Finding a Musical Path

The violin is a complex instrument. We have to do one thing with one hand, while doing a completely different thing with the other. We have no frets to help with pitching, holding the instrument comfortably is a challenge and holding the bow with any semblance of flexibility is the work of many months. On top of all this, we may be required to read and interpret visual symbols! Perhaps it is no surprise therefore that the most common reaction to a whole class violin lesson from support staff is I’m off to the other side of the playing field! Enticing these colleagues back by achieving a beautiful sound is hard enough in a one to one situation, but when we are teaching 30 Year Four children, the likelihood of aural and postural anarchy racks up exponentially. How, therefore, can we ensure that, rather than frustrating and disfiguring a generation of potential string players, we inspire them to take up this wonderful instrument? How can we facilitate a musical experience for everybody?

I have been wrestling with this question for the last eight years, and my answer relies on the use of song as the primary medium of music making. The more I focus on the challenges of technique, the fewer tunes we sing and play; the fewer tunes we sing and play, the less interested the children become. Moreover, spending time purely on technique does not necessarily lead to any improvement in playing when that time is spent outside of music making itself. To solve these issues, I have developed a method by which active technique is embedded in music making and listening – a means to an end rather than an end in itself, allowing us to aspire to ‘fluency, first and last’ (Swanwick, 1999).

Faced with the dilemma of teaching this difficult instrument to a whole class, I began by asking myself two fundamental questions; 1. Where does music start for children? 2. What do the children want to do in their music lessons?

From these two questions came two answers: singing is the essential starting place, and actively making music is what children want. These answers may sound obvious, but all too often I find myself forgetting such basic principles. We can all sing, but we cannot all play the violin; therefore, let us begin with the common denominator. Playing the violin, that most melodious of instruments, begins with singing. The playing arises from the singing, thereby giving the whole process a sense of growth, with melody at its core. This relies on the teacher being musical; being willing to sing and play with the children. It also relies on having a clear vision of the pace and structure of lessons so that they are not bogged down with talk and dry technical demonstration.

My termly series of whole class violin consists of ten fifty minute lessons. Of these, eight are practice sessions, the ninth is a dress rehearsal and the tenth is a concert. In those eight lessons, I aim to master four songs, accompanied by myself on the keyboard. The children sing each song and learn a pattern on their instrument to accompany the singing.

For example, we learn the first verse, chorus and middle-eight of With A Little Help From My Friends by The Beatles. I sing to my own accompaniment and they copy the vocal line. We work for some time on the quality of the singing before we even pick up an instrument. We then learn patterns (initially using the four open string notes of G, D, A and E) to accompany those three sections. The patterns may be very easy (bowing on a single string) or more complex (taking us over two, three or four strings). I demonstrate the absolute basics of the instrument (recognising left from right, posture, drawing the bow across the string, getting from one string to another) and then the children have time both in private practice (five minutes in their own time to try things out) or all together practice (trying it as a team). Private and team time is an important balance to strike. On the one hand, playing music in a band is a team activity, which requires empathy and patience. On the other, large groups of young children have limited reserves of both and need private time in order to discover and experiment. During together time the pattern of musical activity is thus; sing the song (holding our violins by our sides in first position); sing the note pattern that we are about to play; violins onto shoulders (second position); play the pattern (while I sing and play keyboard over the top). This work is entirely aural; it is a mantra of Shinichi Suzuki that attention to score reading in early instrumental learning weakens the difficult kinaesthetic awareness needed to master arm and finger control. Louis Armstrong put it more succinctly; when asked whether he read music his answer was ‘Yes, but not enough to hurt my playing’. (Woody 2012 p. 83). Young children need to learn musical fluency before musical literacy in the same way that they learn to speak before they learn to read. Indeed, throughout the ten lessons, there is no score reading at all. There is always time later, in one to one lessons, to develop reading skills.

The pace of these activities is fast and I do not allow children time to dwell on feelings of I can’t do it. They all get there in the end, with varying degrees of success. In order to help with the quality of sound that we produce as a team there are two other activities of a technical nature. This first I call the Beautiful D Competition. The aim is to hear thirty deep, long and sonorous Ds, and then to invite individuals to pit their Ds against each other. This allows the children to focus on tone production. The second has become known as the Spider Game. The children crawl up the bow stick with their fingers tips, accompanied by recorded music, and when the music stops they must demonstrate their bow hold to me...a form of musical hand-statues. With both games, I am unashamedly wedded to handing out house points for success! Obviously, every instrument requires a different set of games to facilitate technique, but the important common factor is that they happen within, a musical framework...listening or doing is happening as the technique is practised, and the necessity for time-consuming explanation is minimal.

Through these simple ideas, we are able to present a concert of singing and playing within ten weeks. The mantra that guides me throughout is that the techniques of music are not the music itself. I do teach technique (for example, we discuss the similarities between Andy Murray developing his forehand and us developing our bow stroke), but musicality comes first. Andy Murray repeats his strokes endlessly in practice because he wants to express himself on the tennis court. Likewise, we repeat our spider game, in the context of our desire to make beautiful Ds. If musical behaviour is the interplay between sound, action and symbol (McPherson, G and Gabrielsson, E, 2002), then we, as teachers of young children, have to get our priorities right. As children grapple with the demands of the violin, they demonstrate to me that they want to produce sound through action. The symbolisation of their work holds little interest for them at this early stage. By stripping back the notational and technical demands of complex orchestral instruments and focussing on melody and simple patterns through the medium of song, we can keep lessons musical, thereby exciting children’s natural sense of musicality. _________________________________________________________________

Kip Pratt is a lecturer in music education at The University Of Plymouth, and a teacher of music in South Devon schools.