Creating Affective Lessons

1. Creating Affective Lessons

2. Emotional and intellectual connections to the music are what made us all passionate about music and are a reason we chose to teach music. We want our students to experience these musical “highs”. • Creating connections to the music makes rehearsals more meaningful to students.

3. Students perform better when they make connections to the music. • Affective responses are often emotional, but can also take on the form of values, opinions, desires, personal knowledge, or self awareness.

4. Affective outcomes are often long-range goals for our music students because it takes time to develop appreciation, inspiration, or sensitivity.

5. Categories of Affective Outcomes: The Composer’s Craft The Meaningful Performance Building Community Personal Knowledge

6. From the Book “Shaping Sound Musicians” – Patti O’Toole The Composer’s Craft Students analyze the composition in terms of its affect and draw conclusions about its expressive content based on the composers compositional choices.

7. Meaningful Performance Just as the composer makes choices that create emotional content inherent in the piece itself, performers enhance (or detract from) that emotional content.

8. Building the Community Sometimes a piece will lend itself to an outcome that enhances the group identity, builds a stronger sense of teamwork, promotes pride, creates an atmosphere of trust, openness, or sensitivity to others.

9. Building the Community Examples: Students will analyze the development section of the symphony as an analogy of a group discussion. Students will explore issues of group identity, nationalism, and patriotism, both healthy and unhealthy.

10. Students will create new group goals based on the previous concert performance. Through musical improvisation, students will explore the tension between process and product in a performing group. Students will write text and melody for a band “Alma Mater” based on their feelings about and desires for the band.

11. Personal Knowledge By giving students a chance to explore their own personal connections with the music they are performing, they are able to explore aspects of themselves that are practically never dealt with in school but can influence their values and feelings in a meaningful way.

12. Affective Outcomes for: “A Prehistoric Suite” by Paul Jennings Heart of this piece: The heart of A Prehistoric Suite is its creative use of musical devices to describe a particular dinosaur or pair of dinosaurs and spark the imagination of the listener.

13. Personal Knowledge Students will identify their new learning and will express an informed opinion about the music based on this new knowledge. Strategies: • What have you learned about music from this piece that you didn’t know before we began studying it? • Discuss program music versus concrete music. Play excerpts of examples of each. Do you prefer music that is programmatic or concrete (music with no non-musical influence)? Why? • If you were composing this piece how what musical devices would you use that Paul Jennings uses? How would you portray each dinosaur differently in your composition? Why?

14. Assessment Write a short composition for your instrument that describes a dinosaur of your choice. Perform the composition for the class and be prepared to answer questions about musical choices you made to describe your dinosaur.

15. Affective Outcomes for “Portrait of a Clown” by Frank Ticheli Heart of this piece: The heart of Portrait of a Clown is not a single element, but the idea of contrast and surprise.Ticheli does this with rhythm, texture and timbre, phrasing, compositional devices and the use of the lydian scale.

16. Composer’s Craft Students will analyze the piece, referring to form and phrasing, and describe how the composer provides unity and variety. Strategies: • Discuss contrast - what is it? - where do we find it outside of class? Where do we see it in our music? • How does the composer use contrast to reflect the musical title? What makes this piece a portrait? Why did composer use that title? What does the title say about the music.

17. Meaningful Performance Students will describe how expectation and surprise in music arouse our emotion. The form of this piece ABA and the melody/harmony provide 2 distinct musical emotions. Strategies: • Tell a story from your own personal experience, about a surprise in your life. Was it joyful or sad? both? What is Portrait of a Clown reminds you of that surprise? • Tell a story from your imagination about a surprise. Think of this story as a movie. What music will you use to help tell your story? Would Portrait of a Clown work? why or why not?

18. Assessment Affective assessment can be handled in several ways. Portfolios of work, self-evaluation, journaling and rubrics are some of the tools you can use. Excerpted from Portrait of a Clown Teaching Plan – Laura Sinberg, Wisconsin CMP Team Member

19. October by Eric Whitacre The Heart: The heart of Octoberis the simple, Romantic melodies enriched by the intentional, intricate weaving of timbral colors and arched phrases uncovering the sentimental soul of the season ultimately experienced through the performance.

20. Composer’s Craft Students will identify, analyze and interpret the differing compositional techniques used by the composer to create his intention for the performance. Strategies: • Explore and develop a purpose for using • One measure phrasing • Differing meters • “Falling” scales • Suspensions • Solo, chamber, and full ensemble sections • Staggered entrances/canon • Trills • Harmonies • Timbral choices

21. Meaningful Performance Students will explore the nuances of Romantic sentiment to embody the ebb and flow within the performance. Strategies: • Discover and relate lyrical literary elements from Robert Frost’s poem, October, and William Cullen Bryant’s poem, October, to the lyrically arched phrasing in Whitacre’s October • Relate the differing tempi, pauses, and emphasis performed in the lyrical reading of poetry to the performance of phrasing within the composition

22. Building Community Students will compare and contrast each individual’s role in the differing settings we encounter in life with the differing textures in the composition. Strategies: • Develop everyday life scenarios reminiscent of differing sections in the work • Soloist with minimal accompaniment • Chamber wind sections • Full ensemble settings • Within the developed scenarios, determine and understand the individuals who should be more prominent and those who accompany the task and/or may step into more prominence for a short time then return

23. Personal Knowledge Students will express personal experiences of quiet, sentimental beauty revealing their own relationships with the composition. Strategies: • Analyze and discuss musical elements within October that would indicate quiet, sentimental beauty • Create individual or small group projects reflective of quiet, sentimental beauty • Develop periodic journal entries

24. Affective Outcomes for “St. James Infirmary” arr. Tom Davis Heart of the Piece: This arrangement of St. James Infirmary has a wonderful mixture of textures that take the performer on a musical journey back to New Orleans at the turn of the century.

25. The Composer’s Craft Students will analyze and categorize the compositional devices that create the various “atmospheres” in St. James Infirmary. The students will then evaluate their expressive impact in the piece. For Example: Opening theme in trombones – “testifying” Triplet based drumming with mallets – “African Drumming” Aleatoric sounds in the piano and guitar – “Other worldly”, “purgatory” Plunger muted trumpet solo – “Crying”, very vocal in Nature. Call and response in the ensemble sections – “Prayer Meeting”, “Wake”

26. The Meaningful Performance Students will analyze expressive elements of the jazz language (glissando, scoop, growl, use of mutes, etc.) and evaluate whether these elements make the composition more expressive and communicative. • Listen to numerous recordings of St. James Infirmary and discuss what expressive elements are used and why.

27. Building the Community Students will analyze jazz improvisation as an analogy for a group discussion. • Define what elements are needed for a successful group discussion. (Lunch Room, Committee Meeting, etc.) • Connect these elements to aspects of a jazz performance. • Listen to various jazz performances and determine how successfully the performance depicts a group discussion.

28. Personal Knowledge: Students will relate their own experiences of loss or grief to St. James Infirmary. The text/story of the piece is the story of loss and death. • Read, analyze, and discuss the lyrics for the folk song, St. James Infirmary. • Journal

29. The CMP Model Music Selection Analysis Outcomes Strategies Assessment