How One Kid’s Musical Story Shaped ABI’s Curriculum
A couple of weeks after Art Beyond the Ink was formed, still in the early stages of the pandemic and frustratingly stuck at home, we started a podcast called “Inklings: Stories by Students.” Though it only lasted a couple of episodes, Inklings interviewed kids and the stories they heard within a piece of music. In the second episode, we spoke to Shigi, a 9-year-old who used to study flute with me. Emmalie played him Paquito D’Rivera’s solo clarinet piece, Lecuonerías from “The Cape Cod Files.”
Shigi came up with a hysterical and elaborate tale about a trickster who was trapped in a castle for decades. He planned his escape by hiding fake treasure all around the castle for others to look for, and when they found it, he chased them around the castle until he trapped them in his place and could finally escape! At the end, the trickster yells out, “Ha ha! Tricked you, bye!”
We were so impressed with Shigi’s story that closely followed the emotional arc and nuances of the music, a piece full of taunting clarinet licks and teasing gestures. “How did you come up with this?! What about the music inspired this story?” we asked him. But… he couldn’t give us an answer. Shigi was not a shy child, nor was he unfamiliar with music – he studied the flute for 3 years by this point and had developed a great ear! Yet still, he couldn’t say one thing about why he heard the story he did. Emmalie and I discussed afterwards:
Could it have been from the short articulation that gave the piece a jumping quality?
Was it the fast tempo that then slowed down at the end for a dramatic finish as the trickster walked off?
Maybe it was the wide range of the melody, soaring up high with the excitement of a chase and dipping down low in anticipation as we wait for the trickster’s escape plan?
All of these things – and more – were most probably influencing Shigi’s story, and we realized that this process of explaining why we hear what we do is an important skill in musical storytelling and something that kids (and adults!) struggle with. With this intriguing problem on our hands, we got right to work on its solution and spent the next few months developing and writing a workbook: Hearing and Seeing Musical Stories: The Story-Filled Tool for Understanding What You Hear. The workbook teaches music theory concepts including high and low (pitch), soft and loud (dynamics), fast and slow (tempo), short and long (articulation) and major and minor (tonality) through short stories – because to us everything is better as a story. It even compares listening for these concepts to baking a cake.
Photo credit: Amanda Crommett
It’s been so exciting and rewarding to have used this workbook and method of teaching with over 250 students in NYC and even more exciting to hear young students, most of whom have never studied music, be able to identify musical concepts and how they influence their own stories. We believe that this idea of “creative listening” is useful far beyond music, as the process of listening and expressing musical stories uses the same tools we pull from when listening to others and expressing ourselves.
Emmalie and I are cooking up a new workbook to expand on the first with additional musical concepts, games, art projects and adventures that will hopefully encourage even more kids to listen for stories in everything they hear.
Quick Links:
Learn more about the workbook!
How can you practice creative listening? Read our blog post about it.
Watch Shigi’s podcast episode here.
