day, the class walked in to the music room and saw the following terms scrawled on the whiteboard, drawn very freely in no particular order, and made to look like "graffiti":
West Side Story
Romeo en Julia
Broadway
Leonard Bernstein
William Shakespeare
Steven Sondheim
Gangs (bendes)
Musical
Puerto Rico
Polish-Americans
“Cool”
1950s
Upper West Side, New York City
Tieners
Mambo
Ballet
Juvenile delinquency (jeugd criminalitiet)
I use this workform to introduce the important subjects pertaining to West Side Story. Pretending to pick words from the board at random, I start off with musicals, then I move on to West Side Story, then how it was a modern version of Romeo and Juliet, etc.
After showing the film to the class, we have embarked on two parallel projects in which I divide the class in two sections. The first project involves the class forming groups and together practicing and playing the song America in three parts. For the second project, groups of two are formed. I send the students to the library (under the supervision of teaching assistants), and give each group two terms to research from the "graffiti-board." During the class, each group must make an essay about each term which can include encyclopedia definitions, images, web sites, and whatever else they find relevant. At the end of the project I will have compiled all these essays in a special West Side Story-folder.

Subject assignment ("Ontwerpopdracht") nr. 3: Musical Layers

The following (in Dutch) is an assignment I do with all of my 2nd and 3rd year classes. It has to do with the idea of musical layers, which conforms with chapter 3 in the INTRO 2 textbook about "musical depth." First I show a painting by Vermeer, The Love Letter, in order to introduce a discussion about depth in painting, namely over foreground, middleground, and background.
Then I switch over to depth in music, and the following layers: vocal-layer, chord-layer, bass- layer, rhythm-layer, and sometimes the background voices-layer. I then distribute the following handout. It is my analysis of the form of the original recording of the Beatles' song Let it Be. I like to use this song because it has a very logical instrumental buildup. I play very short fragments of each section, stopping the cd and each asking the students what instruments they hear, and which layers are represented. They find it very exciting to do. We do it together until the guitar solo, then for the rest they have to work alone or with a partner. At the end of the process I check the results.

Analyse van opname van The Beatles, Let it Be

VORMDEEL (onderstreep instrumenten)

INTRO ___________________________

COUPLET

a. “When I find myself in times of trouble…” ________________________________

b. “And in my hour of darkness….” ________________________________

REFREIN

“Let it Be, Let it Be…” ________________________________

COUPLET 2

a. “And when the broken hearted people…” ________________________________

b. “For though they may be parted….” ________________________________

REFREIN

“Let it Be, Let it Be…” ________________________________

“Let it Be, Let it Be…” ________________________________

TUSSENSPEL ___________________________

SOLO ___________________________

REFREIN 3

“Let it Be, Let it Be…” ________________________________

COUPLET 3

a. “And when the night is cloudy…” ________________________________

b. “I wake up to the sound of music….” ________________________________

REFREIN 4

a. “Let it Be, Let it Be…” ________________________________

b. “Let it Be, Let it Be…” ________________________________

TUSSENSPEL (OUTRO) ___________________________

Subject assignment ("ontwerpopdracht") nr. 2: Making a "sound map"

Making a “sound map”: listening and "drawing sounds"
Benedict Weisser

I made the following exercise last November at Laar en Berg for a special project (klas 2 havo/vwo/MYP, English-language strean) about Smetena’s orchestral work Die Moldau. It can be done with any number of people.

