Before children learn and start playing from sheet music in my classes, there is always a preparatory period, which varies in length depending on the age of the children and how mature they are for this type of learning. With a child, who has just started attending the second year of primary school (7 years old), there are only needed a few lessons, which we fill with standard games to awaken imagination and motivation. These games include playing sounds on the head joint, drawing sounds, and playing them, playing with a bubble blower (see chapter 5), etc. If the child has just entered first grade or is of preschool age (less than 7 years old), then they usually have no experience with the alphabet and writing letters in the measure that is useful in the music lessons. Basic techniques and simple melodies are learned slowly and without notes. Simple rhymes and songs are processed in a graphic notation that visually evokes the idea of the pitch, length, and colour of the tones.
The first chapter of the section For Teachers is useful for children who are ready to start reading musical notation. There, we can gradually discover a way to extract notes from the recorder, while listening and co-creating music at the same time. Among the first things we begin to learn is metre perception. Personally, I consider this area very important, and I would like to mention here a technique that has worked for me, even though it may appear unacceptable, too difficult, or unmusical for many colleagues.
It is common, that with children’s first encounters with playing the recorder (or even just listening to music), they bob up and down with their knees. In the early days of my teaching, I made the mistake of trying to calm these children down – I tried to get them to stand still, count in their heads, or tap the metre with their right foot. However, if they experience music so deeply, that they move their body, it is almost an impossible task for them to stop it, and it also puts them in a state that is unnatural for them.
Nowadays, we do the opposite in my classes. Pupils, who don’t move while playing or listening to music, have to learn to do so. Kato Hawas writes about relaxing the knees (and movement in general) in his book Stage fright (p. 28). The pulsation in the knees and thus in the whole body can be seen in the videos of many musicians (I was inspired by the videos from the production of jazz groups around Louis Armstrong). When I lead pupils to bob their knees slightly (probably like when they are standing on a trampoline, where they are already standing alone, all their friends have just left, but they don't want to go home yet...), I teach them to feel the metre with their whole body. At the same time, the idea, that the whole body or the torso, is actually moving, is important, and that the knees are just a kind of gearbox that makes this movement possible. The source of movement should be in the head – in the occiput (the stato-kinetic centre - cerebellum - see chapter 3). If children just forcefully bend their knees, the movement is not only visibly unnatural, but also inefficient and works in the same way as children tapping their toe/heel: the movement is far away from the head and needs to be controlled to a greater extent than for perception of other activities connected with playing the recorder. At the same time, it is very important that pupils do not straighten their knees, i.e. they should always be relaxed. The goal is to teach children to perceive not only the metre, but also the rhythmic pulsation of the whole body (Hawas, p. 28).
A number of average and less gifted children are initially unable to rock their knees and it is difficult for them to perceive its necessary regularity and to achieve this regularity. So, listening to music and practicing this movement with music is important. I used to provide children with recordings of various genres so they could practice pulsation at home - swinging, dancing, etc., which only rarely worked. What started to work are the musical accompaniments, because children could learn to feel the metre directly with the pieces they were learning to play.
We can talk about pulsation regularity even in terms of tempo. Some pupils have a problem with regularity at a faster tempo, while others, have a harder time perceiving regularity at a slower tempo, when the individual beats are further apart. For beginners, in my opinion, the centre is somewhere around the MM76 tempo (when the shortest values are quarter notes), MM80 and above tend to be borderline for children, and often at this tempo they do not have time to concentrate on movement/breathing/reading notes/articulation/listening at the same time. Under the MM72 tempo, the pulses are far apart, and the movement tends to be rushed.
Some colleagues view movement itself as comical and they reject it. I do not deny that at the beginning and often in the later period, if the pupil is really less able, the swaying in the knees is, to put it delicately, unaesthetic. In addition, it may seem that movement can cause the pupil not to be able to play a straight, calm balanced note, that it will disturb the flow of the musical phrase, etc. I am not afraid of that. Over time, rocking the knees can give children order and security that they would find difficult to find elsewhere. Thanks to movement in the knees, they can feel relaxed, and if we teach them to breathe correctly, the quality of the tone also improves, because the diaphragm and muscle areas, responsible for balanced air pressure, are exposed to the need for stability and flexibility during movement. Over time, pupils soften the rocking in their knees until it is almost imperceptible. They learn to perceive larger metric units and the flow of the phrase with their whole body, which enables them to better navigate polyphony.
My experience is that every pupil is unique - and almost everyone needs their own individual plan and approach. (Similarly, I. Yalom talks about the need to invent unique therapy for each client in his book Lying on the Couch, p. 228). I repeatedly remind the children that music is perhaps the only human activity where almost all movements we make are subject to a regular metre and rhythm, and that this is something they cannot find anywhere else.
