Rocking Recorder

Laura Brooke explores an unusual combination of instrument and genre.

My name is Laura, I work as a Music Teacher at a Primary School in Harare, Zimbabwe. I conducted a student questionnaire and I was surprised to learn from one of our Grade 2 students that they had an interest in Rock music. This student’s feedback gave me the intention to look at the genre of Rock music in our next Music Assembly. I had just recently acquired my old electric guitar that I had brought back to Zimbabwe from the UK. I thought it would be fun to surprise the school by bringing it in.

Last year our school received a wonderful donation of recorders from Drums for Schools in the UK. Before, I was teaching the recorder to a whole school of sixty children with only 1 recorder available. Thanks to Drums for Schools it meant a whole class now have access to their own instrument. My aim is to teach the recorder to more students and this is all thanks to the generosity of Drums for Schools. I wanted to act on this child expressing their interest in Rock music and combine it with learning the recorder, to open student’s minds on the possibility of playing more contemporary genres on traditional instruments.

In Assembly I played a recording of Eye of the Tiger by Survivor as it is considered an iconic rock song. I asked students to close their eyes, open their ears and just listen. After we listened to the recording, I asked all of the student’s questions about what they had heard. For example, what was the animal mentioned in the song? What instruments did you hear? One student put up their hand and said they heard drums, another said they heard a guitar. I asked if anyone knew what kind of guitar was playing in the song. Another student answered that it was an electric guitar and they could identify the track as Rock music. As a surprise, I had brought my own electric guitar from home to show to the school. The reaction was one of excitement as I’m sure that most of these students had never seen an electric guitar up close before.

I feel it is really important to give students access to as many different instruments and songs as possible to ignite a student’s passion for music. One of the challenges with living in Zimbabwe is accessibility. I selected a couple of students to stand at the front and invited them to strum the electric guitar as I worked the chords. As a whole school we sang a couple of our usual school songs using the electric guitar.

The next part of the lesson was using the recorder. As a group we revisited the notes B-A-G that we had learned previously. One of the Grade 2 students recalled all of these notes and was rewarded by being invited to the front to play the recorder. The student successfully managed to play B on the recorder, they needed some assistance sounding the notes A and G but they managed to produce these too which I hope gave the student a boost of confidence.

I then played the tune of The Eye of the Tiger on the recorder and asked the students to identify the song which was the recording we had heard at the beginning. I said how I would like to teach everyone to play this rock song on the recorder using BAG. Altogether students were asked to identify what fingers I was using to make each note, e.g. the first finger down is the note B. The notes for the song were written out on a whiteboard which goes like this B, BAB, BAB, BAG.

When you think of Rock music you don’t often think of the recorder. My aim for this lesson was to show that all music is within our reach. That music can be open to interpretation, it is open for experimentation, it is flexible and it is playful at all levels and right at our fingertips.