DECATUR, Ill. (AP) - Savannah Riestenberg’s instrument is her voice.
When Bryan Powell put her on the drum kit at the Little Kids Rock workshop held at Millikin University, she’d never tried playing the drums before.
“How did it feel?” he asked, after walking her through a simple rock beat.
“It was awesome,” she said.
Powell is director of programs for Amp Up NYC, a partnership between the Berklee College of Music and Little Kids Rock, curriculum for guiding students through the basics of performing popular music on guitar, bass, drums, keyboard and vocals. The workshop was held for both Millikin’s music education majors and Decatur schools’ music teachers, who were using a professional development day to attend.
Tom Miller teaches at Johns Hill Magnet School, where music includes a guitar class.
“I don’t usually do the bass or the drums or anything,” Miller said. “I just never thought about it. I do a little of this without some of the language that (Powell) uses. I’ve taken notes on some ways I could maybe sequence my instruction a little better and how I’d like to do it. I’m pretty fortunate because I have 18 or 20 guitars in my classroom. It’ll be kind of neat this year to try supplementing a little bit more with what we learned today.”
The trick to teaching modern band and popular music, Powell said, is to provide as much instruction as necessary, but not too much.
“What is the minimum amount of instruction to still have success in this lesson?” he said.
While teaching kids music theory along with technique is important, making it fun is important, too. He proved that by teaching a simple bass line that alone was boring and repetitive, but when he showed them that by playing it backward, and along with Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused,” they were playing a song, that all changed, and heads bobbed in time all over the room.
“Some might say you’re ’just playing rock music,’ but all of a sudden, it’s totally cool,” he said.
Neal Smith, associate professor of music education at Millikin, has held rock band camps for kids and helped with pilot programs in some Decatur schools, such as Dennis, Johns Hill and Holy Family. His hope, he said, was that the teachers who attended the workshop would start programs in their schools and the idea would spread.
“It kind of speaks for itself that we have a whole school district that has a professional development day and they’ve chosen to be here, to do this, to widen the door to music participation,” Powell said. “A lot of the teachers here might not identify as a guitar player or whatever, and we’ve given them an approach to how they might include it in the classroom, not to replace the thing they’re doing, but in addition to that, to get more students into school music.”
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Source: (Decatur) Herald & Review, https://bit.ly/2fCGhXs
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Information from: Herald & Review, https://www.herald-review.com
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