|
|
|
|
|
|
Unit VI Louisiana's Musical Landscape Lesson 3 Generational Music Communities
My father was a singer. My mother sang,
too. She learned mostly from her mother. I imagine a long time ago they
had to have some kind of pleasure for the children. So my music came down
that way, through the generations. --Inez Catalon, Creole ballad singer, Vermilion Parish Grade Level 4-8
Curriculum Areas English Language Arts, Music, Social Studies, Theatre Arts
Purpose of Lesson This lesson focuses on age-related generations so that students consider how traditional music is transmitted from one generation to another and how music functions for people within a generation, including their own.
Lesson Objectives/Louisiana Content Standards, Benchmarks, and Foundation Skills 1. Students explore music in their own generational music communities and other generational communities, then compare and contrast their own with others' communities.
2. Students research masters and apprentices of traditional music, investigate the master-apprentice relationship, and personalize their understanding in a writing assignment.
3. Students connect with older and younger generations of people as they conduct fieldwork to research generational music communities at school, at home, and in the broader community.
4. Students demonstrate a song or tune that they have learned or taught traditionally by word of mouth and observation.
Time Required 3-5 class periods
Materials If your students will be doing fieldwork, you may need digital cameras, audio recorders, or video recorders in addition to notepads and pencils as well as appropriate fieldwork forms. Print out and duplicate any worksheets or rubrics that you will be using. Try to accumulate recordings of various generational music communities to share with your students. Check with the school librarian media specialist and music specialist for resources.
Technology Connections Internet Resources
Student Worksheets
Assessment Tools
Evaluation Tools/Opportunities Process
Summative
Products
Background Information for the Teacher This lesson focuses on generational music communities -- of adults, teenagers, and children. Students identify their own generational community, as well as older and younger ones. Music is transmitted within and between these different age-related communities, or folk groups. Folklorists use the term folk group (see Unit I) to describe a specific collection of people who share a worldview based on cultural commonalties. When we use the term generational community, we are talking about a folk group who share an interest in similar types of music and who are also bound together by age-related traditions and worldviews. The boundary markers of generational music communities constantly shift, depending on the population in question. We may be talking about people who share ethnicity, family, or region; or about a group of individuals born and living at the same time; about a group of individuals sharing status (as that of students in a school), which may be temporary. In generational traditional music communities, adults are typically tradition bearers and teachers; teenagers can be characterized by innovation in that they use and reinterpret what they've been taught; and children often use hand games and rhymes. Often a master musician will work with an apprentice to teach the tradition to younger people in the community, either formally or informally. Members of these generational music communities will gather at different places to hear, perform, or dance to traditional secular and sacred music. Babies will be at home, hearing lullabies and birthday and party songs; older children might be on the playground, at home, with friends at school, or at religious organizations; adolescents are often alone with a radio or MP3 player, plugged into headphones, or watching music videos with friends; adults may be at a religious service, festival, or concert. There are places where all generations come together: pow wows, religious occasions, rites of passage such as weddings and funerals, festivals, fais do-do, and parades, for example. When we talk about generational music communities, we are talking about the transmission of culture. Key questions to consider are: What are characteristics of different generational music communities? What music do members of generational communities learn and teach each other? How do they learn traditional music within and between generations? The answers will be as varied as the people who ask the questions. But to offer brief examples, we can say that parents might teach children to sing "Happy Birthday," and children often learn from other children humorous variations of the song--"Happy Birthday to you / You live in a zoo." The Baby Boomer Generation might sing "Blowin' in the Wind" with shared memories of the 1960s--the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, and the peace movement. Some Baby Boomer parents might teach their children to sing "Blowin' in the Wind" and tell personal experience narratives of that era to drive home the song's importance to their generation. Grandparents may teach grandchildren hand rhymes set to music, such as "The Itsie Bitsie Spider" because their grandparents taught the song to them. Sunday school teachers may teach the hand motions of "The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rock" or "Deep and Wide" to young children to teach religious values. Children also learn parody songs such as "On Top of Spaghetti" at camp or on the playground. The teaching and learning is often done through observation and imitation--in traditional fashion. Relationships can be formal, informal, secondhand, or seemingly accidental within and between generations. It is important to remember that generational traditions of music will not always fit tidily into categories of folk, popular, or elite. For example, a popular song that adolescents hear on the radio might then be used in folk ways: a special dance at a football game might develop to "The Saints Go Marching In." The popular music of the Neville Brothers, a New Orleans family musical group, is often used in folk ways during Mardi Gras, with traditional dance movements. However, in this unit we are making a deliberate effort to focus, as much as possible, on traditional folk music, not popular or classical music. This lesson also connects to folklife apprenticeships because the master is usually older than the apprentice. It also links to Unit VIII, Lesson 1 and Lesson 3. In Louisiana the value of inter-generational transmission is recognized and encouraged by the folklife apprenticeship program, which you can read about in Keeping It Alive: Louisiana's Folklife Apprenticeship Program.
