MUH6515: Musics of the World Listening Journal (von Jena)

In my 7th and 8th grade chorus classes, we are working on a version of Jingle Bells that switches time signatures almost every other measure (focusing on 6/8, 4/8, and 3/8). I chose this arrangement because I wanted to challenge them to understand a sense of time outside of a single three or four beat pattern. Most of the music that my students listen to falls within the four-beat pattern, so it is difficult for them to access music outside of that classification. As we know, music (especially in other cultures) is not solely classified into groups of four or three (or even a single steady beat pattern in a piece). When preparing to teach this piece to my students, I immediately had flashbacks to my undergrad world music class when we were learning South Indian Tala  and Solkattu  and bouncing around different beat patterns back to back. We also read about this in chapter 3 of the Wade (2013) text. Although I have not approached my students with the solkattu  syllables ...

This is my listening journal for the Musics of the World class at UFL! As we are beginning this course by reflecting on the world music experiences we incorporate in our own classrooms, I thought I would share a video from my classroom. In my school we offer Mandarin as a foreign language, so there is a lot of outreach to the Chinese Culture. The performer in this video is Professor Yue Yuan from Bryant University. She came in and did a vocal demonstration for all of the music classes and performed several Chinese Folk Songs. I cannot remember the exact title of this piece, but you will hear her describe the piece at the beginning of the video. This video was recorded in February of 2015. I believe that experiences like this are so valuable to our students as they are not regularly exposed to authentic world music experiences. Unfortunately we can not always bring in outside musicians to our classrooms on a regular basis, but this does create an opportunity for students to connec...