Even though I mainly wear composer or flutist hats these days, I've done various teaching gigs since I graduated from UMass Amherst with a Music Education degree. Music pedagogy is a subject that remains near and dear to my heart. Here are the various fruits of my labors in this area:
a teaching philosophy of my very own!
the flute book.
The main impetus for writing a flute-book-as-blog was to fill in a gap I saw in teaching people to read music: there aren't enough easy folk tunes. And when I say easy, I mean really easy — using only, say, do re mi and whole, half, and quarter notes and rests. You might think, "Well how many tunes does that take before you get it and can move on?" More than you might think. And every student is different. So I started putting this together to provide more materials per musical concept. Right now, it's on a bit of a hiatus as I do three things: a) finish my dissertation which has nothing to do with music pedagogy; b) write more tunes; c) go through a slew of existing tunes to classify them for my devious pedagogical plans (mwah ha ha!). I don't know when I'll get back into this. In the meantime, there's a good amount to get you started.
Here is volume 1 of the aforementioned really easy pedagogical songs.
Volume 1 uses: only whole, half, quarter notes and rests; only 4/, 3/, and 2/4; only drmsld' and its subsets; only major pentatonic in C, F, or G; no ties or dots; no initial anacrusis.
thoughts on improvisation:
• my most recent thoughts on improvising with songs.
• a jazz improvisation primer I made up for some sixth graders I was teaching back in 1997.
• a jazz improvisation primer based on notes from a jazz history class I took at The Boston Conservatory with Jeff Stout back in 2000.
• a free improvisation primer I made up just cuz back in 2003.
• a real basic primer on comping bass lines, geared towards folks who know their chords and scales already.
Also see the open instrumentation pieces I have on my composition page; most of those also contain opportunities to improvise that should be comfortable for those new to improvisation.
A unit on beginning songwriting, using only whole, half, and quarter notes and rests, and do, re, and mi in C, F, or G. I used this for an 11th grade general music class at Brooklyn International High School, a school that serves New York City's recent immigrant population.
For beginning band directors, a helpful set of how-to sheets for basic band instruments.
A one-sheet detailing how to slur on trombone in three complicated steps.
A song I spontaneously made up in a kindergarten class to practice moving, matching, and freezing. It was inspired by an article I read in which a child development expert said, "If a boy is not moving, he's thinking about moving."
If you need new ideas about how to practice scales and what scales to practice, here's a rather exhaustive scale workbook.
Four classes I taught at Brooklyn College:
andrea at reloadsanear dot com