Needed:
Paper, pencils, graph paper, a room with windows

1. Turn all the lights out in the room, and open all the windows.
2. On the count of three, everyone should close their eyes and be very quiet for exactly one minute.
3. Turn the light back on. What did you hear? Write everything down, no matter how seemingly unimportant.
4. Repeat step 1: turn all the lights out in the room, and open all the windows.
5. Repeat step 2: on the count of three, everyone should close their eyes and be very quiet for exactly one minute.
6. Turn the light back on. From which direction was the sound coming? Try to draw it on the paper, and pretend that you are a set of stereo loudspeakers, with your left ear being the left side of the page and your right ear being the right side of the page.
7. Can you draw a picture of the sounds? (for instance, if you heard speaking you can draw mouths open and words coming out)
8. Was it a loud sound or a soft sound? How can you draw that?
9. Was it a long sound or a short sound? How can you draw that?
10. Putting it all together, can you draw a complete “sound map” of what you heard? You need to “draw” the sounds like you did in step 7. You need to determine whether you heard them from your left or right ears as you did in step 6. You need to determine the dynamics and length as you did in steps 8 and 9. You now also need to determine where they occur on the page in relation to each other (for instance, not just “left” and “right” but which sounds were “ more left” or “more right” than others.
11. Use graph paper to work within limits. For instance, set a top and bottom limit as to how loud the loudest sound can be represented, and how soft the softest sound can be.

Subject assignment ("ontwerpopdracht") nr. 1: composing and collaborating

The following is a "creative process" which I made for a project in protest music which I am doing next month at Laar en Berg (with klas 2 havo/vwo/MYP, English-language stream). However, steps 1 to 9 are useful for making a new song with any kind of subject matter.

GETTING STARTED—GENERATING CONTENT AND AVOIDING CREATIVE BLOCKS
Benedict Weisser

Working in groups of three (give each person a number—1, 2 and 3):

1. Roles: Persons 1 and 2 make a text, and person 3 writes everything down on a piece of paper.
2. The three sit in a circle, or in a manner in which they can all see each other very clearly.

3. The subject is something that makes you happy. Possible subjects: your family, your friends, a love relationship, perhaps, or your favourite song, or a particular article of clothing such as a nice pair of shoes, etc.
4. Person 1 has 20 seconds to make up the first line of text. This line of text can be short or long, but it has to make sense as a line of text. It does not need to be fantastic! Person 3 is writing everything down.
5. Person 2 takes what person 1 did, and then adds a second line. Person 2 has 20 seconds to think of the second line. Again, person 3 is writing everything down.
6. Person 1 then comes back with a third line for which (s)he has 20 seconds.
7. You now have a verse (couplet) consisting of three lines. Person 3 should read the whole thing aloud.
8. Rotate so that person 1 takes the role of person 2, 2 takes the role of 3, and 3 takes the role of 1.
9. Repeat the process twice with two rotations (in other words, the process occurs three times).
10. Once you have completed that process, you are ready for the next step.
11. PROTEST—think of the state of the world. Think of something that really is an injustice.
12. Pick one subject that really bothers you, and keep it short, simple, understandable, and something you can quickly explain to other people!
13. Go through the process again from steps 1 to 9.
14. You will then have three verses from a protest song.

I am not supposed to know about this, but....

check out
http://benedictweisser.hyves.nl

My ideal music-room: a theatre of dreams

One the one hand, you can give a nice music-class and have fun anywhere with virtually nothing. All you need are ideas and willing people. On the other hand, from two years of teaching I have learned that a room has an enormous influence on what happens and on how students behave.

If I think of an ideal space for a music room, my thoughts begin with my previous job in Amersfoort at Het Niewue Eemland (Meridiaan College) where I worked during the 2007-08 school year. My colleague there, Paul Koolen, has been teaching there for over twenty-five years and designed the music room himself—it is truly a “school music paradise.” It is a large room situated next to the auditorium (aula), bigger and with a higher ceiling than in Hilversum. There are windows on three of the four sides of the room, which gives a feeling of light and airiness. The space between the “les-ruimte” and the “speel-ruimte” is clearer and more pronounced. There is a winding staircase that leads upstairs to three practice-rooms, one of them extremely large. It was a pleasure to teach in that room, the only problem being that there were three music teachers and due to scheduling conflicts I was often forced to teach in other rooms besides the “speelparadijs.”

My large-scale vision is not merely that of a “muzieklokaal,” but (at the risk of sounding too much like Pierre Audi) that of a “theatre of dreams.” As in Amersfoort, I would like the music room to have two floors, with a staircase leading upstairs to practice rooms. For the bottom floor, I would begin with a very large soundproofed space (not in any way isolated from the rest of the school) with high ceilings and and many windows as possible. It seems to me that the ceiling is a very important element when considering a music-room: sound should not be smothered and should be able to “rise” like a flower or like bread in an oven. For me another important element is flexibility. I do not like music or music-making to be in any way static. I like things to be constantly in flux and reflecting the changing circumstances of my environment. I would still have a division between the “les-ruimte” and the “speel-ruimte” but there would be more potential of mixing the two together within a large space.

