I had this idea years before having the opportunity to launch it here in Port Alice. I am a private professional music instructor, and I moved here a year ago to retire. I learned there was no music instructor in Port Alice at all. My housemate told me he’d learned there was a local group that had been discussing a community grant that was available to apply for that would benefit the community, and was inviting ideas. So I talked to him about my idea for a children’s music class, and he brought it forward to the committee, and they loved it! My housemate wrote the grant application, and once it was approved, I met with their committee to discuss details and make a task sheet. We decided on the minimum number of children to run the program, and we got just enough interest to make it viable!
I ordered small percussion instruments and came up with a class plan. The course ran once a week, on Friday afternoons after school, for an hour. Primarily, I taught them to listen for a play-along with a “beat”. I explained how music is different from noise, even though it’s all sound, by being organized into regular sequential units of time. For this purpose, I introduced and worked with a metronome with them, a machine that does exactly that and measures regular units of time. There was quite a bit of emphasis on training one’s ears to continually listen while playing, to the beat, to oneself, and to each other.
As we started working on putting together a song. I introduced the element of musical “pitch”, via a tuned piano. In one class I brought in a digital tuning app so they could see how the note their voice made compared with the pitch from the piano. That was an eye-opener! The objective was to match one’s voice to the note. This is easier said than done for beginners! I changed the emphasis on the rhythm of the lyrics in relation to the beat.
During the last few classes, we got focused on putting together a complete song, with me singing and all of us playing percussion on “bucket drums”. An opportunity to share music with the community in a Christmas concert arose, and the children were gung-ho to participate! So we worked out an arrangement of Little Drummer Boy. As of this writing, the course is officially complete, but I am offering one more tutorial a little later this month of December 2024, and then the concert, to finally complete the project.
The parents have been completely supportive, and through the upcoming community concert, can be proud of their children for showing what they have learned thus far. My hope has been to plant the seed of inspiration and motivation to continue music education and the discipline and joy of learning to make music in these families, as it’s possible to become a lifelong pursuit (as it has for me!), and is best to be kindled in childhood. It has been a joy and pleasure to work with these youngsters in the introduction of learning music!
