Page 27 - Glasbenopedagoški zbornik Akademije za glasbo v Ljubljani / The Journal of Music Education of the Academy of Music in Ljubljana: Mostovi med formalnim in neformalnim glasbenim izobraževanjem, leto 15, zvezek 31 / Year 15, Issue 31, 2019
P. 27
Ana Èoriæ, DEVELOPING COMMUNITY MUSIC ACTIVITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION...
similar programs at their university. Both workshops were a true learning process for both
sides since there was a certain language barrier, but the music crossed all the imaginary
frames, showing the growing need for interdisciplinary collaborations between teachers,
students and academies in general. Besides The Dog and the Double Bass, as a facilitator
who created the whole program from the very beginning, I decided to start one more group
of performers that will gather interested volunteers from the NGO Smile for All who have
an affinity for music and who can start the same process as me and my students did. The
reason why I decided to make two divided groups was to make more possibilities to cover
all the places in the community we visit and give them more materials, as well as to share
all the experience in order to make the program grow. Also, helping the other group to
grow might be a good opportunity for the students, who will graduate from the academy
very soon, to enrol new groups as facilitators and spread their own ideas and experiences
inside.
Art and pedagogy
This chapter describes the development of the program in an artistic and pedagogical way.
The process of work on five different stories will show the growth of the idea in both
directions, based on the mutual communication between the students, me as a facilitator of
the program and audiences.
The story we started with was The Wizard of Oz, a well-known story by L. F. Baum. As a
starting template, we used the text adaptation by F. R. Robinson which was published as
the children’s book with ‘finger sounds’7 in Croatia in 1994. The first idea was to divide
characters between each other and re-write the text for ‘the stage’. Since it was the first
workshop, we didn’t make many changes in the text and there were no interventions in the
storyline. For the musical part, we decided to use the song Over the Rainbow (Harold
Arlen/Yip Harburg) from the famous movie, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios
Inc. in 1939. In the space where we performed the story (library), we didn’t have a piano,
so we decided to use only a guitar and some Orff Schulwerk percussions. Since at the
beginning of the program we didn’t know what to expect and how will visually impaired
children react to the workshop we prepared, we decided to start simple. Regarding the
usage of the space, only one person who played the guitar was ‘static’, while the rest of us
moved each time when the ‘yellow brick road’ appeared in the storyline. For that purpose,
we composed a small musical pattern for singing and playing, while marching all over the
room. There were some ‘unexpected’, smaller sounds we added spontaneously during the
performance (for example, dog bark sound for Toto).
In the follow-up part after the story, we realized that the group of visually impaired
children with various developmental disabilities react better to the sounds than to the story
itself, especially if the story had too many characters, so we realized that for next stories
we have to choose simple plots and add the variety of sounds inside. Children reacted
really good on the process of learning by ear that we used for learning the lyrics and
melody of the Over the Rainbow song. Also, we gave them percussions to try following
7 When reading the book, a child can press a certain sound with his/her finger. Sounds are representing each
character and the text is suggesting to press the drawing of the figure each time when it appears in the
storyline.
25
similar programs at their university. Both workshops were a true learning process for both
sides since there was a certain language barrier, but the music crossed all the imaginary
frames, showing the growing need for interdisciplinary collaborations between teachers,
students and academies in general. Besides The Dog and the Double Bass, as a facilitator
who created the whole program from the very beginning, I decided to start one more group
of performers that will gather interested volunteers from the NGO Smile for All who have
an affinity for music and who can start the same process as me and my students did. The
reason why I decided to make two divided groups was to make more possibilities to cover
all the places in the community we visit and give them more materials, as well as to share
all the experience in order to make the program grow. Also, helping the other group to
grow might be a good opportunity for the students, who will graduate from the academy
very soon, to enrol new groups as facilitators and spread their own ideas and experiences
inside.
Art and pedagogy
This chapter describes the development of the program in an artistic and pedagogical way.
The process of work on five different stories will show the growth of the idea in both
directions, based on the mutual communication between the students, me as a facilitator of
the program and audiences.
The story we started with was The Wizard of Oz, a well-known story by L. F. Baum. As a
starting template, we used the text adaptation by F. R. Robinson which was published as
the children’s book with ‘finger sounds’7 in Croatia in 1994. The first idea was to divide
characters between each other and re-write the text for ‘the stage’. Since it was the first
workshop, we didn’t make many changes in the text and there were no interventions in the
storyline. For the musical part, we decided to use the song Over the Rainbow (Harold
Arlen/Yip Harburg) from the famous movie, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios
Inc. in 1939. In the space where we performed the story (library), we didn’t have a piano,
so we decided to use only a guitar and some Orff Schulwerk percussions. Since at the
beginning of the program we didn’t know what to expect and how will visually impaired
children react to the workshop we prepared, we decided to start simple. Regarding the
usage of the space, only one person who played the guitar was ‘static’, while the rest of us
moved each time when the ‘yellow brick road’ appeared in the storyline. For that purpose,
we composed a small musical pattern for singing and playing, while marching all over the
room. There were some ‘unexpected’, smaller sounds we added spontaneously during the
performance (for example, dog bark sound for Toto).
In the follow-up part after the story, we realized that the group of visually impaired
children with various developmental disabilities react better to the sounds than to the story
itself, especially if the story had too many characters, so we realized that for next stories
we have to choose simple plots and add the variety of sounds inside. Children reacted
really good on the process of learning by ear that we used for learning the lyrics and
melody of the Over the Rainbow song. Also, we gave them percussions to try following
7 When reading the book, a child can press a certain sound with his/her finger. Sounds are representing each
character and the text is suggesting to press the drawing of the figure each time when it appears in the
storyline.
25