From the point of view of musical kinetics, rhythm is the fulfillment of the metre and vice versa: playing rhythmic values correctly results in a regular metre. Therefore, if I teach the pupils to perceive the regularity of the metre with their whole body, then it is easier for me to teach rhythm: if they play out of rhythm, the flow and regularity of the metre is disturbed. This disruption is a physical warning that something is wrong with the rhythm. Mastered rocking in the knees thus becomes a tool of control.
The whole swinging motion in the knees has 2 phases: a downward movement and an upward movement. It is beneficial if I point this out to pupils, especially when practicing quavers (eighth notes). If we swing our knees to quarter values and we are supposed to play quaver notes, then the first of the two quaver notes is played when the body goes down, the second is played when moving back up. Sometimes it's quite funny because the fingers can't keep up when playing the quaver notes, so pupils have to slow down the swing motion quite a bit which leads to them looking like robots. After a while, the movement usually calms down. It helps to realize that sometimes the body goes down and the fingers go with it, other times it can be the other way around. (It pays for me to write arrows in the notes above/below the quaver notes that show the direction of body movement.) Weaker pupils get confused in the countermovement of the body and fingers, and start swinging not on quarter notes, as is the goal, but on quaver notes. Equally helpful is the swinging movement in practicing the dotted quarter note (in a quarter beat): the dotted quaver note is played at the moment the body moves upwards.
I sometimes use a special rocking motion in three-beat time. It is a movement from side to side, a kind of weight transfer from foot to foot in case I want to teach the children to feel the pulse for whole bars – an odd bar from left to right, the next one the other way around, e.g. in the bar of 3/8 (Dědečku koleda - Grandpa's carol) or live 3/4 measures (Ländler, Walzer in the first section For Teachers). In a slow tempo this movement is useless because it takes too long and the children get lost in it, but in a livelier one it can help them a lot to feel the first beat in the bar and also not get lost in the ligatures or starts after them (Drifting Along - ibid.).
Rocking the knees is invaluable if I want to teach children the regularity of the metre. When children begin to learn to play in polyphony (in chamber music), they need to learn to perceive the complexities associated with not playing alone and respecting what others are playing. In these cases, it comes in handy to use the movement of tapping both feet to the beat while sitting. It is absolutely essential that the movement in the count begins in such a way that the left foot (or its toe) comes always on the first beat of the bar. It is really convenient for children if they "read" the metre from left to right, just like they read a text - e.g. beats 1.2.3.4. = LRLR. The feeling associated with the movement of the left foot on the visible first (or third) beat in the bar gives them order and calmness, which is almost immediately manifested in rhythmic certainty, otherwise difficult to achieve. Alternating legs when playing while standing is more difficult, but not impossible, and at least during practice it helps weaker pupils to find their way around polyphonic music and not get lost. In odd bars, alternating feet doesn’t help weaker pupils much, but it's a great coordination exercise. Bart Spanhove describes the possibilities of practicing ensemble playing in his book Finishing Touch of Ensemble Playing.
The last of the movement techniques that help my pupils master rhythm and metre is what we call hidden articulation. It is a term used by Walter van Hauwe in his book The Modern Recorder Player (Vol. 2, p. 80), although in a different context. In our context, the hidden articulation is the movement of the tongue in the mouth mimicking the sound "L"during longer rhythmic values. This subtle movement is well felt by the player, although it hardly disturbs the course of the sounding tone (it depends on the intensity with which we do it). It is used to fill in longer rhythmic values either with beats or sub-values and is a variation on filling in rhythmic values with articulation, as described, for example, in Flautoškola (Vol. 2, p. 32). Pupils who need to playaccurately, for example, a whole note, therefore articulate it in quarter values T-L-L-L. At the same time, they can hear a small wave on each "L" in the notes played ("L" articulation is used for tongue vibrato). This tool is priceless when children have trouble feeling the exact length of a quarter note with a dot: the T-L-L method allows children to measure the length accurately and play the subsequent rhythmic value at the right moment.
Literature:
HAWAS, Kato: Stage fright, Bosworth 1973
YALOM, Irvin D.: Lying on the Coach, BasicBooks 1996
SPANHOVE, Bart: Finishing Touch of Ensemble Playing, Alamire 2000
HAUWE, Walter van: The Modern Recorder Player, Vol. 2, Schott 1987
KVAPIL Jan, KVAPILOVÁ Eva.: Flautoškola 2, WinGra 2004
