Save Our Music – Keeping Music Education Alive in Our Schools
For the next couple of weeks, Arts Commons blog will be posting stories speaking to performing artists in Calgary about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their lives, and how they are continuing to create art in a time when the sharing of the performing arts in its usual form is not possible. We will examine the essential role that the arts plays in our lives, and look at what the future might hold.
You can also check out previous installments:
Performing Art in Strange Times
Performing in a Time of Performancelessnes
A Musician’s Pandemic Awakening
Read time: Under 4 minutes
In a couple of weeks students will return, for the first time in six months, to their classrooms across Alberta. Teachers are having to confront a very different, and often frightening reality of teaching in a completely new head space, one that involves, masks, frequent sanitation, and the elimination of high-risk activities such as singing.
A staple of most school music programs, the voice is an instrument that every student takes with them everywhere, making it infinitely accessible. Removing it as a teaching tool is forcing music teachers to think creatively about how to continue to inspire and teach musical art forms.
Samantha Whelan is a professional musician and long-time teaching musician. She’s worked with schools across Alberta as an artist-in-residence and embarked on larger arts education projects with the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. In her career, she’s taught ages from 2 years old to 92 years old, and everything in between.
Her most recent labour of love, "Wandering with Wonder", funded by Canada Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, is an immersive outdoor musical storytelling experience, created in collaboration with musicians from across Canada including jazz pianist Chris Andrew, singer-songwriter Matt Epp and her two cross-cultural music teaching partners with the NAC , Sherryl Sewepagaham and Walter MacDonald White Bear. It was originally slated to premiere this season, at the Leighton Art Centre, with a 150-person choir, but COVID-19 has made it necessary to postpone it for a year, and Samantha is facing the reality that her original vision will never come to fruition.
“It’s been epic. There’s lots of grieving that happened when it was first cancelled,” says Samantha. “Performed outside, 150 people were supposed to come out of the forest and surround the audience with singing. I’ve had to entirely revision what that’s going to look like.” Working with Tim Shantz, Artistic Director of Luminous Voices choir in Calgary, Samantha now plans to put out a call to as many youth singers as want to participate to record their voices and add them to the live performance.
“So, what was originally a 150-person choir prior to COVID could potentially be in the thousands,” says Samantha. When you take these same questions into a classroom setting, you encounter a whole new set of roadblocks, but Samantha has already begun to tackle them.
“The teacher can’t sing, and the kids can’t sing back, but they can hum. Especially when you’re trying to teach basic music technique, like matching pitch, humming is a great tool,” says Samantha. “As a virtual teacher, I’m going to have to restructure how I teach. There will have to be a lot of body percussion and a lot of listening.”
Listening might not sound exciting on the surface but it’s the beginning of all music. It starts with listening.
“One way that I’ve taught jazz to young kids is to teach the students to recognize the chord changes,” says Samantha. “That’s really sophisticated listening. I work with the kids with xylophones and teach
them improvisation as well as chord changes. We worked with three basic chords, and I asked them to put their hand up when the chord changed. Over time they could hear and identify those changes, something that even some university students have a hard time with. We’re really having to be creative with the tools we have, and it’s important to remember the teaching tools that we have.”
Another teaching tool for music that Samantha has taught successfully in the past is conducting. Even a kindergarten student can learn the basics of conducting, and that skill can be taught all the way up to grade 12 with more complex and emotive conducting.
“They can be conducting the New York Philharmonic. Music moves in twos, threes, and fours, and that’s it. For little guys, if all we teach them is that music moves in twos, threes, and fours, that’s extraordinary learning.”
Some institutions are looking at new creative ways to teach and share music, expanding the definition of virtual to something that builds relationships and encourages meaningful interaction. The Festival of Sound, based in Parry Sound, Ontario, was forced to cancel their festival this year, but they’re still keen to continue with their artist-in-residence program which works with ten different schools to create unique music learning opportunities for students. Rather than shrink from it, their subject matter this year fully acknowledges the trauma of the COVID-19 experience and will tell the story of how teachers’ lives have changed through an A-B-A soundscape created by the students.
“This is a time in history that we’ll look back on as a pivotal moment of transformation. And I’ll be able to tell you in a year whether these techniques have been successful or didn’t work at all,” says Samantha. “There is something about live art that is so healing. And we will have profound moments of beauty and transformation in those spaces when we can gather again.”
