Harmony with the Glockenspiel

This was one of the most focused and fruitful classes we've had all year at Birkdale. Starting off with our regular physical warmup, we got straight into vocal warmups, diving the kids into three tables, having them sing the solfege notes of a major chord separately, and then explored singing them together. The kids were curious to hear themselves, so I recorded the sound of their singing and played it back to them. I think it made a big difference to their approach toward making music collectively once they could hear the sound in its totality. I also made use of the whiteboard in the room to show them a bit of notation (some seemed into it, others a bit less so, but I wanted to introduce the concept). We looked at how chords are visualized, and the distinction between harmony and melody. We jumped off of this by playing out those major chord notes on the glockenspiel. First we explored C-E-G in any configuration, then we tried doing things rhythmically in sync. I wanted to finish off with some structured improvisation, so I directed them to play only the sharp notes on the glockenspiel (which have a tendency to always sound good together in any configuration), alternating between free playing and synced playing on the 1st beat. We got some really beautiful harmony out of those glockenspiels! We finished off with a show and tell of anything the kids wanted to perform for the rest of the group, and a few kids had some sweet dance moves they wanted to show off. There was a very good feeling in the air when I left!