Phoebe’s perception of the principles and processes of the Orff approach 112

from many years of experience that it goes somewhere.’

4.4.2 Phoebe’s perception of the principles and processes of the Orff approach

For Phoebe the Orff approach was a creative approach to music and movement education, the principles of which offered the possibility of a nuanced response to specific teaching contexts through the use of specific processes, strategies and material.

She viewed the role of the teacher within the Orff approach as facilitating

equitable participation in movement and music-making, where students were able to experience both being a leader (director) and a follower (member of a group). The teacher was not always ‘in charge’ but nevertheless had the responsibility of providing a safe structure within which artistic movement and music-making experiences occurred.

For Phoebe, the approach offered specific strategies and processes as a means of structuring such learning experiences. Excluding the rating (5.00) given to the relevance of the Orff approach to reading and writing notation (which will be discussed in Chapter 5), Phoebe’s highest overall mean rating for relevance (4.67) was for questionnaire items related to the use of Typical structures. This indicates that she consistently considered structures such as question and answer, rondo and

canon, as either “highly” or “very relevant” to her teaching situation. Similarly her mean score for questionnaire items related to Typical tonalities (4.20) indicated that she considered the processes in this category as mostly “highly” or “very relevant” and were used by Phoebe in her school context to give structure and meaning:

Within the structure of the pentatonic you can have a bordun, a little melody and you can bring in improvisation – there’s a place for children to explore but within a structure that is quite comprehensive…that is a very strong concept to be able to improvise when you are six, seven or fifty and you don't know anything about music…It gives sense. It’s meaningful…and it is also open ended.

All items in the category Typical singing and speaking activities (mean 4.33) were rated by Phoebe as either “highly” or “very relevant”. All items except “the

integrated use of proverbs and sayings” found application in her context at some time. She indicated that her experience of the Orff approach had encouraged her to emphasise the ‘joy of singing and movement’ through the use of action songs, songs with body percussion, and songs with movement. ‘In my classroom, students are very happy to sing and move.’

Similarly all items in Typical instrumental activities (mean 4.20) also were rated by Phoebe as “highly” or “very relevant” to her teaching context. She said that she integrated the use of tuned and untuned percussion in her classroom and that she was also building a resource bank of a wide range of other percussion

instruments, such as boom whackers, djembe and found sounds such as rocks, shells, clay pots, home-made shakers, and so on. Such instruments facilitated the elemental music-making that she saw at the heart of the Orff approach.

As a result of her experiences in the approach, Phoebe reported that she valued the role the recorder could play in ensemble music-making. In the typical Orff

ensemble, the piercing sound of the recorder blends well with the timbre of wooden and metal barred instruments. She saw the recorder as an instrument for exploration, not only for improvisation within pentatonic modes that matched the key range of the barred instruments (C, F & G), but also for the exploration of unconventional sounds and for the contribution these can make to improvised soundscapes. It was important, she thought, to ‘get away from just rote learning a

For Phoebe, an elemental approach to music education, as exemplified in the Orff approach, was one in which simple ideas, or faculties ‘natural to all human beings’ such as the feeling of a regular pulse generated by our physical being, or the awareness of our breath in a simple gesture, are elements that can be explored, built upon, transformed and changed, in a process of imitation, exploration and creation. In movement work, Phoebe typically began with such elemental, ‘naturally felt’ experiences, or with something that was already known, such as ‘make a round shape’ rather than ‘put your hand up here and your leg here and so on’.

The open-ended nature of the Orff approach also demanded of Phoebe attentive observation of her students in order to make judgments about ‘where they were at’ and ‘what you (the teacher) need to do to take them somewhere new’. For

Phoebe, this contributed in part to her overall sense that the ‘Orff approach to teaching music and movement was an art’.

4.4.3 Phoebe: The Orff approach in action

Phoebe’s classroom was a large, multi-functional, carpeted space with high ceilings, effective lighting, good acoustics, huge storage cupboards and attractive displays, including photographs of performances, artwork and posters. The room was well equipped with a range of tuned and untuned percussion instruments,

ukuleles, guitars, drums and a piano. For the lesson I was to observe, a varied array of instruments was laid out on a coloured cloth to one side of the room.

4.4.3.1 The planned focus for the lesson

Phoebe indicated that her intention was to have students work in groups to

compose a piece based on a narrative with visuals incorporating the recorder

with tuned and untuned percussion using unconventional and/or conventional

sounds. The previous week the students worked in groups to compose a piece

about a machine, using only recorder sounds.

