I'm doing my first ever Webinar next week!
It's for the ISM and entitled 'Teaching the child of our time.... the challenges of the digital age' Here's a link about it....
And if you'd like to join in, here's another link....
During the talk I will be briefly alluding to the Simultaneous Learning Map of the Musical World.
If you'd like a copy, click the button to download...
Hope to see you next Tuesday!
I occasionally get asked by people searching for a teacher, if I know any who teach using the Simultaneous Learning approach. Conversations with many teachers all around the world suggest that many do, but I thought I might try to put together an ‘informal’ directory. If you are a Simultaneous Learning teacher (to whatever degree!) and would like to be included in this directory (and therefore agree for your details to be shared) let me know - will just need name and a point of contact (email, website, phone no etc). Will then put something together on my new website.
Many thanks!
Do get in touch here or use my email: pauldavidharris@icloud.com
Do share if you know of other interested teachers.
Was delighted to have been invited to Slovenia last weekend to speak at a conference for flute players and teachers.
Those who attended traveled from all over Slovenia and neighbouring Serbia and Slovakia. I was very touched by their warmth and kindness. It was run by the wonderful Ana Pucihar and her husband Blaz, who ABRSM followers will know for his 'Playful Pony' presently set on flute Grade 5.
There wasn't much time for sightseeing, but I did enjoy a short tour of the tiny capital Ljubljana and was treated to a delicious apple crumble ice cream! Also to some street musicians playing some national folk music - a small extract is below - inexpertly filmed on my iPhone! The conference was held in a very beautiful 1000 year old castle.
I spoke about Simultaneous Learning, which many of the teachers there already knew about and found their questions afterwards insightful and penetrating.
I'm now looking forward to another visit!
Welcome to my new website! We’ve updated the look, and there’s more content (and as the weeks go by we shall be adding even more!) But I would like to say a big thank you to Tim Wray, who created and looked after the old website.
The great thing about this new website is that it is much more interactive. I'll be updating my new blog on a regular basis adding reflection on teaching, music education and other matters . The new blog is fully active allowing you to leave messages (something the old one wouldn’t do) and so there is much more possibility for engaging in conversation (be it virtual!) with me and other readers.
So do let me know what you think and do use the website for asking questions, telling stories, and posing musical and teaching conundrums.
Looking forward to lots of interaction!
Very best wishes,
It recently occurred to me that a really special quality of the Simultaneous Learning teacher is to be able, simultaneously, to give an instruction and be aware of its likely effect.
I’ve written (and spoken) often of the importance of our response-ability – that ability to notice (accurately) the reaction of our pupil to our last instruction and then (though sensitive and focussed observation and judgement) deliver an appropriate next instruction. This is simply taking that just a little further.
The bit between our pupils doing things usually has two elements – a reaction to what they just did, and the setting up of what they are to do next. The virtuoso SL teacher will simultaneously
- respond appropriately and also…
- be aware of the effect of that response
It’s multitasking on quite a low level – but will reap very positive rewards.
Alan Richardson
It’s always very exciting when an unexpected cache of compositions suddenly emerge. A friend of mine recently got in touch to tell me that over twenty unknown and unpublished clarinet pieces by the composer Alan Richardson had just been discovered.
You may know Alan Richardson through his delightful piece Roundelay – pastoral, quintessentially English (though Richardson was actually born in Scotland) with just a hint of Poulenc! It’s been recorded by both Reginald Kell and Gervase De Peyer and I play it often. Alan Richardson was born on February 29th 1904. He spent his 18th birthday (in 1972!) with Christopher Regan, who was Director of Studies at the Royal Academy of Music when Alan was a professor there. I’ve just been speaking to Christopher who remembered Alan very well. Alan, he recalled, was a charming Scotsman, excellent pianist, dedicated teacher, a highly respected examiner, married to oboist Janet Craxton and composer of many very attractive and charming character pieces as well as a number of larger scales works. The portfolio of clarinet pieces I’ve been given actually contains thirty-five pieces in all, written between July and November 1976. Three of them are unfinished. They range from short and simple ‘teaching’ pieces to slightly longer and more flamboyant concert works. I have asked my friend, the clarinettist Jean Cockburn (Jean and I gave a performance of the Krommer Double Concerto recently) to edit these and my intention is to publish them as The Alan Richardson Collection in four volumes.
The reason Alan devoted quite so much of the second half of 1976 to composing for the clarinet is rather unclear. This was obviously a major project which never reached fruition. There is some really enchanting music here – all of it well written and some of it rather quirky, making for a valuable addition to the repertoire. I’m hoping to have it ready for publication in the Spring of 2012.
As a member of the British Music Society I was thrilled the other day to receive the latest journal which brought news of the release of a new CD: English Music for Clarinet and Piano, played by Nicholas Cox and Ian Buckle. It’s a very interesting collection indeed and I rang Nicholas up right away to have a chat about it. Included are the Three Nocturnes by Iain Hamilton (which makes the title of the CD not strictly accurate – like Alan Richardson, Hamilton was a Scot!) This work is very strongly linked with my own teacher John Davies, and it’s great to see it finally receiving its first recording (as far as I know anyway). Then there is the Sonata by Roger Fiske, a pupil of Herbert Howells, The Duo Concertante by Richard Rodney Bennett and Hugh Wood’s Paraphrase on Bird of Paradise. Finally Nicholas has included the Arnold Bax Sonata. Happily it’s a work that has become central in the repertoire, but Nicholas has undertaken a lot of new research and discovered much of interest, especially about the phrasing and certain passages in the second movement. I haven’t received a copy yet, but he tells me that the 20-page booklet that accompanies the CD reveals much of interest. The CD is available in the US via Allegro Classical distributors or directly from the BMS by sending a US cheque for $16 made out to S C Trowell at 7, Tudor Gardens, Upminster. Essex, RM14 3DE, UK.
Another new CD contains virtually the complete clarinet music of Richard Rodney Bennett (which means a second recording of the Duo Concertante). This is yet a further disc from the hugely energetic Victoria Soames (accompanied by Michael Bell) and I was lucky enough to be present at the recording sessions up at the studios at Keele University. I was there for three days and on one of them Victoria worked almost continually from about 9 o’clock in the morning to 2 o’clock the next morning! Among the works included is the very beautiful and accessible Quintet for Clarinet and Strings. Given an opportunity to perform a quintet we do so often fall back on the Mozart or Brahms (and of course those are usually the most requested). But at just over a quarter of an hour running time, why not try to slip in the Bennett too. I think audiences would really appreciate the chance to hear something new and highly engaging. The CD is a must for your collection and available on Clarinet Classics – CC0064.
I’m just off to do an all-Elgar concert: Enigma Variations, Music Makers and the Bavarian Dances. Amazing to think that John Davies (with whom I had a cup of tea yesterday) knew Elgar! His father (John Davies senior) used to teach Elgar the violin and as a young lad John would answer the door to the great composer regularly on a Sunday afternoon...
It was first performed by the Ealing Symphony Orchestra, conducted by John Gibbons and narrated by John Griff at the 8th Malcolm Arnold Festival in Northampton on October 19th 2013. I'm rather pleased with it and it's going to be available for sale (Queen's Temple Publications) soon. Should make a great item for any concert for young people. Although it's known as a Wind Quintet, the first version was in fact for violin, clarinet and tuba! There's a wonderful performance of it with the legendary Robert Hardy doing the narration on Victoria Soames Samek great CD.
Iain Hamilton with John Davies
After much fascinating work and research, I am now able (all permissions formally granted!) to post the first movement of the Iain Hamilton Clarinet Quintet, Op.2 played by John Davies with the Aeolean Quartet as broadcast in March 1950 on the BBC.
Amazingly the quality is very good. It was transferred from a set of really poor 78s and I didn't think it would be possible. They were in a severe state of decay and disintegration! But I found an expert who has done a truly magnificent job and so we can now hear this rarely played work in a very rare recording – I have the rest of the work (which I hope to post eventually), and together with the slow movement of the Mozart Quintet, this is about all we have of JD actually playing. It’s a moving and dark work – it really deserves to be known and John plays it beautifully.
I have written a longer article about the Quintet and all about this recording for the next edition of the ICA Magazine.
Paul Harris discusses the fascinating (and sometimes enigmatic) side of music that we know as music theory.
When thinking of ‘theorists’ – those who indulge in the study of theory as a career for example – we probably imagine a group of very earnest and rather solemn-looking scholars sitting at desks, surrounded by books and thinking, occasionally committing their deep thoughts to paper and publishing them in weighty tomes. Such people live in a land far away from those of us who spend most of our time at the coalface, teaching our pupils to play music. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take the odd trip into their world. We may learn fascinating things. In very general terms, Music Theory is about what makes music work. It’s the story behind the notes; it concerns all the stuff that falls in that area that is ‘about’ music.
In this article I’d like to look at the theory and history behind some of the areas we usually think of as music theory and uncover some other areas that don’t often make their way into theory exams. And in the next article we’re going to return to some of those topics often assembled together in those ‘theory exams’ and explore how they can support our practical work and look at ways of incorporating them in our regular teaching.
So let’s begin with sound. After all, music is sound (or ‘organised sound’ as many theory definitions would have it), so it would seem reasonable for musicians to want to know something about it. There’s much to learn about how we actually hear the sounds our instruments make – how the ear and brain processes these magical vibrations and turns them into music that can affect us so much. There’s the whole fascinating area of harmonics (yes, harmonics really can be fascinating!) – which are present in all sounds and the reason behind why different instruments actually sound different. Did you know that there is one instrument (possibly more than one) that produces no harmonics (or overtones)? This gives that particular instrument it’s very distinctive sound. (All will be revealed in the next article.)
The harmonic series (that naturally occurring series of notes that are linked mathematically to any fundamental tone) also has an interesting bearing on the way harmony has developed and goes at least part way to unlocking the reason why music in a major key sounds happy and in a minor key sounds sad. Then there’s the vast subject of tuning and temperament, an area of music theory that Bach himself was particularly interested in. If he hadn’t have been, we may never have got the ‘48’ and music may have developed in quite a different manner.
What about all our various scale patterns and the intervals we can divide them into? How did all that come about? Some say it’s all the result of a certain blacksmith and his occasional visitor, the great philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, some time round about 400BC. Pythagoras realised that the size of the hammer (hitting the anvil) caused sounds of different pitches and that these sizes and their pitches were related. He worked out all sorts of mathematical connections – which is probably where the age-old connection between music and mathematics began. The origins of all the millions and millions of scales that we play with such varying degrees of pleasure, began their life in that little Greek island of Samos in the eastern Aegean Sea. It ought to be a regular place of pilgrimage for all musicians!
And had you ever wondered why we split the perfect octave up into twelve units? If you keep going round the circle of fifths from a C you will eventually land back there 12 notes later. Hence the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. But in fact it needn’t have been twelve. It turns out that twelve is simply a number of pitch sub-divisions that the human ear can organise with reasonable ease. And each of those semitone intervals is divided into 100 cents, although of course it isn’t always 100 cents as those with a knowledge of different temperaments will know! And that, on a very practical level, is where things get really interesting. For a real sensitivity to (and knowledge of) fine tuning begins to open up the huge and wonderful world of pitch nuance. How should we tune that leading note – a little up or down? Which would be the more expressive? Where exactly does a minor third fit into a perfect fifth to make a really meaningful minor chord? Is D sharp the same as E flat? It isn’t! There’s not much we can do about it on the piano, but for all non-fixed pitch instruments (and voices) we can begin to produce and savour some very expressive and evocative sounds.
What about the great Hucbald the One-legged? He wrote perhaps the first book on music theory (sometime around 900 and a must-read for all theory enthusiasts) and was responsible for rationalising musical symbols, many of which we still use today. And we mustn’t forget Guido d’Arrezo’s ‘Guidonian Hand’ – perhaps the first attempt at a ‘fun’ way to learn to sight-sing. Guido is another medieval theorist and is regarded as the inventor of modern musical notation.
And I wonder if you’ve ever thought about why is the treble clef so called? Here’s the (perhaps unexpected) answer: in early contrapuntal music the tune was usually in the tenor accompanied by an alto line. Sometimes there was a third line too, higher in pitch and called the treble (the third line). Here are a couple more: why is a stave made up of five lines? What is the golden section and why were Debussy and Bartók so fascinated by it? Such questions are seemingly endless and represent just the tip of the iceberg (my allotted number of words hasn’t allowed me to answer them here – but I hope you’ll be inspired to go off on your own voyage of discovery!). Some of them really can help us in our teaching (to a certain degree anyway) and some of them not so much. But they are all interesting and many of our pupils may be truly fired up by having their imaginations guided in these unusual directions.
In fact if we think of Music Theory as being all about firing our pupils imaginations, it turns it into a very different beast. Theory is about discovering and understanding all those things that lie behind so much of what goes on in our lessons. You don’t need to know how an engine works to get about in your car – but it can make a big difference if you do.
Paul Harris considers... playing scales (part 2)...
When I used to run a music department there was one particular teacher who simply wouldn’t teach scales. She disliked them so much that she absolutely refused to teach them. I ended up having to teach her pupils their scales and it wasn’t even my instrument. And to make matters worse, the pupils knew their teacher’s view. So I began with a massive disadvantage! Even those who didn’t really know what scales were, thought of them as somehow evil. I certainly had my work cut out to find ways of making them palatable.
I’m a great believer in the process being more important than the outcome. In this case the outcome was learning some scales (for some, learning scales for an exam). The process was to be concerned with introducing the idea of scales and scale learning and that process needed to be imaginative, relevant and fun. So I began to develop a method where actually playing the scale would come at the end of what I hoped would be an interesting and, yes, an agreeable journey.
So we began with thinking about what a scale is. It’s a collection of notes that form the building materials of a piece of music. So which scale to begin with? Simple – our own scales. Each pupil was sent home to create their own scale. They could choose any five notes (which included flats and sharps as long as they could play them). Some wrote their scales down, other remembered them. We enjoyed hearing each pupil’s collections of notes which were named after themselves – Robert’s Scale, Sally’s Scale... We hadn’t necessarily put the notes into alphabetical order yet. Their next assignment was to make up a short piece based on the notes of their scale. That seemed to go down well too. Again, we enjoyed hearing the interesting pieces based on each pupil’s made-up scale. Then they wrote their scales down and went home to make up another short piece, but this time based on a friend’s scale. Once more, the results were most enjoyable.
They had, straight away, taken on the idea that scales were okay – even fun – and that they formed the basis of pieces. Next we had a look at someone else’s scale, and the obvious choice was a pentatonic scale – just like theirs. So we learnt to play the pentatonic scale and some little pieces I found based on it. We took some of the other ingredients out of the pieces (rhythms, dynamic and articulation markings) and applied these to the scale. It seemed a sensible thing to do to make practising it more interesting. And they agreed.
So now to make the leap to the scales of the pieces they were learning. We looked at the pieces carefully, decided on the scale used and spotted patterns in the music. Were there any technical issues to consider? If there were we created some short exercises to help overcome these. Then we improvised in the key: call and response sort of activities, always being careful only to use notes of the scale. We added other ingredients. Then I found some short studies in the key based on the scale patterns. Next we attempted to play, by ear and in the key, phrases from pieces they knew – the first phrase of Jingle Bells, the opening phrase from EastEnders. Eventually we decided that all technical problems had been overcome and the notes were well known. It was time to perform the scale. As a preliminary, the note names were said out loud – up and down. Then one or two ingredients were added from the piece – a dynamic and a character for example. Finally we had reached our outcome, a performance of the scale, played with relevance and good will. The process had been fun and imaginative. The outcome – playing the scale accurately, with character and with some real satisfaction – had been achieved.
I tell this story because there are many ways to teach and learn scales. If we teach them dryly and only because they have to be learnt and played at some distant event (an exam for example) there is little joy to be had. If it’s felt there is not enough time to devote to such teaching, then perhaps it’s necessary to decide why we’re in such a hurry. Scales are important; they are the building blocks of both pieces and technique and can be quite pleasant, to teach and to learn, if approached with a little imagination.
