Lesson Plan: Experiencing Style
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MORE ENTRY-LEVEL LESSONS FOR BEGINNING STUDENTS
Lesson Plan: Experiencing Style
For young students, this is a good first experience with style. Older students will be ready sooner to participate in stylistic comparisons of more than one arrangement of the same song.
Through participation in this lesson, students will begin to develop a sensitivity to stylistic and interpretational differences between different settings and performances of a particular work, in this case, between their own performance and a "professional" recording of a concert work. Students should be encouraged to express their personal impressions and interpretations of what they hear. In their comparisons and discussions, students should be encouraged to make note of the ways in which the differences in characteristics between the two performances produce differences in affective character.
“Bought Me A Cat” is a traditional American folk song appears in the literature in several different melodic settings. The versions appearing in this lesson are one of the traditional folk settings and a concert setting for solo voice and orchestra written by the American composer, Aaron Copland, in 1950.
Suggested Recording:
Long Time Ago: American Songs by Aaron Copland by Dawn Upshaw and
Thomas Hampson.
The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra under Hugh Wolff
© 1994, Teldec Classics International, Time Warner
9031 - 77310 - 2
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Lesson Plan: Experiencing Style
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Lesson Plan: Experiencing Style
Materials:National Standards: 1, 2, 4, 6, 7
Aaron Copland (1900-1990): "I Bought Me a Cat" from Old American SongsGrade: 1 or 2 or older, if carried out differently
“Bought Me A Cat” (folk song)
Pictures of the various animals in the song: cat, hen, duck, cow, dog, horse
Lesson Assumes:Organization:
Students have had some prior experiences listening to music and describing what they hear. Whole group performance and listening problem.
Objective:
To introduce the idea that a piece of music might be performed in different ways, and to help students begin to determine what some of those ways might be.
Assessment:
Students will show their understanding of the comparison through their comments and suggestions throughout the discussion phase of the lesson and through developing their own arrangement of the folk song.
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Lesson Plan: Experiencing Style
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Guide students in discovering the differences between their own performance and that on the recording. They may need to listen a second or third time in order to find them all. As students discuss the comparison of their own performance to the Copland setting, some of the differences they note might be:
•different melodic contour
•some lyrics and animal sounds are different
•different vocal timbres (adult male voice as opposed to children’s voices, also singer uses his voice in ways that imitate animal sounds)
•texture (accompanied solo voice as opposed to classroom ensemble singing)
•accompaniment (orchestral vs. either no accompaniment or guitar, piano, or whatever was used during the classroom performance)
•tempo changes (soloist sometimes utilizes ritard and accellerando at various points in the performance)
•dynamic changes
•(and more)
Once a list has been formulated, talk about the differences with the students. What kinds of effects do the various stylistic and interpretational differences have on the listener?
Encourage the students to formulate their own stylized arrangements of the song. You might ask the large group to work together to make suggestions and decisions about a large group performance. With more mature students, it is also possible to divide the class into small groups and ask each to develop its own arrangement and either teach that arrangement to the class or rehearse and perform the arrangement for the class.
Extension:
On another day, you might show the students iconic representations of the phrases, “Fiddle-dee-dee,” “Chipsy-chopsy,” and “Moo-moo,” as follows:
Ask students to figure out which is which, and then which other animal sounds in the song these icons also represent. [There are only three patterns used for the animal sounds in the song as they sang it.] Students might then try to figure out how to play the animal sounds on step-bells or xylophones, and then try to play only the animal sounds in the appropriate places in the context of a class performance of the song.
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