fwd: Children improvising and composing

In a message dated 2003:08:26 04:03:20 PM, Andrew Raffo DeWar writes:

>Hi All:
>
>Just wanted to point your browsers at one of the things I had the great
>opportunity to do this summer in Boston. I was hired to explore
>improvisation and composition with 5-10 yr. olds at the Fayerweather Street
>School in Cambridge. They were kids who don't consider themselves
>'musicians' -- this was just their required daily music class.
>
>The first week we did 'directed' improvisation -- I had them choose three
>sounds and work with those materials - I cued some events, but the goal
>was
>to have them get comfortable with creating forms/sounds themselves
>intuitively. It could be argued that I also 'composed' by setting out
>the
>array of instruments to be used, although they chose what they wanted to
>play from those available instruments.
>
>I also talked to them about expanding the definition of music, using
>crickets, rain and birds as examples of 'non music' music. After that,
>we
>were quiet for a minute (yes, they actually kept quiet) and listened for
>sounds in the room that they liked. Then we did a piece where they mimicked
>those sounds -- (Jacob and other ex-members of the GIE might remember a
>'grown up' version of this 'exercise')
>
>The second week I played some of mine and Braxton's graphic and mixed
>graphic notation (his new 'poetic notation', which is really cool) and
>had
>them write pieces using notation of their own invention.
>
>Perhaps it's on topic with the eternal comp/improv debate. Perhaps not.
>
>It was a great experience, and the recorded results have been posted by
>the
>school on the web here:
>
>http://www.fayerweather.org/summertime_rb.htm
>
>click on "summertime music 2003".
>
>The first 6 pieces are 5 yr. olds , #7-9 were 6-8 yr. olds, and #10-16
>were
>mostly 10 yr. olds.
>
>I hope more of us try to work our way into the schools, especially with
>little kids, because they are so open minded at that point.
>
>Anyway, enjoy.
>
>Andrew
>

"The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the
place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape,
from a spider's web." - Pablo Picasso

---
Hanuman Zhang, musical mad scientist

"Welcome and explore and inquire into everything, new or old, that comes
your way, and then build your own music on whatever your inner life has been able
to take in and offer you back again." - Henry Cowell

"Music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a
copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. For this
reason, the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is
that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music
of the essence." - Schopenhauer, _The World as Will and Representation_

"His music, far from being in the background of my life, was in the
foreground. It was he as a musician who accomplished what I dreamed of, and
I followed as well as I could with the inferior power of words. The ear is
purer than the eye, which reads only relative meaning into words. Whereas
the distillation of experience into pure sound, a state of music, is
timeless and absolute." -Anais Nin on her brother Joaquin Nin-Culmell

"...improvisation is about change, about flux rather than stasis. ...
improvisation is about a constant change." - Steve Beresford

improvisation: "a process of liberation, a working around the assumptions
that define our civilization, and the results are open-ended." - John Berndt
Improvisation resists documentation - it celebrates the ephemeral, it
perversely reminds us every second that everything dies. Much of the "modern
Westernized world" isn't ready for this kind of news.

> >"Any sufficiently advanced music is indistinguishable from noise"

> >(after Arthur C. Clarke's aphorism that any sufficiently advanced

> >technology is indistinguisable from magic.)" - John Chalmers, in email
response
to the quote _The Difference between Music and Noise is all in your Head_