Music Rocks Your World
  • Home
  • Ms. Wakeen's Bitmoji Classroom
  • Table of Contents
  • K/1 Concert Practice
  • 2/3 Concert Practice
  • African Folk Tales
  • All Sing
  • Annie - H4/5
  • Artist Alive
  • Beat 4 Peace
  • Body Percussion
  • Carnival of the Animals
  • Composers & Musicians
  • Composer Project
  • Civil Rights Resources
  • Connections
  • Elementary Music Room News
  • Elements of Music
  • For Teachers
  • GarageBand
  • General Music Grade 6
  • Grammy Awards
  • Guitar
  • Hamilton/SOTA I - Little Kids Rock
  • Hmong
  • Instruments of the Orchestra
  • iPad Connections
  • Little Kids Rock Jam Zone
  • Mandalas
  • Middle School Showcase
  • Music Finances
  • Music in the Movies
  • Music Lab Grade 8
  • NOTEFLIGHT: Creativity Corner
  • On-Line Games for Musicians
  • Patriotic Songs
  • Piano
  • Poetry and Music
  • POETRY PROJECT
  • Recorder
  • Rock History
  • This Day in Music
  • Ukulele
  • Virtual Instrument Closet
  • World Drumming
  • World Music
  • 2/3 Portfolios
  • 4/5 Portfolios
  • Listening Room
  • Blog
  • Song Writing/Parody
  • Song Focus
  • New Page
  • Purple Keys Piano Studio
  • Resources by Grade Level
  • K! Portfolio
  • Grades K-1
  • Grades 2-3
  • Grades 4-5
  • Drum Set
  • Summer School Songs
  • Music Workshop
  • New Page

12 bar Blues in C for Boomwhackers

10/1/2018

0 Comments

 
Today we learned the 12 bar blues progression using boomwhackers! If you have chromatic boomwhackers you can even let kids take turns soloing a blues melody. Remember that the melody should repeat two times and then, on the third repetition add something different or special. 

To be honest, it was a bit messy the first time, but their ears improved as we took turns and practiced listening. We found it helpful to separate the bass line players from the melodic players. Also, putting the groups into small circles so the students could see when people were playing improved the melodic interaction. Otherwise they students were simply playing every note on every beat. Once in a while that can be an interesting effect, but consistently done can make listening quite difficult.

​I hope these visuals are helpful.

Picture
Picture
Picture
0 Comments

Inspirations for Young People

9/28/2018

0 Comments

 
I have collected images from www.kisspng.com/free/website.html and a few video clips of instrumental background/sound effects for you to play with.

Images

Click to set custom HTML
Click to set custom HTML
0 Comments

A bit more on Langston Hughes

9/26/2018

0 Comments

 
  • The first to recognize the potential of the blues as written poetry was Langston Hughes, who was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. 
  • When he was eleven years old, he heard the blues coming from an orchestra of blind musicians on Independence Avenue in Kansas City. 
  • Hughes moved to the East Coast in 1921 and heard the music again, in clubs on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, New York, and 7th Street in Washington, D.C. 
  • "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on 7th Street," he remembered in his autobiography The Big Sea. Those songs "had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going." 
  • The blues stanza allowed Hughes to convey the African American experience in people's own vernacular language.
  • ​
folkways.si.edu/poetry-ballad-blues-stanzas/music/article/smithsonian

Dream Boogie
​by langston Hughes

Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
​
Listen closely:
You'll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a -

You think
It's a happy beat?

Listen to it closely:
Ain't you heard
something underneath
like a -

What did I say?

Sure,
I'm happy!
Take it away!

Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!


Y-e-a-h! 

Dream Variations
​by langston Hughes

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me-
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening…
A tall, slim tree…
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

Dream Boogie and Dream Variations can be found in in this book, Hip Hop Speaks to Children, Nikki Giovanni. This book is a great resource of poetry with a beat, including recorded performances of the collection. You can find it many places, including,  Amazon.
Picture
0 Comments

Music Inspires Langston Hughes

9/24/2018

0 Comments

 
 Music can inspire us, and even evoke feelings that we might have misplaced or forgotten. Langston Hughes was one of the first poets to make a connection between music and poetry. He was inspired by the blues music he heard. The blues rhythms can be traced back to Africa. Most field hollers (call and response), work songs, and spirituals have a similar form which can still be detected in much of the popular music of today. The intention of the lyrics is to express an emotion. Langston Hughes, throughout his life wrote poetry which was inspired by the blues, jazz and some rap music. The rhythms were catchy and familiar, but also gave the impression that the emotion was happiness, when in the words there was an under current of something much more complicated than that. Jazz or blues music often was in the performed during a reading of the poetry.
Picture
Langston Hughes, reciting his poem, "The Weary Blues," (written in 1923) on TV in 1958. Do you notice anything about the orchestra?
This next powerful video was published in 2007 by Four Seasons Productions as a part of the Moving Poetry Series. Reciting the poem is author and Harvard Professor, Dr. Allen Dwight Callahan.
To read an analysis of the poem, "The Weary Blues" click here!
0 Comments

    Archives

    October 2018
    September 2018

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly