Music Education Workshops

Helping students become musically literate is central to the school, community, and church music curriculum. While there is much agreement about why we should teach sight singing and musicianship skills, there is less agreement about how we should teach those skills. Far too often students are taught to be savvy symbol decoders rather than independent literate musicians.

Working from the premise that students learn musical skills in much the same order as they do language skills, participants will explore how we ‘learn’ music through hearing and imitating patterns before reading (translating notation into sound) and writing (translating sound into notation). The pedagogy also includes a sequence of instruction that results in a strong link between sound and notation.

The TAKADIMI rhythm-pedagogy system, a beat-oriented system whose originators see it as evolving from Gordon’s syllables, will be incorporated. The rhythm syllables can easily be adapted to elementary through adult choral and instrumental rehearsals in the church and K-collegiate setting.

To aid in the development of aural (listening) — oral (performing) skills, Dr. Krueger developed a series of sequential vocal pitch exercises and chord progressions, and portrayed them via graphs. Since interval quality and quantity are both visible on the graphs, major, minor, augmented and diminished intervals and chords can easily be seen and then transferred to the staff where only interval quantity is visible.

Specific techniques for developing reading readiness, literacy, audiation, musical memory, and dictation will be addressed. Workshop participants will also be presented with teaching strategies and techniques for integrating and applying literacy skills to appropriate repertoire. Special attention will be given to the development of music literacy curriculum maps and diction maps.

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