Module 2 - Perceiving

For this assignment, I will be looking at rhythm for a song towards the beginning of my students' violin education, "May Song."  "May Song" is a difficult song rhythmically, as it is the first song to have a dotted quarter note, and students have had relatively little experience with eighth notes, which this song also has.  To learn this song, my students traditionally listen to the CD and have the sheet music.  Here is a photograph of the sheet music:

Here is what the first line of the piano part looks like:

This offers some information about how the dotted quarter note is played, but not enough.  Even if I showed this to my students, they likely would not gain much from it.

So, to look at it in a different way, I used colored construction paper to create "notes."  Each measure was 18" long, each half note was 9", quarter notes were 4.5", and eighth notes were 2.25".  Dotted quarter notes were 6.75".  I laid out the pieces, with the top row showing the measures, the next row showing the rhythms the students had to play, the third row was half notes, the fourth row was quarter notes, and the bottom row was made from eighth notes:

 

Measure 1:
















Measure 2:

Measure 3:















Measure 4:

(Since the rhythm in the piece during the fourth measure is half notes, I did not include a second row of half notes.)








Using these pieces, students will really be able to experience how a dotted quarter note is equal to 3 eighth notes, and a quarter note is equal to 2.

Reflection:
 

Perception is how you use the five senses to experience the world, and how you process that experience. When I originally perceived the rhythms of “May Song,” I mostly used the senses of sight and hearing. I saw the music, the rhythms, and each of those rhythms means something different to me. Dotted quarter note, eighth note, quarter note, and half note, all mean something different. I also heard the song; heard how long each note is held, and felt the rhythms.

To re-imagine the rhythms of “May Song,” I wanted to provide my students with a way to experience rhythms in a different way. My experience and perception of rhythms is colored by my long experience and association with them. I've been playing for 19 years, so every note has a different meaning to me, amassed over those 19 years. My students don't have that long background experience that I do, but I want to enable a similar experience for them. I used colored strips of paper to represent each note, allowing students to manipulate and work with the rhythms in a physical manner.

By representing rhythms physically with pieces of paper, the time each note takes is translated into physical space each note takes up. This provides a different way for my students to experience rhythms, in a way that enables deeper understanding. Through manipulating the rhythms, students can directly experience that each dotted quarter note gets as much time as three eighth notes, and that having a dotted quarter note and an eighth note is a different rhythm than having two quarter notes, though they take up the same total amount of time.

While I have told my students this many times, they will not internalize it until they discover it for themselves.  By using these sheets of paper to work with the different notes, they should be able to discover this on their own, without me having to tell them.