4.4.3.2 The lesson

When the Y4 class of 5 boys and 10 girls arrived, they sat on a carpeted area in front of Phoebe with their recorders. Without speaking, Phoebe pointed to pitch letter names on a visual cue known as a ‘G pentatonic pitch stack’. in which the letter note names D E G A B C and D were vertically represented. Beginning with

G she moved her pointer mostly in a stepwise movement from one note to the next directing the students following along to play an 8-beat phrase. Pausing after each 8-beat phrase, she continued directing the students this way for three or four more 8-beat phrases. A nearby student assisted one student, who was struggling to finger the notes correctly, while the rest of the class continued to play with the teacher.

Phoebe then asked the students to listen and observe her playing single notes as she demonstrated good tone and correct fingering technique. She asked the

students to echo particular notes, and asked them to listen as they played to check that their sound matched the sounds around them. This was helpful to the

struggling student, who needed to revise particular finger shapes. However, there

was no attention drawn to this and, with the ongoing support of her friend, she started to finger the notes correctly.

Phoebe then offered the role of musical director (i.e., the person who points to the notes on the pitch stack to make an 8-beat phrase) to a student. She indicated that he/she needed to shape a pleasing, 8-beat phrase by starting on G, ending on G, and moving mostly in step-wise motion. Students willingly took turns as leader and, regardless of who was leading, were attentively engaged in the task. Revising work from the previous lesson, Phoebe asked her students to

demonstrate to the class some of the interesting sounds that they had discovered using their recorders in unconventional ways. The students enthusiastically shared

all sorts of interesting sounds, which were invariably met with interest and keen

curiosity as to the means of production. Phoebe then explained that they were going to have the opportunity to use their recorders, as well as other instruments to create a soundscape to accompany the story The Fish of Māui.

She showed a simplified version of this story, which consisted of pictures and an accompanying soundtrack. After one viewing, Phoebe and students discussed the story identifying the following sections:

• Introduction

• Throwing out of hook and waiting • Hook dropping

On the second viewing, Phoebe turned off the soundtrack and asked the students to imagine their own soundtrack, using some of the recorder sounds and other instruments of their choosing. As they watched, they spontaneously began to

contribute ideas for the accompanying soundscape. Phoebe then invited students

to form self-selected groups of three or four. The students immediately focused on talking about how they wished to play the recorder and/or which instruments they wanted to use. Gradually they started gathering the instruments of their choice. They spent about fifteen minutes experimenting, discussing and settling on instruments and sounds for their part of the soundscape. Phoebe circulated

between groups, listening and prompting with questions such as, ‘What’s the next step?’ ‘How can we improve this?’

Asking the students to use the pictures on the screen as a score or cue, Phoebe directed the four groups to play their soundscape. She reminded them that they needed to be ready to play their part so that there were no ‘gaps’ in the sound, and that they needed to know when to stop. They watched the screen carefully and very effectively judged when to begin and when to stop playing:

• Māui appears: Recorder unison on single pitch, low xylophone pitches and rattle • Throwing out of hook and waiting: Recorder whistling, bass bar pulse and guiro • Hook dropping: Descending melody on metallophone, with water drum and pulse

on hand drum

• The island slowly appears: Ascending melody on metallophone and ocean drum.

As they played and/or listened to others, their attention was fully engaged. At the end of the performance, Phoebe indicated her appreciation of their soundscape in general terms and then asked the students if there was anything they wanted to say about the process. Students made comments such as, ‘It is hard to play low notes on the recorder,’ ‘I can make the notes very soft and it sounds good,’ and ‘Even if you don't have much time you can still make up a cool piece of music.’

4.4.3.3 Phoebe’s reflection

Phoebe was pleased with the way all students had ‘participated fully and

enthusiastically’ in this second compositional activity. She was particularly

impressed by the group dynamics: ‘I liked the way the students spoke and listened to each other, and that they were trying things, discussing their ideas and building something, composing something.’ She indicated that in her lessons she often

asked for student input and they were usually forthcoming and confident with their ideas but that she had not used a visual stimulus or a narrative sequence for

a soundscape with this group before. She was pleased with the structure and motivation this had provided. She had thought that the warm-up on the recorder might have resulted in students composing little melodies in G pentatonic as part of the soundscape, but in retrospect she concluded that they needed further structured learning experiences in melodic improvisation on the recorder to confidently call upon this skill when improvising or composing soundscapes.