Music Teaching Idea: Alternatives to Counting the Beats

One of the hardest paradigm shifts my students face is learning that rhythm is more important than note accuracy. In fact, the first thing they bring up when I ask them, “How do you think you did?” is “wrong notes”.

“Rhythm,” I tell them, “is harder to fix than notes.” Like many of my students, I am a multi-modal kinesthetic learner, so I use analogy to help drive my point. home: “Ppppp….lease….ppp..aaaass...mmmmeeee a Kleee..ex.”

Our brain tends to fill in the blanks and correct things like typos on a page, so we can read and listen to misspelled or even misused words and generally, suss out the meaning. However, in the case of the Kleenex question above, it’s a bit more difficult to figure out what the speaker is trying to say. This was illustrated beautifully at a Pattern Play workshop I attended in 2010 with Forrest Kinney.

When They Can’t Count the Beats in Music

We try hard to teach and encourage our students to count the beats: “1 & 2 &...” For the younger ones, we often use “ta’s” and “ti-ti’s”. Once in a while, however, I’ve had a student who has a mind block to either.

One year, I taught two boys who were huge Pokémon fans. To subdivide the beats, we used variations on Pikachu’s name: “Pi - Pi - Pi-ka-chu.” You can read about it here. For some students, we use food: “blue-ber-ry, huck-le-ber-ry, a-pple, pie”. It tends to make us extremely hungry during lessons, though.

This week, one of my beginners, a sweet introspective lad, was struggling with the timing on “Starry, Starry Night” from the Faber & Faber Piano Adventures series. His family is doing some travelling this summer and, he’s a bit of a history and geography buff, so we used country names to “count” the beats. We even invited the Grade 12 student after him to contribute, a process they both enjoyed.

Here’s our handiwork:

When I asked him to clap a small passage and later play it, my student performed marvelously.

Further Reading on Other Ways to Teach Counting the Beats in Music

A Strategy to Teach Ta Ti-Ti

Four Ways to Prepare Ti-Ti and Ta

Freebie Friday - Beat, Rhythm, Ta, & Ti-Ti

Music Teaching Idea: Using Visual Aids to Help Introduce New Works

When introducing a new work to a student, I try to give him or her an idea of the form, era and genre. It's a little easier to get music teaching ideas when the composition has a descriptive title. Last month, one of my intermediate students started working on “Arabesque” by Génari Karganov (Royal Conservatory Grade 5). He's a delightful transfer student who excitedly says, “Sonatina!” when I ask him what he'd like to work on first. “I've been waiting to show you all week,” he'd say. This student has the same level of enthusiasm for all of his classical repertoire.

When we listened to the RCM CD recording of “Arabesque”, I asked my student to describe the music. Our discourse turned up: “graceful”, “lots of curve” and “flower”.

Then, I asked my student if he knew what an “arabesque” was. He answered, “No.” I shot up from my exercise ball, and did a quick online search for an arabesque. We found one that was licensed for reuse and printed one off:

I am pleased to say that one month later, my student still has the print-out of the arabesque clipped to his music. His shaping is coming along nicely. That was one music teaching idea that I'm glad I acted upon the moment it popped into my head.

One more example to share: My students and I have been exploring the music of Jennifer Ecklund of PIano Pronto. "No Limits" is extremely popular with my tween and teen boys in my studio.

When discussing choreography and the importance of our body language matching the music, my student came up with this to remind him how to end the piece:

As far as visual aids go, you can't miss that!

What about you? What kind of visual aids to use in your music teaching to help your students learn their pieces? Let the music teaching ideas come in!