Explorations of Kinesthetic Analogues for Musical Schemes.
Veronika Cohen · Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education · 1997
Many years ago serendipity and a class of exceptionally (i.e., wild) fourth graders led me to a new pedagogical tool: mirrors as a kinesthetic analogue for musical schemas (mental organizers). All my professional life as a music educator, I have relied consistently on movement as a pedagogical tool, both as a means of apprehension and as a means of self-expression. In methodology courses, I spent much time exploring with students ways to use movement for teaching and for expressing musical ideas, not precise aspects of the text, as is done by Dalcroze practitioners, but rather those aspects that express the mind's organizing activity: groupings (e.g., closure), hierarchy of groupings, change and return, direction of musical movement, expectation generation, gratification, and so forth. For many years I felt a growing doubt that, whereas it is necessary in teaching to focus attention on particular aspects of the experience (that is to move back and forth between analysis and synthesis), there is a danger in the child's focusing on one aspect at the expense of others. It may be argued that the child's own instinctive musicality will provide a movement solution to a particular musical problem that is based on a total apprehension. Nevertheless, it was unsatisfying to me that the teaching was taking place almost exclusively at the level of analysis and not that of synthesis. In other words, the teacher communicates to the child particular aspects of the music, but is unable to communicate the fact that what makes any event significant is the contextual role it plays in the whole. Because I firmly believe that teacher educators need to work continuously with children, each year I teach several classes of children in which my students come to observe how I practice what I preach. Israeli children are not the easiest to deal with under the best of circumstances, but one year I encountered a particularly energetic class of fourth graders with a particularly tired and fed-up homeroom teacher. No movement with this class, she announced at the first class of the year. You get them up and moving and then they are wild the whole day and I can't deal with them. My students were shocked and fascinated by this drama. you going to take a different class? Are you going to give up movement? Are you going to fight the teacher on this? My answer pleased and excited them: We will do movement without getting them out of their chairs. All were curious to see how that could be done, but none more so than I. What on earth did I mean?