Music to my Ears...

It's Friday, and because the post is about music,  here is my song for the beginning of the weekend:

Music has always played a large part in my life. My mother works as a Director of Music and has played the organ in many amazing places. I remember as a child being up where she practiced, sometimes turning the pages. Growing up, I learned to play the piano, the oboe, and the guitar. I'm very glad that my children enjoy playing music and listening to it as well.

Over the last few years, my mother has taught Music Appreciation at the college in her town. She also teaches a great class on occasion for teachers: using music in the regular education classroom (I know I'm getting that title wrong, so I'm not capitalizing it). During one visit, she asked me to speak to the soon-to-be teachers about how I weave music into the classroom, so I'm sharing some of that today:

Playlists - For years I've kept playlists for different units of teaching. In it, I kept things such as:
- thematic connections - popular music for older texts to breach the distance of time and help students connect. For example, when talking about Chaucer and courtly love, students often thought the rules about jealousy and instant love were ridiculous. For them, extreme jealousy = stalking and physical symptoms of love seem silly. But when I play something like this:

Or this:

They begin to rethink how we talk about love culturally. Asking them to go find their own examples and compare them to depictions of love in Chaucer or in the rules of courtly love help as well.
- cultural connections - In Beowulf, for example, there is mention of the woman who "sang sorrowful" during his funeral. Letting them hear a version of a keening song, for example, helps them understand the context of the singing in a deeper way:

- changes in point of view - one popular form of expression in participatory culture is to write songs and stories from a different point of view than that chosen by the author. For example, in the Harry Potter world, here is a song from the Ministry of Magic from the point of view of Voldemort and Lily:

On a more academic note, collecting songs with different points of view about war, such as "The Green Fields of France":

to contrast with a song such as "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition":

with some modern songs today about the effects and beliefs about war can add a new, emotional layer to facts that might seem dated and too far away to be relevant.
- content review - For me, there is nothing better than historyteachers when I wanted content review. I could show them this about the plague to just give them the little bit of information I needed before reading "The Pardoner's Tale" and ask them to be ready to share what they think the most important thing to remember about the plague might be to spark discussion:

Or this after Beowulf to ask the students to evaluate the song and determine if the song highlighted what, to them, were the important messages of the text:

- content enrichment - When moving into Romanticism, students struggle a lot with long, abstract texts like Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Even though Coleridge provides his own version of Cliff's Notes to sustain the reader, students struggle with the overall concept. What I wanted them to understand with this poem, and with Walton's experience in Frankenstein, was the relationship between the sailor and the sea. I wanted them to understand the mystery, the danger, the pull the sailors feel. For that, I used a variety of sailor songs including "The Sailor's Prayer" (this isn't my favorite version but I like it without instruments - try the one by Pandora Celtica - it wouldn't load):

or "The Mingulay Boat Song"- this is by a local group that unfortunately no longer performs:

 or the song "White Squall":

- creating a soundtrack for in-class reading - For sharing important moments, I tried to find appropriate soundtrack music, which helped the students remember but also emotionally connect. A lot of people today are creating battle mixes while playing video games, so this is a great connection for them. So, for example, with Beowulf's fight with Grendel, I would play battle music from a mix such as:

After going through my playlist with them for the unit (I'd never hit all the songs in the playlist), I'd show them the list and ask them to make their own. I received great examples that I added to mine over time. The Ministry of Magic addition, for example, was from a student.

Figurative Language - Music can reinforce ideas about figurative language in a variety of ways. Here are some of the ways I've included music:
- tone - It's important to note that music alone can change the tone of a piece. Music can help students develop a vocabulary of tone words, because some can describe how music feels more easily than words. In looking at how tone can change dramatically, I like to choose two very different versions of the same song, such as Europe's "Final Countdown":

With Laibach's version of "Final Countdown":

I choose Laibach intentionally because they have done covers of this as well as songs by Queen such as "One Vision" for a deliberate reason that has a lot to do with music and tone. Their story is fascinating and can be found here, where an article calls them the "unlikely godfathers of Occupy and Anonymous" and here.

Another fun way to explore tone is with the very popular YouTube tendency to remake trailers into a whole new genre. For example, here is a realistic, original trailer for Cinderella:

and here is a remix with scenes from the same movie but altered music and selection of images:

Students can generate tone words and describe how the music changes the tone. Later, students can create their own sets of trailers or other pieces for tone exploration. This ability to play and remix cultural pieces is another component of participatory culture that students identify with and enjoy doing.

- allusion - Allusions are our conversational shortcuts. We use allusion to bring in cultural knowledge without having to explain certain elements that would distract from the main point. While expanding their allusion vocabulary so that students can better participate in those conversations, I often used music to support the notion that these kinds of terms are everywhere. By far, students enjoyed this one the most and often danced in their seats:

But there is also Enter the Haggis's "Icarus" which goes well with Breugel's painting and Auden's poem - really showing how an allusion can appear in many forms and how texts can carry on a dialogue over time. There is a long instrumental beginning, so it's a good time to show other art depicting the Icarus story:

After a few examples from me, the students are off and running. They begin to see and hear the allusions everywhere, which is what I want. We collect examples in a forum, musical or otherwise, and I ask them to bring in music that depicts an allusion, like thirty pieces of silver, to see if other classmates can determine the meaning underneath.

Research abounds discussing the benefits of music in classroom learning. Vh1 collected much of it for their "Save the Music" campaign, and that can be found here. While it focuses on formal music education, some of the quotes also discuss music and learning in general. Here is an article that discusses wider uses of music in forms such as the long-popular Schoolhouse Rock pieces (my daughter was humming the one for the Constitution as she took her test just last week) to modern rapping with math. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics offers a grant for using music to teach math in early grades. The American Historical Association provides this resource for using music in a social studies setting and illustrates how to incorporate music in a variety of ways, including like the example of different points of view I listed above. Finally, this Edsource article shows how the California State Standards called for implementation of music.

Even with online learning, our team talked about music implementation just a week ago, and we all shared a variety of strategies. Sharing music with the students helps forge a relationship and can show them new sides of our personality. While teaching content, to start a collaborative session, or as a creative opportunity, finding ways to weave music into a course brings a new layer to the content itself.