I had NOT heard about these — but I just purchased the songbook (& CD) on the human body! (I start teaching a course on lungs next week...)
I reflect, sometimes, that in elementary school our twice-a-week music class included a lot of traditional folk melodies. "Old Susana", "Home on the Range", "Big Rock Candy Mountain"... Those feel now like the tail-end bits of a dying educational culture, which is now (almost) totally replaced by, gosh, I don't know even how to characterize the meaningless crap my kids learned at their elementary school, before we were able to start homeschooling them.
I encourage anyone interested to follow Timothy's link, and click on the sample of the song "Invertebrates". A song like this is, necessarily, fairly superficial knowledge — but of topics that few ADULTS even know about. It's wonderfully propaedeutic — a fancy word that means "helpful for preparing the way for deeper learning". It reminds me of some of the best "They Might Be Giants" songs from their album "Here Comes Science" — like "The Sun is a Mass..."
In fact, this whole thing warrants another pattern. Thanks!
Very amused your elementary school choir sang "Big Rock Candy Mountain" which our nearly 4yo loves too. But did they bowdlerize "and the little streams of alcohol come trickling down the rocks"?
There’s a big puzzle piece that I think needs to be added in here.
We connect deeply to music primarily when we’re deeply familiar with the style:
— As far as I know, most teenagers’ music tastes expand out something like this. They fall for a simple, catchy song. Then they fall for a handful of songs by that same artist. Then they fall for that artist’s whole album. Then they finally fall for a couple of similar artists. Our music tastes naturally expand through intense exposure to subgenres, not through the random sampling of great songs.
— One of the main things that I did in music class in primary school was listen to traditional music from cultures all across the world. I didn’t have a good grasp of those styles. It felt boring and incomprehensible. Only when we worked for a long time practicing one specific style (we did 2 years of some type of African drumming) did one of those styles sink in.
— I went to Catholic school. We were frequently exposed to a very simple kind of Christian music during school assemblies. Was it good music? Probably not. But that didn’t matter. We knew our corny Christian music well. And we sang our hearts out to our corny Christian music.
If we were to play a random great song each week — the Beatles, then ABBA, then Louis Armstrong — most kids would find most songs incomprehensible/boring. It’d be like spending one week on algebra, then the next on calculus, then the next on trigonometry, never diving into any area enough to grasp it properly.
So I think this idea would work most effectively if we focused in on one subgenre of music each semester. Give the kids a chance to really get a feel for the style they’re listening to/playing with.
Bring in intense exposure to subgenres (so as to help kids become familiar with the style of a song): a powerful point! And your analogy to jumping between random math subjects is convincing.
My initial worry is that if we limited ourselves to one subgenre per semester, we'd ultimately limit the diversity of songs that kids were exposed to. But maybe this is absolutely worth it. Maybe there are other ways to bring these together, too. I'll start thinking about this — thanks!
Thinking about it a little more, perhaps 'sticking to the same subgenre for a semester' is heavier-handed than needed.
I think the broader principle behind what I'm saying is that it's ideal for a new song to be one step away from *something* that the kids already know/love/understand/enthusiastically sing.
This could still leave a lot of room for variety. Perhaps one week you do a John Lennon song, if you're a later year class who's already enthusiastically sung the Beatles before. Perhaps the next week you do one of a wide variety of Christian rock songs, if you're a Christian school that plays a lot of that stuff. Or perhaps a new nursery rhyme or silly song, if you're a kindergarden class. Or perhaps a great song by a classic artist who happened to have one song blow up on Tik Tok. Or a related song by a frequent collaborator of an artist you've already covered.
The music world could come to feel bigger and bigger for the students, like a tree with roots that grow ever outwards in unpredictable directions.
(This tree analogy is different to what I picture working best for something like history, which really doesn't need to grow from a 'base' of familiarity to seem awesome. I think Egan's right that it would be absolutely fascinating for kids to hear wildly different stories each week from all around the world. Music just happens to have an added layer of complexity to figure out.)
Music has been unfortunately de-amateured, and that makes it hard to be playful with it. Singing is expected to be skilled, not a way of exploring the music. I was very grateful to my voice teacher who corrected a wrong note but also told me *why* I was going wrong... "He's not giving you that note yet, you're trying to resolve it too early." Making a mistake was an encounter with the choices the craftsman had made.
