| CONTENTS Introduction
WTH = W. Thomas Huyck CM = Christopher Moore |
16 - Music FundamentalsWTH: There's an item here in October of '72 about your beginning a music fundamentals course in the Urban Gateways choruses and the Ray School Music Workshop, and you mention having a goal that every member of the choir be able to read music. CM: We had been pecking at musicianship -- at formal music skill building beyond the skills for choral singing. I wrote an article back in the 1950's -- in the late 1950's -- suggesting that the Kodaly approach was the way to go and why. But I'd been so busy with so many other things that I had not had a chance to pursue this myself, and we couldn't make a really good start on it. We couldn't even really get into a discussion about it until we reached the point that we had the makings of fulltime staff -- people who could spend some time planning, working on materials, developing a curriculum that we could use. So our first trumpeted formal efforts came in 1972. And we played games with this for the following decade. We really went into high gear when, in 1981, we hired Keith Hampton as one of the full-time music staff. And Keith was a trained Kodaly specialist. That's when we really began to codify what we were doing. But starting in 1972, we were making a systematic effort, and the results of that effort were numbers of kids who could read -- we had kids who could read before because they'd had other instrumental training or because they were bright enough to catch on by being exposed in appropriate fashion to the materials. But we simply were not in the earlier years of the program able to be systematic about it. And there is some tension between the formal skill building and the creating of the excitement which comes, first of all for most kids who use their voice, and the need to back up that vocal prowess with some skills that you really have to work at. It's hard for some of our inner city kids; it's hard for some of our middle class kids who had been exposed to so much that they were sometimes reluctant to settle down and give deliberate, systematic effort to certain activities just because they need to do it. But, of course, we are now very heavily into a fairly deliberate curriculum of rhythm syllables, of hand signals for pitch, vocabulary building and a series of activities in formal music skill building that lead to sight reading competence and a far greater awareness on the part of our younger kids of what the musical enterprise in professional terms is all about. |