To Prepare Read Background Information for the Teacher, above, and think about how best to initiate this lesson with your students. Older students will be able to conduct more sophisticated fieldwork and analysis. Review the Extensions and Explorations in addition to the activities to choose activities for your students: staging skits, researching traditional roots of popular music, studying the music master and apprentice relationship, and so on. Consider how your own generational music communities have changed from early childhood to today. What do you remember about your parents' or grandparents' music communities? What do you overhear of children's music communities? Visit the website Keeping It Alive: Louisiana's Folklife Apprenticeship Program to review the Louisiana Division of the Arts master and apprentice program. Focus particularly on the blues guitar playing of Raymond Blakes and Clarastine Cook and on the Cajun home music of Lula Landry, Inez Catalon, and Marce Lacouture. Also read Public and Private Domains of Cajun Women Musicians in Southwest Louisiana, by Lisa Richardson and Music of the Black Churches, by Joyce Marie Jackson for examples of inter-generational music traditions. Review the websites listed in Step 4 to choose which are appropriate for your students' biographical research. Refer to Unit II to review fieldwork procedures. Try to identify traditional or other musicians in the community for students to interview. If you want students to use these resources and they are written above their reading level, use Adaptation Strategies for ways to adjust them to levels that students can understand.
4th and 8th Grade Activities 1. Read one of the quotes from the beginning of this lesson aloud to students and ask them to brainstorm about their own traditional music communities. Model for students by sharing some of your own. Start with school, family, or religious groups to identify some music communities. These communities can be within your students' own generations, or they can be inter-generational. Remember that a key element in traditional music is variation, so there might be different versions of the same song. One version is not more "right" than another. Ask students to consider who taught them about music. Other students? Teachers? Parents? Grandparents? Cousins? Ask them to complete the Discovering Generational Music Communities. After they have individually completed the worksheet, ask them to share their answers with the class or in groups. Distinguishing between popular music and traditional music that a generation shares will be an interesting challenge throughout this lesson. After discussion, you can use the Things I Know About Generational Music Communities Worksheet as an introduction to the lesson and as a pre-assessment tool that students will return to at the end of the unit. As a homework or class assignment, have students complete the Concept Map worksheet with information from their Discovering Generational Music Communities. Explain that they may need to add more ovals to accommodate all the concepts on their worksheets, and that some ovals may relate to more than one item. Encourage creative and adventuresome thinking. Technology Option: Concept maps can be created with mind mapping software. 2. Ask students to list some folk groups that they belong to and identify traditional music associated with that group. Share some of your own. Groups might be friends, a class, Scouts, religious organizations, 4-H, or clubs. Ask them to pair off with someone who doesn't know one of their songs and teach it to their partners. 3. Students can also pair off to interview each other about music that they've learned from someone of an older generation. They should complete the Generational Music Communities Survey and share results as a class or in groups. 4. Students will learn more about
generational music communities by studying the master and apprentice
relationship. Assign students to research master traditional musicians in
Louisiana: What kind of music do they play or sing? How did they learn the
music? Where do they perform? Are they teaching anyone their music?
Consult:
If these are written above your students' reading ability, refer to the
Adaptation Strategies
for ways to adjust and modify them to levels that students can
understand. Each student should choose one master and write a short biographical
sketch, a two-page essay, a diamante, or a resumé. Access and print copies
of the Diamante Worksheet
and help students follow the directions. This activity will help clarify
in students' minds the elements of each type of music, plus the
differences between the different types. Students could also perform a role-playing skit where a "master"
teaches an "apprentice" about his or her music. Consider different roles
for students in these skits: a shyer student may want to be a
"technician," or a "photographer" or a "manager" who organizes information
gathered by the group. 5. Students may write an essay or give an oral presentation, "If I Were an Apprentice," explaining which Louisiana traditional musician they would choose as a master and why, how undertaking an apprenticeship would change your life, what the master would gain, and how an apprenticeship differs from after-school lessons. Students could include a musical sample by the master. Introduce the "If I Were an Apprentice" Checklist and review all the Quality Features. Remind students to plan their essays by writing about each feature. After the writing, they should verify that this was done by placing a checkmark after each in the Self column of the Checklist, then edit the essay to include any that are missing. Pair off students and have them read each other's essays and score them in the Peer column. Finally, you can score the essay and assign a score. 6. Help students produce a generational music presentation of traditional music recordings of different eras. Ask the media specialist for recordings and encourage students to bring in recordings. With older students, discuss what lyrics are appropriate for the classroom and ask their assistance in researching sources for traditional music and dance of different generations. A group of students should present each generation's music, relaying what they have learned about the music and those who played, danced, and listened to it. This is also an opportunity for students to sing or play something they've learned from another generation, younger or older. Students may also demonstrate or describe dances they know and have learned about through their research. (See Unit VI Lesson 4 for activities on researching folk dance and movement.) 7. Assign student to compose a song for someone of a different generation. They may borrow the tune of a traditional song, just traditional musicians do. Find practical steps for songwriting in the Country Music Association's Words and Music Teachers Guide.
