I was in the middle of giving a couple of piano lessons recently, and spontaneously decided to add a creative element to the mix. I did two different activities with two of my young students, inspired by the Orff Schulwerk training that I’ve done. They turned out to be quick, easy and engaging and, I think, an excellent way to nurture the creative skills of our students. Here are the details of one of the activities; I’ll post another blog article on the other activity later!
Invent a pattern and turn it into a sequence
One of my students was working from Alfred Basic Book B. I don’t find the material in this series inspiring, but the student had used it with a previous teacher, and it was easier to continue using it with added supplementary repertoire for interest.
The student was up to a piece which had a pattern of steps and skips which was sequenced a step lower two times. I called the student’s attention to it, then said, ‘Let’s make our own pattern.’
I drew down an example, and we played it, then I asked him to make his own pattern. He came up with a six-note pattern.
The sequence was: step up twice, skip down, skip up, step down.
To keep things in the key of C major, I told my student to start the pattern on C:
Then we made it into a sequence by repeating the pattern a step higher:
And one more time, a step higher:
For the final bit of the song, I said that since we started on C, we had to find out way back to C to end the piece. He came up with:
I’ll mention here that at this point, I was not having the student notate the music. We were following the pattern he drew initially.
The final piece looked like this:
I harmonised it with the following chords as he played the melody and he thought it sounded good.
Then I summarised our procedure, to enable the student to keep on creating without me:
1. Create a pattern. Use a mix of steps, skips and repeated notes.
2. Sequence it. Go up or down in steps, see how it sounds.
3. Harmonise it. I did this step on behalf of my student, but this was within the capabilities of my student if I restricted his choices to chords I, IV and V, but would have taken too much of the lesson time.
The activity was short and engaging. We ran out of time in the lesson to notate it, but that would be the obvious next step.