For the “les-ruimte,” I would thus use an open space as a basis, and have Japanese-style sliding doors and partitions employed to give the room changing shapes. These would be larger or smaller depending on the size and nature of the group. For me the concept and the pure space itself, with its integrity and beauty, is more important than what is in the space. In other words, instead of seeing a bunch of keyboards, guitars, and drums and saying: "ok, what can we do with all these instruments?," I would rather begin with an interesting concept and then decide what means can best serve it using a pure space as a basis. A solution also needs to be invented to attack the problem of seat-setup. It takes way too long to move the seats and tables into the proper “opstelling.” I would prefer a system in which large groups of seats and tables (in different formations and shapes) were moveable on wheels which could be easily shifted so that it would never take more than five minutes to go from one “opstelling” to another. The “les-ruimte” would be equipped with a beamer, screen, and a music whiteboard.

The “speel-ruimte” would be slightly more fixed than the “les-ruimte,” because, of course, instruments are involved. I would keep the idea of having rows of keyboards on keyboard stands/tables, but there would be more space between the instruments and the keyboard stands/tables could also be moved on wheels. That way students could play at times facing each other, or at times in a circle, or however they or I wished. One idea which I would like to appropriate from the third floor at the conservatory in Utrecht is that of a podium. I would like to have space for a podium which would be the only really fixed element in the room, with microphones, amplifiers, lights, and a mixing board.

In thinking about this essay and the subject in general I have spoken with my present and former colleagues: Emel Spaninks (my former colleague at ATC Hilversum), Mari-Ann Koudijs (my present colleague at ATC), and Harrie Derkx (my colleague at Laar en Berg. Emel and I formulated the redesigning of the room in Hilversum in 2007. Mari-Ann and I are busy further redesigning the room and its contents, and Harrie and I are thinking about what can be done to salvage the room in Laren. So hopefully I have more opportunities to come up with a beautiful new music room!

Digital fotoreportage

The following posts constitute a digital fotoreportage about my two workplaces: first in Hilversum (Alberdingk Thijm College, Katholiek Lyceum in Het Gooi) and then in Laren NH (Laar en Berg, Katholiek Lyceum in Het Gooi).
I have photographed the two music rooms and discuss their positive and negative aspects, both purely as places to work as well as their suitability for teaching music in a high school setting.

Mijn lokaal in Hilversum, deel 1

I am very happy with my muzieklokaal in Hilversum (Alberdingk Thijm College). It is newly rebuilt, and we have also just made a big investment in new instruments and speakers.
One thing which is good about this muzieklokaal is that it is on the ground floor, right near the front entrance of the school. Although it is not isolated and gets very noisy, it gives the impression that music is important to the school. After all, it is perhaps the first thing you see and hear when you come in .
The room, as you see, is divided between the "les-ruimte" and the "speel-ruimte." The ceiling, though not extremely high, is high enough which makes for more mental space. ICT plays an important role in the school, which profiles itself as "the laptop school" becasue every student and teacher has their own laptop computer. Thus I am often in the lokaal with thirty students who are all working on their laptops (for example, on the INTRO-website), with my computer connected to the beamer and projected on the large screen.. Next door to the muzieklokaal is the ICT-room, so I can have someone come in to help at a moment's notice.

Mijn lokaal in Hilversum, deel 2

The muzieklokaal was just rebuilt last spring. There used to be a "helling" which gave the room a "zaal-achtige" gevoel. It was a lot of fun, with the class surrounding the teacher who was below. Didactically speaking, however, it was a bit of a nightmare. The students were "on top of" the teacher, it was an invitation for bad behavior, and the whole thing resembled a sort of Roman Colosseum in which the Christians were thrown to the Lions (insert your own comment here). It was very difficult to get to the students to give them individual instruction, and it was very inflexible allowing only for a classical classroom set-up. Not to mention that it was extremely difficult to clean.

