Music workshop 1

Today was the first day of the music workshop .

It started in a very funny way , before we enter we had to take off our shoes!  And the way how we treat the teachers is very informal we just need to call them by name . The music teacher is Karin.

In the first part of the class we talked about some musical concepts . The teacher began by talking about Eurythmics and said " to learn music first we need to experiment with the body ."

The Eurythmics theory was created by Rudolf Steiner together with his wife Marie Steiner- Von Sivers , and in this theory music is treated as a language.
The Eurythmics is a body and musical language , is a form of art and is used in pedagogy at the Waldorf method (also created by Rudolf Steiner ) as a pedagogical Eurythmics .

We did some warm-up exercises related to the theory.

We started with a heating in a circle a very active exercise in which we had to try to step on someone with caring, and we could not step on the person who was on our left or right. We could not leave the hands of anyone and that made it more difficult both to get other people and to escape.

The exercises were appearing in the course of the class.

We talked about pulse, time and rhythm, essences and aspects that make the music and very important to understand to work Eurythmics because with the body we can work all these points.

First we work the pulse as the "home".

The pulse is the basic unit that marks the time of a song. Is a succession of constant pulsations marking a certain time in equal parts.

We started to mark the pulse in the legs to the sound of some songs, feeling the beat. Much of the exercises were done in circle because that is a way of having more contact with each other and have better communication.

When we were more confident in marking the pulse we experimented with a sandbag and we had to mark the pulse throwing the bag to our colleagues from the side and with maces we had to play them and without missing the pulse or leaving the mark  we needed to pass to the person by our side.

The time was the second point to be spoken and the teacher treated him as the "rooms".
This is characterized as a serie of pulses that make up a song . Time, as the pulse that composes it, always has the same value in a certain composition.

We can find songs with bars of 2, 4, 8 or 3 times.

We heard some music and tried , each in his own way , to find the time of the songs. And we did an exercise with a tennis ball to mark the downbeat.

The rhythm we treated as " furniture " . The rhythm is a repetition of musical intervals present in a musical composition and can be strong or weak , long or short , regular or irregular .

We started to work a story of a moose walking in the woods and his steps changed according to the situation . At first walked in average step - corresponding to ¼ note - heard something and slowed down a bit - ½ note - felt danger and started running - 1/8 note - got tired and went back to slow down - note.

We also had an exercise in groups with cardboards that represented the note and its parts. And each group had to make a musical composition with these cardboards and try to play .

Cardboards

In the second part of the class we worked the voice.

The voice is produced by the vocal cords but is through our facial and body structure that our voice can be distinguished from the other voices.

We made a vocal exploration through different musical tones - more serious and acute.

And joining voice with Eurythmics we worked the sound with movement. Songs with gestures such as " aram sam sam ", human frames with motion and sound and the use of sounds from the daily day to make music, or games like memory through sound ( having a sound and try to figure out similar ).

At the end we used scarves as an extension of the body , blindly form of movement and dance and very appealing because the movements made ​​with the scarf can expression movements that we can not do with our body or we don't feel confortable to do. 

All this work helps children in coordination, cooperation, team spirit, waiting for their turn , mathematics , knowledge of the space around them and is very important in the knowledge of us, our body and our limits and capacities.

Friday, January 22, 2016