Heather Fortune and I are delighted to announce the publication of 5 Pop Grooves for Orff Ensemble, available now from the good people at F-flat Books. If you teach elementary music, you should check them out!
We discuss the process behind and purpose of this music on F-flat’s podcast:
The arrangements grew out of a series of groove-oriented instrumental method books that Heather and I are working on. As we were building our collection of grooves and patterns, Heather realized that some of them would work well as Orff music. I wrote the (very silly) lyrics. The pieces are structured around repetitive grooves that build gradually in complexity – read more about that idea here. You can play them as through-composed pieces, or you can use them as modular kits for assembling your own music.
From Heather’s liner notes:
The musical ideas included in these pieces are derived from pop music. Each melody begins in a simple rhythmic form and iterates to a fully realized melodic idea drawn from common musical building blocks. These iterations illuminate motivic development and provide a step-by-step approach to advanced concepts such as ties and syncopations. Students are prompted with directions and colors to gradually add complexity.
Ensemble teachers seeking to infuse their work with student creativity will find a great starting place with these pieces. Additionally, teachers should feel free to add their own ideas to these arrangements, adding different instruments and parts, vamping different sections, and choreographing movement sequences. Each groove holds space for improv, solos, dances, raps/flow, and other performance elements. Each piece serves as a launch pad for generative work you could present at concerts, highlighting student creativity.
Groove works beautifully for young ensembles. Groove animates from within, and allows your audience to participate. There is a place for any skill level in a groove, and playing grooves fosters deeper listening in your players. Groove joins our listening life with our playing life and creates a palpable group dynamic among players.
Most of are you reading this are not elementary music teachers, so you may not know what the Orff method is. It was first developed in the 1920s by Carl Orff (the “Carmina Burana” guy) and Gunild Keetman. The idea is to scaffold young children’s music learning by providing them with music that is within their cognitive and physical abilities. The repertoire is usually folk songs and nursery rhymes with repetitive structures and simple variations on rhythmic patterns. The instruments are mostly percussion, especially mallet instruments. These have the famous removable bars, so you can easily customize them. If the song only uses the notes C, E and G, for example, then the teacher can remove all the other bars, making it impossible to hit a wrong note. I played these in music class as a kid, and they were a lot of fun.
Writing music for kids is a new adventure for me. I have been making up silly songs with my own kids since they were born, but creating formally notated compositions intended for school settings is another story! I will be getting into my and Heather’s ideas about how school music could be groovier in future posts.