Yesterday while I was exercising, I watched a Turning Point episode that showed how one woman who wanted to help refugee children in her country discovered the joy of bringing music to their lives. Talk about being an instrument for good! (To watch, click not the link.)
Tempo means “time” in Italian, and it measures how fast or slow the beat of a song moves.
We measure tempo in beats per minute (bpm). This is great, because we all can relate to how many beats per minute our heart is beating.
We know that a resting heart rate should be slower than when we get up and walk, jog, run, or sprint. (Here’s a fun activity for you: print out this chart and find your heart rate during these activities.)
Sometimes there is a quarter note followed by a number that you might see at the beginning of a song, like:
That tells how fast the beat goes in that song. Also, you might see other “tempo marking” terms that describe how fast or slow a piece should go. Here are a few you may have heard of before:
lento (=rather slowly, around 40 bpm)
adagio (=slowly, around 60 bpm)
andante (=walking pace, about 75 bpm)
andantino (=a little faster than andante, about 80 bpm)
moderato (=moderately fast, about 90 bpm)
allegro (=quick and cheerful, around 120 bpm)
vivace (=quick and lively, around 140 bpm)
presto (=fast, around 170 bpm)
prestissimo (=very fast, 180 bpm or more)
(For more terms, go here.)
Look at this piece of music (click on the link to view). Can you find a tempo marking, either in the number of in a word?
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik sheet music page*
See anything on this page**?
Why do you think they didn’t include a tempo marking?
How do these terms match up with your own heart rate doing different activities? When you run, is your heart rate allegro?
You can understand why different pieces of music are named after their tempo marking, such as in a concerto. Here’s an example in a famous piece by Mozart called “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” It has more than one part to the piece. This part is called “Allegro:”
The song begins at 2:12. But there is lots to learn from watching before the music begins, such as from which side of the stage the musicians enter, how they tune, how the conductor enters, what he does before he begins conducting, etc.)
Antonio Vivaldi wrote some songs that he called “The Four Seasons” and named them each after a season. Notice the tempos he chose to describe each season.
In this video, Spring is played at 96 bpm (andante). Summer begins around 74 bpm (adagio) and then picks up up 108 bpm (moderato), then slows down again. Fall begins and stays at about 114 bpm (moderato) until it takes a big drop in tempo for a while before speeding up to around 134 bpm (allegretto). Winter stays at around 152, except for a little slowing towards the end, followed by accellerando to about 160 bpm at the very end.
If you were to write a song about a season, which tempo would you pick?
When you write your next song, be sure to choose a tempo for how slow or fast you want your song performed!
*This music comes from this webpage.
**This song came from this website.
When you watch the violinists at the beginning of this piece, did you notice them lifting and placing their bows?
Did you see their bow holds? What about their shoulders?
Did you notice how the bows are going parallel to the bridge and the end of the fingerboard?
The violinists (and other string player) sometimes wiggle their left hand as they play. That’s called vibrato. (We learn that later on, after we get really good at placing each finger and moving our fingers around the fingerboard.)
Did you notice that everyone waited for the conductor and that the conductor looked to the soloists (the flute and harp players) before beginning the piece?
Did you see that everyone is dressed in black?
This lovely piece of music is part of a concerto, which is a song made up of 3 parts, or “movements.” The movements are named after the feeling or tempo of the part. Andantino means “slightly faster than walking pace.” Do you remember which language these musical terms comes from? Yes! Italian!
Mozart wrote this concerto, and this video is the movement andantino. Can you close your eyes and see if you can figure out the approximate bpm (beats per minute)? Remember that 60 bpm is 1 beat per second, so something slower than one beat per second would be fewer beats per minute and something faster than that would be more beats per minute. Andantino is often around 80 bpm (just a hint!).
The K in the name of this piece (K.299) stands for Köchel, the last name of a man (Ludwig von Köchel) who made a chronological list of all of Mozart’s pieces (“works”). The number stands for the number of the piece in that list. There are 629 works catalogued on his list!
Here’s some trivia for you: notice which fingers the harpist uses when he plays? Never the pinky finger! Also, did you know that flutes can be made out of nickel, silver, brass, and wood, or some are even made of gold! (A famous flutist named James Galway wrote a book about his life and career called The Man with the Golden Flute. He has a photo of himself holding his golden flute on the cover.)
