3 Musical Stories From Our Students
Perhaps my favorite part about teaching Art Beyond the Ink workshops on creative listening is hearing the imaginative and elaborate stories that kids come up with. They never fail to surprise us with their humor, candor, personal reflections and outlook on life — all of which is channeled when practicing musical storytelling. Here are three stories from students that are so wonderful, we had to share them with you:
Story #1: The Avengers – A brand new group of superheroes that have definitely never been thought of before…
During a workshop at the New York Public Library centered around our film Sketches of Love (based on Cesar Franck’s Violin Sonata in A Major), a young girl raised her hand excitedly, wanting to share what she heard in the climax of the movement. She proceeded to tell us a story of superheroes who are able to defeat an evil villain and restore peace to the universe! What a fascinating story to hear in music! Especially since this musical genre is considered traditionally classical and elegant. “What about the music influenced your story?” we asked her, very intrigued to hear her response. She replied, “Oh, I don’t know. I just watched The Avengers: End Game this weekend.” 😂
Story #2: A Love Story
I was teaching a series of online workshops to a group of 3-year-olds during the height of the pandemic. As you can imagine, classes on Zoom for toddlers are quite challenging, so I had to make sure the content was engaging and fun. After we had built a strong rapport, I introduced musical storytelling to them. I had never taught this to children so young and was curious to see how they responded to it. We were listening to Jugend, a quartet for flute, clarinet, French horn and piano by Sigfrid Karg-Elert. We divided a piece of paper into 4 parts in order to tell our story as a comic book. After listening to the music and doodling our comic books scenes, one girl asked to share.
She heard her family being created; each stage was drawn out in the boxes. First was her parents' love story: when they first met, when they fell in love, and when they got married. She doodled her mom in a big, poofy wedding dress, holding flowers, with the sun shining all around them. Then, the student added herself as a baby to the last scene. Finally born, she could join her family and make them complete. When I asked what about the music made her hear this story, she answered in the sweetest 3-year-old voice, “Well, it sounds like love!” I definitely had to hold back tears for this one. 🥹
Story #3: The Epic Tango Battle
During one Spring semester, we had a group of students joining our weekly, online Inklings workshops who became fast friends. For the sake of this story, let’s call them: Josie, Henry and Gary. In each workshop we listened to a new piece of instrumental music and illustrated the stories that we heard by drawing, getting up and dancing, writing poetry, making puppets, or learning art techniques. During this particular class, we were listening to Tanguera by the Diego Schissi Quinteto. This fantastic tango piece is full of excitement, instrument dialogue, and layered rhythmic patterns. When I asked Josie, Henry and Gary what stories they heard while listening, they agreed that it sounded like an epic battle and fight scene in a movie! “Awesome!” I excitedly responded. “Let’s make a stop motion animation of this fight scene!”
They quickly jumped in and said, “No, let’s act it out instead!” So we made lightsabers, shields, exploding pom-poms balls and magic wands for our fierce competition…over Zoom screens! We played the song from beginning to end, acting out the battle with everyone fighting one another, until they all ganged up at the end and defeated me. 😑
It was probably one of the most fun online classes I’ve ever taught! Even though as my family members watched me jumping around the room, making noises, throwing pom-poms at my computer screen, ducking below the camera and waving around a magic (paper) wand, they definitely thought I was losing it…
Quick Links:
Learn more about how we developed our curriculum based on one kid’s musical story.
Check out our children’s workbook, which teaches general music theory and musical storytelling using a story-filled approach.
How can YOU practice creative listening? Read our blog post about it.
Are you an educator interested in bringing musical storytelling to your students? Reach out to us! We would love to work with you and create a custom program that best fits your students’ needs.