The most radical change is in the flexibility the teacher is offered. The "opstelling" in the old room was etched in stone; it was totally flexible. Here I have much more flexibility to experiment with different looks, seating arrangements, points of focus that are appropriate to the given class. For instance, I like often to group the chairs in six "islands" of five tables each which is favorable to independent work and collaboration. In these photos you see the room in a more classical opstelling.

In the third photo you see the banks of keyboards (all equipped with very good and extremely old headphones which we discovered during the renovation!). The keyboards are situated on large tables which have built-in electrical outlets that feed into a central control. Thus I can turn all the keyboards on and off from a single switch behind the blackboard. Less happily, students have been playing with these outlets, jerking them up and down so that they start to break.

Notice also the carpeting on the walls which deadens the sound--that is one negative point about the renovation. The carpeting was put in because the room sits below the teachers' lounge and there were complaints about the noise. Whereas the room used to have a nice, "live" acoustic, I now have to play much louder to get the piano heard, to really "pump it out." We are still waiting for the curtains, which makes it very difficult to look at things projected on the beamer (clips, films, internet).

Mijn lokaal in Hilversum, deel 3

A side room was converted into two practice rooms (we were already using it for those purposes anyway), which will hopefully be soundproofed in the near future. This way, I always have enough space to work on a speelstuk even with a class of up to sometimes 33 students. What I often do is to put the students who are the most relaxed and able to work together most independently in the pracice rooms, then I stay in the big room with the busiest students, who then have more space and quiet. It also gives more space to the students who are working in the larger room. Besides the fact that we are using chairs to place the keyboards on, these rooms really have a conseratory-type feel, which I like a lot.

Mijn lokaal in Laren, deel 1

Laar en Berg is very well known for the attention it gives to music. The two "voorspeel-avonden" in the year are very big deals (the first, Klassiek en Unplugged, took place two weeks ago and I enjoyed it very much; the second, 80 db, takes place in April and is a rock-and-pop superhyped-giga-marathon). That said, I am not wild about my music room (although admittedly it doesn't look so bad from these photos).
First thing, the muzieklokaal is in my opinion too isolated from most of the school. Although that means you can make a lot of noise without people hearing it, nevertheless I believe that the place a classroom is says something about the priority the school places on the subject. Also, I am from New York City and I live in Amsterdam--I like to feel like I am in the middle of the action, and not as the crazy relative stuck in the basement. You have to walk out of the main building where the classrooms are, and go through a sort of "winter garden" to get to the muzieklokaal. It is right next to the gym and the boys' locker room, which manifests itself during the day in a steady stream of the aroma of deoderant. To reach the muzieklokaal you then ascend a flight of stairs (see photo). What you see is just about the entire room--the speel- en -les-ruimtes are together and the ceiling is extremely low. The room is essentially the size of a normal classoom, not twice as large as should be the case with a muzieklokaal. The size of the room has many consequences for teaching: lack of mental and creative space, claustrophobic, "echo-chamber" effects, etc. In addition, whereas in Hilversum the sound has been deadened by carpeting on the wall, here the room is so small that if I play just mf I can drown out a group of 30.

Mijn lokaal in Laren, deel 2

In principle, all the classrooms have wireless internet, but until it was repaired a few weeks ago the connection was at best intermittent and mostly nonexistent. Also, as you see we have to project images onto a whiteboard.
My colleague (who I like a lot) has a strong preference for the classical, "ring"-type opstelling that is shown in the picture. To do anything else requires an enormous amount of work in a too-small space. What you don't see in this photo are the drums, which are usually situated in front of the teacher's table (!). That means that the whole time I am backing into the drums and the students are constantly distracted by them. There is no other place to put them.
As in Hilversum, all the instruments go through a central control, with the on/off switch at the front. The problem is that there are not enough instuments at the back to serve more than 16 students. Therefore we are obligated to employ other keyboards at the tables in the "les-ruimte," with a labyrinthine maze of adapters and extension cords (visible in the fifth photo in this post, inside the blue box on top of the cabinet).
The two side rooms, which should be for storage and filing of materials, are instead used as (emergency) practice space. In short, everything is very "onhandig."