Kapilow's exploration of the Great American Songbook comes with a lot of examples (with sheet music and a youtube playlist) where he makes classic songs *worse* and shows how the artist made an unexpected choice and how it serves the song. I think it's a great skill for students to have... they can try to grapple with genius by reproducing it badly (trying to fit different words to the rhythm, etc) and their struggle is informative, not a stop sign for learning.
...can I point out that, among the many things I imagined doing with music, I somehow missed SINGING it?
Okay, so now I'm intrigued: how might singing it together be integrated into the class? I mean, churches & synagogues do this just fine, so maybe just making "SING IT TOGETHER!" is enough, and it'd be foolish to complicate it. But, if we WANTED to go further...
I understand that Waldorf teachers get trained in singing, and in how to teach kids to sing. I love this, even as I understand that adding "music lessons" to teacher training makes it harder to pull off. I wonder, with the wonders of the internet and such, if there's a little bit of training that could go a long way toward helping teachers sing well (or well-ish-ly), and help kids do the same.
"It's the best program you've never heard of, based on quick and simple lessons that build facility with intonation, sight reading, notation, composition, and conducting, leading to fluency with Gregorian chant. Trained vocalists and musicians at the conference were all saying, 'I wish I'd had this as a kid!'"
Had me at "Gregorian chant"! I'll give this a careful read; thank you!
Just wanted to share a couple paid musical resources for homeschoolers that you may or may not know about.
1) SQUILT Music (https://www.squiltmusic.com/) has monthly listening calendars based on themes. Unfortunately, it looks like you have to subscribe to even see the back catalog, but our family has subscribed in the past and months have themes like jazz, folk tunes, musicals, opera, specific countries, and of course, classical artists, which is their bread and butter. This might be a great resource for selecting songs as the lady who runs it, Mary Prather, has already put a lot of thought into curating her choices.
2) Classical Conversations is well-known for their songs to help kids learn history (and multiplication tables by skip-counting). This will definitely appeal more to Christian homeschoolers, though there are only a few religious references within the songs. It definitely has a Christian perspective, but I find their timeline song to be particularly useful. The math songs use famous tunes, but the history music I believe is original compositions. There is also a lady on YouTube (CC Happy Mom) who used the Classical Conversations curricula to create a series of geography songs based on real songs.
3) Beethoven's Wig albums are a Weird Al-esque interpretation of classical music. Rarely educational, but it makes classical songs fun, especially for younger kids. It definitely helps them recognize famous classical music in other contexts.
Just listened to Beethoven’s Wig for the first time — the artist (Richard Perlmutter) has a good YouTube channel (and, as you know, I’m ALL about the YouTube channels). For anyone who’s interested, here’s a taste:
Makes me recognize how much having lyrics to focus on is helpful in paying attention to music. And sets a good example to the kids: can you make your own lyrics that are this good?
Oh! And the Classical Conversations timeline song is AMAZING. It has its limits (which are pretty apparent), but listening to it again right now, my daughter joined me. We non-young-earthers really need to get our act together to produce something at LEAST as good.
I’ll write a post about it in the future, but if anyone else is interested now:
I love this and would like to try it (homeschooling, 2 young girls). The main barrier for me is knowing how to generate a good song list, as somebody who wasn't exposed much to this kind of thing. I'd appreciate any specific pointers, but even more so a strategy for how to go about this :)
Hmm... I think that the trick for dipping our toes in (those of us who homeschool) might be to begin with a song we particularly like, and think our particular kids wouldn't instantly recoil from!
As some of us try this, please share how it went...
I hired my fifteen-year-old son (a jazz musician, composer, and aspiring music educator) to do a lesson plan for "Another Brick in the Wall." Let me know if you'd like to sponsor more!
This is more about science and less about the songs themselves, but are you familiar with Lyrical Life Science? I was homeschooled, and I grew up with books like these in elementary school. I still remember some of the lyrics: https://www.christianbook.com/lyrical-life-science-1-with/9780974163543/pd/59775.
The tunes are mostly taken from classic folk melodies, though I'm not sure how many kids would recognize them these days.
I had NOT heard about these — but I just purchased the songbook (& CD) on the human body! (I start teaching a course on lungs next week...)
