Composing with the Pentatonic Scale and Junior Strings Camp
How has your summer been going so far? Mine has been really such a joy – I’m already looking at almost half the summer being gone and wishing I could have more time with my schedule this season. So far I’ve been able to consolidate one of my studios down to one day a week, which has freed up so much time for me to be able to working on a website overhaul, more consistent blogging and creating new teaching resources for the upcoming school year. I’ve been contacting some local venues about where I might be able to hold group classes in the future and I am trying to figure out how I can get all my local music teachers together. Remember when I said that community was one of my five words for 2019? I’m hoping I’m getting closer to finding a solution that can really benefit all private teachers in my area for the sake of collaboration and support. I’m so appreciative to my Shepherdstown students who helped free the time to make this happen, thank you for your summer flexibility.
Even though we’re only a couple weeks into summer, one of my favorite summer activities has already taken place! The Shepherd Community Music Program’s summer camps have already come and gone. From June 17th to 21st both the Junior Strings Camp and Senior Orchestra Camp were held in the Frank Arts Center of Shepherd University, while the Jazz Camps were held the following week. This was the second year for the Junior Strings camp and I was floored by the kind, creative and intelligent students who attended my portion of the camp. Today I wanted to share the composition exercise we completed this year that was based on the Pentatonic Scale. Hopefully you can turn it into something you can use with your students!
The first day of camp I led students through the D and G major scales by having both written up on the board in treble, alto and bass clef. Since the students enrolled in camp come from a variety of backgrounds where some take private lessons, some are in orchestra classrooms and some get a mixture of both, I felt these scales best suited the skills I anticipated the students would have while matching our material for the week. After referencing the scales several times through the day, we ended the day with me erasing all the notes on the board outside of the pentatonic scale and asked students to play a drone D as I played the scale. I demonstrated the scale over top their drone to give an example of how the notes don’t clash and then asked the students to play up and down the scale with me. I also emphasized the lack of half steps in the scale as we tried a variety of rhythms together. Before ending the day students were invited to take over the scale as a solo, while the rest of the orchestra continued to hold out the drone. I was so impressed with how the students were willing to experiment a bit!
On our second day, I provided students with a worksheet with the information we’d covered the day before and a sample of the pentatonic scale based on C. Again the scale was written in all three clefs so all students could easily access the information and also see examples of the clefs other instruments use as well. You can see this worksheet here:
I had student volunteers read through the information aloud as a review and then guided the group through playing the scale in a similar manner to what we had done the day before. Just like our first day, my group quickly seemed to grasp the material so we moved onto the back quickly.
The back provided six different measures that matched up to the six sides of standard pieces of dice. One of my favorite class props is a large foam dice I picked up at Five and Below, but you can find a similar prop on Amazon. Going around the room, each student had the chance to roll the dice and match it up to the provided measure. Gradually we created our own 16 measure song as a group, which looked a little like this!
The students had a blast because everyone got a turn and since we completed the task as a group, I was able to answer questions and clarify any concerns as we went. By walking around the room as everyone was copying down the song on their own piece of paper, I could also see which students felt comfortable writing out notes and who was struggling. At the end of the second day, I asked students to go home and write their own 8 measure song. Some students really got into this activity and it led to one student really writing their own tune using their own rhythms and pitches only from the Pentatonic scale that we debuted at our concert on Friday!
I had a lot of fun with this activity and it was thrilling to see some students really become more interested in composing and writing their own music through the exercise. As the students left on our last day together, I gave out several sheets of manuscript paper with the hopes that the students would continue writing through the summer. Fingers crossed they keep up with it!
If you are interested in getting your own copy of this worksheet, feel free to download it here! Tag my Instagram @shawstrings so I can see the results. I think it’s so important for students to continually get experience writing out music and acquiring the confidence and skills to experiment with music. Unfortunately it’s easy to forget to take the time to do it as well. I hope this helps other students and teachers take the time to include this in their lesson and rehearsal time.
Enjoy!