8. Assess student growth in awareness from
the beginning of the lesson with the Things I Learned About
Generational Music Communities assessment form. Ask students to
complete the forms and compare them with their earlier versions, then
assign themselves a grade. On the last line, you can assign a
grade. 4th Grade Explorations
and Extensions 1. Share a traditional song that you have
learned from someone or taught someone from another generational music
community with the class or in groups. 2. Interview one or two adults about
traditional music in their past. Have them recount what they learned, how
they learned, what memories the music brings to mind, what the music means
to them. Learn the song or find a recording of the songs they describe,
sing or play it for the class, and tell their stories. Look for recordings
of traditional music in your school library and on the Internet (see
Technology Connections above). See Unit II Lesson 3 for
guidance on inviting a community member into the classroom and ways to
maximize this learning opportunity. 3. Read this quotation by show-boat
musician Vic Tooker of New Orleans. Using your imagination, draw a picture
of him playing all the instruments that he lists in the quotation. Then
draw a picture of a current musician whom you like, playing an instrument
if appropriate. Compare the musicians in your drawings using a Venn Diagram or
two-column chart.
--Vic Tooker, Musician, Orleans Parish 4. Make up new words to the camp song
"If I Weren't a Boy Scout," a cumulative song with a tune similar
to "Pop Goes the Weasel." Call it "If I Were an Apprentice." Represent the
master / apprentice you researched and make up a rhythmic sound that
reflects the tradition of that person. For example,
8th Grade Explorations
and Extensions 1. Design a fieldwork project to collect
songs or stories about music from two different age groups in your school,
family, or community. Refer to Unit
II to review proper procedures such as filing out release forms
and thanking your interviewees. Use the Generational Music
Communities Survey as well as release forms. If you record
your interviews, add them to the classroom listening center and record
your observations in fieldnotes and your Listening Log - Music Around
Me from Unit VI Lesson 2
Listening Logs. 2. Prepare a "Music Through the Years" scrapbook or
album that shows the differences in traditional or popular music for
students and older generations. Begin by collecting and photocopying
photos of high school proms over the years from yearbooks and family
members' photo albums. Label copies with the year, put them in a binder,
and use them as prompts in interviews with adults from different
generations. Ask interviewees what songs were their favorites as teens.
Ask if they have a story to go with any of the songs; where, when, and
with whom they would listen to the songs; what kinds of dances they did.
If you're recording interviews, ask interviewees to sing, hum, or whistle
part of a favorite song. Try to find a recording of the song to bring to
class and play during a Generational Hit Parade, when you can share your
interviews with classmates. As a class, compare school and community
traditions that include pop music from different generations: dances,
parades, parties, festivals, sports. By collecting personal narratives
about these songs you can analyze why songs might have been meaningful to
a generation.
3. Essentially, all pop music has deep
roots in traditional music and within folk groups. Research the
traditional roots of pop music from one or more generations. You can use
your research from the Music Through the Years Album above or choose
popular music that you like. Some of the websites in Technology
Connections above can teach you a lot about the relationship between
traditional and pop music. Look at both American
Roots Music and American Routes, for example. 4. Read Public
and Private Domains of Cajun Women Musicians in Southwest
Louisiana, by Lisa Richardson and Music
of the Black Churches, by Joyce Marie Jackson. Write an essay
comparing and contrasting the generational traditions in the two articles.
Teachers, use Adaptation
Strategies to adapt these adult-oriented resources to your
students' reading level, if necessary. Use the Sources of Generational
Music to compare what they learned from personal experiences and
interviews versus what they learned from these articles. Venn Diagrams can
be used both as a pre-writing tool and as a presentational tool for the
final essay. 5. Write about or discuss learning music
or a life lesson of your own based on one of the quotes below, taken from
the introduction to this lesson.
--Eddie Raxdale, Fiddler, Rapides Parish --Inez Catalon, Creole ballad singer, Kaplan, Vermilion
Parish --Vic Tooker, Musician, Orleans
Parish
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
