From Sibelius to GarageBand, today’s leading music creation programs blur the line between performance, composition, recording, and notation. This panel discusses how these programs work and suggests ways to employ them in the music classroom.
Moderator: Pete Jutras, assistant professor of piano, University of Georgia and editor of Clavier Companion
Panelists: Amy Burns, music teacher, Far Hills Country Day School, Far Hills, NJ; Estelle Roth, instrumental music teacher, Patrick Henry Elementary School, Arlington, VA; Barbara Freedman, electronic music and audio engineering teacher, Greenwich High School, Greenwich, CT

This presentation was from the TMEA/TI:ME conference in San Antonio on Friday, February 13, 2009.

This trimester, 3rd grade learned about the rainforest in their Science classes. To integrate what they learned in science with music, the students created a song to go with the facts that they learned about the rainforest. The students used Sibelius’s Groovy Jungle to create their music. I divided them into five groups of 3-4 students. They each launched Groovy Jungle from one of the five computers in the music classroom. Together, they decided on and typed in facts about the rainforest. They used melody butterflies, bass line bushes, chord cobwebs, arpeggio flies, rhythm trees, and bonus animals to create wonderful musical works. When they were finished, they presented their works to the rest of the class. They recited their facts and explained why they used the musical elements of melody, rhythm, chords, arpeggios, bass lines, and especially the bonus animals in certain places of the songs. When you view and listen to the pieces, you will see that many of the students coordinated their music with their facts. I hope that you enjoy their wonderful musical creations!

To listen to more of their rainforest compositions, please visit my website at http://www.amymburns.com.

Here is a 30 second excerpt of my 1st graders singing Albrecht's arrangement of "Siyahamba" from our 2008 Holiday Concert. Please enjoy.

Here is a 30 second excerpt of my students singing "Este es La Navidad" from Music K8 performed at our 2008 Holiday Concert. Please enjoy.

Here is a 30 second excerpt of my K-3 students singing "A Holiday Hand Jive" from our 2008 Holiday Concert. Please enjoy.

Here is a 30 second excerpt of my 3rd graders playing "Angel Band" on the recorders at our Holiday Concert. Please enjoy.

Podcasting in the Elementary Music Classroom - presented at the TI:ME NJ Conference on October 22, 2008. Unfortunately, it cuts off after 35 minutes.

This is the Technology for Music Teachers at MSU Course Podcast.

Here are my Kindergartners singing "3 Black Bats"...another nice song for a Halloween Parade.

Here is another installment of my Kindergartners singing one of their Halloween songs. This one is titled "Do You Know."

Please enjoy.

5 Little Pumpkins

Here are my Kindergartners singing "5 Little Pumpkins." Please enjoy!

The students in second grade learned about the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). We read a book titled Ludwig van Beethoven by Louis Sabin. We then listened and moved to his music. Finally, we watched Beethoven Lives Upstairs, a movie about a nine-year old who comes to adore Beethoven and realizes that Beethoven is a musical genius. We then wrote facts about Beethoven’s life and music, recorded ourselves speaking about Beethoven’s life, and picked the music to accompany our podcast. We hope that you will enjoy podcast!

Sincerely,

The Students of 2H

During the winter trimester, we studied Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. We learned about the characters of the story and how the instruments of the orchestra represented each character.

At the end of the trimester, we created this podcast. For this project, we composed new rhythms for each character, performed our rhythms using classroom instruments, told Mrs. Burns the story so that she could narrate it, and drew all of the pictures.

We hope you enjoy our rendition of Peter and the Wolf.

Sincerely,
The Students of 1C

At the end of the school year, I wanted to reinforce the notes B A and G or mi, re, and do in 3rd grade general music. They learned to read and perform the notes B A and G on the treble clef staff through singing, performing on the recorder, and performing on the Korg X50 keyboards that we used when we visited the grades 4-8 music lab. In this project, they were given guidelines on how to create a background accompaniment to the B A and G improv that they would record in GarageBand. They were given a style and created a four-measure intro, an eight-measure accompaniment, and then a four-measure coda. As you can hear, they improvised during the eight-measure accompaniment. This 3rd grader decided to use a synthesizer sound as his improv instrument. Please remember that this is a 3rd grader. He did a nice job.