For many years I have enjoyed asking people about what, if anything, they remember of their primary school music education. Each year I pose this question to the class of 1st year acting students I teach at WAAPA. And when running workshops for primary classroom teachers over the years, I have always posed it to them as well.
For many of my generation in Western Australia, the only school music education was the weekly ABC singing broadcast to schools. On Friday mornings at around 11.30am the crackly classroom wireless set was cranked into action to deliver the song to be taught that week. My classmates would sigh and then drag themselves into reluctant submission to the alien classical songs being offered for their musical education. By contrast I always enjoyed – or pretended to enjoy - the broadcasts, but then I was already learning piano from my grandmother and listening to my mother practise art songs and German Lieder for her next ABC broadcast. I suspect I was a young musical upstart.
In the 1980s the Education Department in Western Australia introduced music specialist teaching into primary schools. It was a political decision to support the teachers’ union demand for DOTT (duties other than teaching) time for classroom teachers. To support the appointment of so many specialist teachers (many of whom had had limited actual specialisation in music themselves), the department developed music syllabus materials to support them. “Music In Schools” was developed, based on the Kodaly approach to music education, and on the work of Deanna Hoermann in NSW. Deanna was one of Australia’s pioneers in bringing the Kodaly approach into an Australian context.
So back to my original question. Many of the students and fellow teachers I have worked with over the past 20 years were educated post-1980s - and in the Kodaly approach (which emphasizes solfa and time names and a methodical approach to intervals through singing.)
The taas and titis are the very first, basic rhythmic steps of this approach – closely followed by tika -tika, timka, etc. And paralleled by the learning of simple melodic intervals such as the falling minor third. It is a sequential program of learning.
Yet it is those first two rhythmic patterns that are remembered best - both as sound and symbol – along with anecdotes about marking the rhythms with claves, making rhythmic patterns by making the symbol shapes with pop sticks and so on.
Is this another example of our fundamental human instinct for beat and rhythm? Or is it simply that beat and rhythm are less complex to teach than melody, so therefore more students Australia-wide have been exposed to the taas and titis?
What was your experience?
