Sunday, April 6th, 2008
At the beginning of this school year, I instituted something called “Music Monday.” Every Monday, I would play a recording of a piece of music for my students. They, in turn, would respond to the selection by writing a description the piece using musical terms. We would also briefly discuss the piece, including whether or not they enjoyed it and why.
After a couple of month hiatus, I resumed the practice this past week, but with a twist. Instead of just using a CD recording, I used a clip from YouTube. Using the YouTube download tool at Tech Crunch, I saved the clip to my portable drive and projected it on screen using my LCD projector.
This idea hit me when I was visiting Evan Tobias’s blog, “Catalysts and Connnections.” The funny thing is that his post really didn’t have anything with using YouTube in the classroom. His post (inspired by another music blogger, James Frankel) was focusing on music notation software. But at the end of his post, he had a clip of Anne-Sophie Mutter playing a portion of Vivaldi’s Spring, with Herbert Von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.
As I watched that clip, the idea hit me to give my students the opportunity to see the music being made as well as hearing the music. One of my goals is to give students the opportunity to develop a sound concept for their instrument and the orchestra as a whole. I also want to expose them to string instruments playing a variety of genres. CD’s can certainly do this. But video allows the students to go one step further and observe the musician’s concentration, his/her instrumental technique and their very personal involvement with the music.
It was a huge hit! My students really enjoyed what they saw and heard. As we discussed the clip and Ms. Mutter’s playing, they talked about technique, intonation (one of my frequent rehearsal rants), balance in the ensemble, how the music portrayed or did not portray for them the idea of spring.
Where do we go from here? I plan to play YouTube clips for each of the orchestral instruments in a variety of genres. If you have some YouTube favorites that you think would benefit my students, I would appreciate it if you would leave a link in your comments.