I reflect, sometimes, that in elementary school our twice-a-week music class included a lot of traditional folk melodies. "Old Susana", "Home on the Range", "Big Rock Candy Mountain"... Those feel now like the tail-end bits of a dying educational culture, which is now (almost) totally replaced by, gosh, I don't know even how to characterize the meaningless crap my kids learned at their elementary school, before we were able to start homeschooling them.
I encourage anyone interested to follow Timothy's link, and click on the sample of the song "Invertebrates". A song like this is, necessarily, fairly superficial knowledge — but of topics that few ADULTS even know about. It's wonderfully propaedeutic — a fancy word that means "helpful for preparing the way for deeper learning". It reminds me of some of the best "They Might Be Giants" songs from their album "Here Comes Science" — like "The Sun is a Mass..."
In fact, this whole thing warrants another pattern. Thanks!
Very amused your elementary school choir sang "Big Rock Candy Mountain" which our nearly 4yo loves too. But did they bowdlerize "and the little streams of alcohol come trickling down the rocks"?
There’s a big puzzle piece that I think needs to be added in here.
We connect deeply to music primarily when we’re deeply familiar with the style:
— As far as I know, most teenagers’ music tastes expand out something like this. They fall for a simple, catchy song. Then they fall for a handful of songs by that same artist. Then they fall for that artist’s whole album. Then they finally fall for a couple of similar artists. Our music tastes naturally expand through intense exposure to subgenres, not through the random sampling of great songs.
— One of the main things that I did in music class in primary school was listen to traditional music from cultures all across the world. I didn’t have a good grasp of those styles. It felt boring and incomprehensible. Only when we worked for a long time practicing one specific style (we did 2 years of some type of African drumming) did one of those styles sink in.
— I went to Catholic school. We were frequently exposed to a very simple kind of Christian music during school assemblies. Was it good music? Probably not. But that didn’t matter. We knew our corny Christian music well. And we sang our hearts out to our corny Christian music.
If we were to play a random great song each week — the Beatles, then ABBA, then Louis Armstrong — most kids would find most songs incomprehensible/boring. It’d be like spending one week on algebra, then the next on calculus, then the next on trigonometry, never diving into any area enough to grasp it properly.
So I think this idea would work most effectively if we focused in on one subgenre of music each semester. Give the kids a chance to really get a feel for the style they’re listening to/playing with.
Bring in intense exposure to subgenres (so as to help kids become familiar with the style of a song): a powerful point! And your analogy to jumping between random math subjects is convincing.
My initial worry is that if we limited ourselves to one subgenre per semester, we'd ultimately limit the diversity of songs that kids were exposed to. But maybe this is absolutely worth it. Maybe there are other ways to bring these together, too. I'll start thinking about this — thanks!
Thinking about it a little more, perhaps 'sticking to the same subgenre for a semester' is heavier-handed than needed.
I think the broader principle behind what I'm saying is that it's ideal for a new song to be one step away from *something* that the kids already know/love/understand/enthusiastically sing.
This could still leave a lot of room for variety. Perhaps one week you do a John Lennon song, if you're a later year class who's already enthusiastically sung the Beatles before. Perhaps the next week you do one of a wide variety of Christian rock songs, if you're a Christian school that plays a lot of that stuff. Or perhaps a new nursery rhyme or silly song, if you're a kindergarden class. Or perhaps a great song by a classic artist who happened to have one song blow up on Tik Tok. Or a related song by a frequent collaborator of an artist you've already covered.
The music world could come to feel bigger and bigger for the students, like a tree with roots that grow ever outwards in unpredictable directions.
(This tree analogy is different to what I picture working best for something like history, which really doesn't need to grow from a 'base' of familiarity to seem awesome. I think Egan's right that it would be absolutely fascinating for kids to hear wildly different stories each week from all around the world. Music just happens to have an added layer of complexity to figure out.)
Two books I'd recommend:
Sondheim's Finishing the Hat / Look I Made a Hat (https://amzn.to/3uEivCh)
But even more strongly, Rob Kapilow's Listening For America (https://amzn.to/46BfyiT)
Music has been unfortunately de-amateured, and that makes it hard to be playful with it. Singing is expected to be skilled, not a way of exploring the music. I was very grateful to my voice teacher who corrected a wrong note but also told me *why* I was going wrong... "He's not giving you that note yet, you're trying to resolve it too early." Making a mistake was an encounter with the choices the craftsman had made.