Here is a video of a young harpist playing another Mozart concerto. (Check out the pinkies!) You can just leave this on as fabulous background music if you don’t want to watch it all…
The main goals for this week’s practicing are:
1. Consider how you can add a little more fun to your practicing, if you need some;
2. To learn to do the “play/life/place” skill (see video);
3. To be able to play (both pizzicato and arco) “I Am Like an Apple Seed” at 60 bpm; and
4. Be able to play the song without stopping if they make a mistake. (Practicing along with the video will help them learn to do this.)
This last goal is in preparation for playing it all together in class next week and being able to play it while others play “Making Music Makes Me Smile.”
SO your child needs to be able to play it continuously without stopping, even if s/he makes a mistake. This is a very important skill for anyone playing in an orchestra!
I posted videos here so that you can practice along with me. Don’t mind my “morning look”–no movie star here :). Just a mom helping a child practice!
Please text me with any questions.
Thanks for working hard to help your child (and yourself) learn to play their instrument!
Take it from Sam:
I think Sam embodies the idea “Making music makes me smile,” don’t you?
Here are the signs for the new line! I sat next to a woman who interpreted in both ASL and British Sign Language. So awesome!
The line we were translating was: “We will work to train our fingers how to play our inner music.”
In 2013, I wrote a story called “The Story of Music” for our curriculum. I would love to have children illustrate it! You can read the story here.
If you would like to color a picture for the book, please do! Then scan it and email it to me! (Or for my students, bring it to class.) If I use your illustration in my book, I will give you the credit, so be sure to write your first name in the corner of your illustration.
Thanks so much!
Last week we worked on learning to play do on D (open D). When we say “open string” that means playing the string with no fingers on it.
Remember, any note can be do. Do is simply the first note in the scale, and for our purposes this year, it is the first note of a major scale.
When you put the first finger down a whole step away, it is re. So we practiced playing do and re, the first two notes in our Solfa scale.
The new song we started learning, “I Am Like an Apple Seed,” contains only do and re, as you saw when you practiced with your child. This week we keep learning the song. Our goal is to have the song memorized in our mind and in our hands so we can play it at 60 bpm by the end of two weeks from today’s lesson.
When we accomplish that goal, we’ll play it together as a class. Then we will ask those children who know Twinkle well at 60 bpm to play it while we play our song at the same time: our first duet! We will be a real orchestra!
We will begin singing the song at home as a duet next week. If any of you want to try it this week and email me a recording (either audio or video), that would be awesome!!! Remember that recordings don’t need to be perfect. They simply encourage others to try. Mistakes can actually be comforting and encouraging because they see that the other child hasn’t perfected the song yet, either.
To read the lesson plan and see the practice instructions, go here.
Last night, I had a hard time sleeping. I remembered the song I posted about yesterday, and I searched for a version of it on my phone. “Where Can I Turn for Peace” came up, and I listened. Wow! I had forgotten what a beautiful version of this song is on this album! I love the arrangement. Her voice is a great example for someone learning to sing to listen to. Wish I had a video of her song to post here.
In looking for a video of that song, I discovered another darling song she and her daughter sing called “Come and Play,” from this album, “Never Give Up.” It’s beautiful! If you have ever enjoyed a moment pushing your child in the swing, give this song a try!
There is one more song on that first album that was a part of an etched-into-my-memory moment. Several years ago, I attended my oldest daughter’s choir concert at her high school. Her choir was singing the song, “Pilgrim’s Song,” which I had never heard before, and it was being sung by (I found out later) a young woman who had fought leukemia for nearly 13 years and was just praying to make it to graduation. There was a feeling in that room that was unbelievable. I am guessing I wasn’t the only one with tears streaming down my cheeks. And so it is a special song to me, and when I hear it I think of brave Emily, who passed away not long after her graduation. She made it!
I think “Pilgrim’s Song” would be an awesome song to choreograph a ballet/modern dance to!
Here’s something to give the children a little vision of where learning to play Solfa on their D string can take them.
I sincerely welcome replacement recordings! I am neither a professional singer nor professional violinist. The notes are not perfectly in tune, and the breathing is poor. (I didn’t have time to do retakes.) PLEASE: if anyone would like to re-do these recordings and email them to me, I’d love it!
“Where Can I Turn for Peace” is a hymn in the key of D with no accidentals (no added sharps or flats), so it’s an easy transfer from learning to play a D major scale, beginning on open D, particularly for a child who knows the hymn already in their head.
The Solfa for the hymn goes like this:
s f m f f m
s t l s r
m f s l l l s
f l d r
s f m f f m
s t d’ d’ d
d’ t l s d l
f m r d
Usually, the note the song ends in is the key for that song. So in this song, the last note is do on D, and it is in the key of D.