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ideas

One of my Christmas presents to myself was the book 5 Pop Grooves for Orff Ensembles by Heather Fortune and Ethan Hein.

I don’t teach the Orff approach ‘properly’ by any means, but a lot of the pedagogy behind looping chordal patterns, and melodic improvisation, often finds its way into my classroom practice. I also don’t have any Orff instruments in my current school.

Anyway, ‘Fresh Feels’, one of the aforementioned five pop grooves, has been a great success in my lessons over the past few weeks. Adapting it for the keyboard, I took the two chordal parts, bass line, and iterative melodies (more on this later), and created my own worksheet. I share it here as a PDF and images:

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I’m adding Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room (1969) to the list of pieces in my ‘new music concert’ that I’ve never got around to putting on (one day…). I saw a great version this weekend at the rainy days festival in Luxembourg.

I’ll do it digitally, and I’ll try and run some tests in my classroom first. Maybe a shorter text for performance in a school?

Watch this space…

#ideas