Kapilow's exploration of the Great American Songbook comes with a lot of examples (with sheet music and a youtube playlist) where he makes classic songs *worse* and shows how the artist made an unexpected choice and how it serves the song. I think it's a great skill for students to have... they can try to grapple with genius by reproducing it badly (trying to fit different words to the rhythm, etc) and their struggle is informative, not a stop sign for learning.
...can I point out that, among the many things I imagined doing with music, I somehow missed SINGING it?
Okay, so now I'm intrigued: how might singing it together be integrated into the class? I mean, churches & synagogues do this just fine, so maybe just making "SING IT TOGETHER!" is enough, and it'd be foolish to complicate it. But, if we WANTED to go further...
I understand that Waldorf teachers get trained in singing, and in how to teach kids to sing. I love this, even as I understand that adding "music lessons" to teacher training makes it harder to pull off. I wonder, with the wonders of the internet and such, if there's a little bit of training that could go a long way toward helping teachers sing well (or well-ish-ly), and help kids do the same.
I don't know anything about the Ward method except that a friend I trust really respects it, so that's where I'd start investigating: https://darwincatholic.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-change-is-as-good-as-rest.html
From the post:
"It's the best program you've never heard of, based on quick and simple lessons that build facility with intonation, sight reading, notation, composition, and conducting, leading to fluency with Gregorian chant. Trained vocalists and musicians at the conference were all saying, 'I wish I'd had this as a kid!'"
Had me at "Gregorian chant"! I'll give this a careful read; thank you!
Excellent, now I can outsource homeschooling research to you and await 10k words ;)
Just wanted to share a couple paid musical resources for homeschoolers that you may or may not know about.
1) SQUILT Music (https://www.squiltmusic.com/) has monthly listening calendars based on themes. Unfortunately, it looks like you have to subscribe to even see the back catalog, but our family has subscribed in the past and months have themes like jazz, folk tunes, musicals, opera, specific countries, and of course, classical artists, which is their bread and butter. This might be a great resource for selecting songs as the lady who runs it, Mary Prather, has already put a lot of thought into curating her choices.
2) Classical Conversations is well-known for their songs to help kids learn history (and multiplication tables by skip-counting). This will definitely appeal more to Christian homeschoolers, though there are only a few religious references within the songs. It definitely has a Christian perspective, but I find their timeline song to be particularly useful. The math songs use famous tunes, but the history music I believe is original compositions. There is also a lady on YouTube (CC Happy Mom) who used the Classical Conversations curricula to create a series of geography songs based on real songs.
3) Beethoven's Wig albums are a Weird Al-esque interpretation of classical music. Rarely educational, but it makes classical songs fun, especially for younger kids. It definitely helps them recognize famous classical music in other contexts.
Just listened to Beethoven’s Wig for the first time — the artist (Richard Perlmutter) has a good YouTube channel (and, as you know, I’m ALL about the YouTube channels). For anyone who’s interested, here’s a taste:
https://youtu.be/v32Budsoin8?si=gt8rG8jw78Z3GGwo
Makes me recognize how much having lyrics to focus on is helpful in paying attention to music. And sets a good example to the kids: can you make your own lyrics that are this good?
Oh! And the Classical Conversations timeline song is AMAZING. It has its limits (which are pretty apparent), but listening to it again right now, my daughter joined me. We non-young-earthers really need to get our act together to produce something at LEAST as good.
I’ll write a post about it in the future, but if anyone else is interested now:
https://youtu.be/gh6VjqYHqvI?si=vfdvP-QlWm3I62cJ
I love this and would like to try it (homeschooling, 2 young girls). The main barrier for me is knowing how to generate a good song list, as somebody who wasn't exposed much to this kind of thing. I'd appreciate any specific pointers, but even more so a strategy for how to go about this :)
Hmm... I think that the trick for dipping our toes in (those of us who homeschool) might be to begin with a song we particularly like, and think our particular kids wouldn't instantly recoil from!
As some of us try this, please share how it went...
> Someone in our community could make a mock-up of this [A Song a Week] for one song
DONE: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cZf_LvrQjQQx1kNe78opJr9Kl1XVLlyfJpnSBh-aQfw/edit?usp=sharing
I hired my fifteen-year-old son (a jazz musician, composer, and aspiring music educator) to do a lesson plan for "Another Brick in the Wall." Let me know if you'd like to sponsor more!