composition & improvisation The Backyard Groove
Many Expressions of Musical Community Leila Ramagopal Pertl, WMEA State Chair, Composition & Improvisation
This school year during our first two terms at Law- rence University, my hard-working music education stu- dents got busy creat- ing The Backyard Groove™, a series of six online, inter-
active workshops featuring global music traditions learned and performed right here in the Fox Valley. This series, co-hosted by Lawrence and the Appleton Public Library, though very much a pandemic response to moving learning at LU to a hybrid, and entirely online in the K-12 schools, was rooted in an important ques- tion we integrate into our Elementary Performing Arts Methods courses as one of the foundational considerations of cre- ating culturally responsive, anti-racist and student-empowering curricula: What is the music of our community? Of course, we don’t know the answer to that ques- tion until we open our doors, extend our hands to our neighbors and listen.
So, teaming up with the co-creator of this project, my colleague Betsy Kowal, Lawrence Conservatory community pro- grams manager, who also happens to be the children’s department assistant at the Appleton Public Library, we opened our doors, extended our hands to our neigh- bors and listened. And we heard the Fox Valley ringing with the sounds of Maria- chi, Balinese Gamelan, Samba, Ghanaian Ewe drumming and dancing, the music of the Menominee and so many more. We have been blessed to work with culture bearers, Nestor Dominguez, Jando Valdez, Dr. Sonja Downing and Pak Dewa, Clarice Cast, Nani Agbeli, and Natasha Verhulst to bring these interactive workshops to life and to engage our community in joyful learning. Then, our music education stu- dents transformed the weekend workshops
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into school music lessons and taught them online to first through sixth graders, right here in the Appleton Area School District. Our pre-service teachers are dedicated to the work of listening deeply, connecting compassionately and co-creating joyfully. They are not afraid to be beginners, which is a value we uphold here in our conservatory. We must always be ready to learn and to lead with respect and love.
What is the music of our community? The Backyard Groove is one of the more visible parts of our work in the methods class of allowing this question to guide our curricular and community building choices as music educators. But how does this question guide us in our day-to-day lives in our classrooms? How do we see, and hear, our students, and honor what we learn about them?
To dive into this idea, I would like to take you on an interactive Deep Listen- ing™ journey to explore what community means. Deep Listening encourages us to recall our personal and shared sound- scapes. As you read, I will prompt you to remember, connect and recreate.
We Are Hear®: Take a few breaths to center yourself. I invite you to soften or close your eyes. When you feel relaxed and grounded, listen for one of your ear- liest memories of music making. Listen with your whole body. Stay in this memo- ry for a while. When you think you’ve re- membered everything, listen more deeply. Let the memory sounds help you sink into this time and keep listening. What else do you hear? When you think you’ve heard everything, listen more deeply. Take some time to look around in this memory and take note of visual information, feelings, sensations, and unexpected discoveries you may have made. After a time, take three deep breaths, and after the third one,
“What is the music of our community?
Who are our neighbors? What are our students’ personal sound histories? Whether in our cities, homes, or in our
classrooms, we can listen deeply, and find the wonder and courage to be beginners again.”
come back here, to our reading space to- gether. Here are some questions:
• What did you hear?
• What sensations or emotions did you feel?
• Did you hear or see anything you hadn’t expected?
This exercise is an adaptation of a Deep Listening score I wrote called “We Are Hear.” It is a score that allows us to travel to places of great comfort to reexperience the soundscapes and sensations within; to literally listen with our whole bodies – not just our ears – to remember, and in a very real way, travel to these spaces of great comfort no matter where we are in the world. In this adaptation, I invited you to travel to one of the first times you remembered making music. When I do this exercise, I often travel back to my grandmother’s kitchen. In fact, her home is the scene of both my earliest memories of music making, and a place of great
April 2021
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