It's almost Opera Season!

Hey Cohort, 

I have a shocking secret for you....

wait for it

I love opera.  

I didn't know that I loved opera until about 5 years ago when I bought a friend of mine tickets to see the Met Live in HD performance of Puccini's Manon Lescaut and went with her to see that opera at the theatre in Saskatoon.  I've learned since then that I love Italian and French opera most of all, but I try to go to as many operas as possible. 

When I went to New York in May of 2008, I went to the Met (the backstage tour was the best $15 I spent on that entire trip) and saw Mozart's La Clemenza de Tito from the nosebleedyest of all nosebleed seats and it was still magnificent.  

You're not going to get your grade 5s or 6s to sit through 5 hours of Wagner, but you could probably get them to watch and enjoy this scene from La Fille du Regiment:

For me opera is the perfect blend of music and drama, and I can see it working in a classroom, not every opera mind you or every classroom either, as a way to give context to periods in time.   Many operas tell stories about the time they were written in or about history and I think of them as a way to give cultural context to history, both in general and the history of music and drama in Europe.  It could also be an interesting introduction into a French lesson (as long as it's a French opera). 

For those of you interested, the Met season at the movie theatre here in town starts on Saturday, October 5 with Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin.  

Accidental Participation in Culture Days and Groopfest at the Groop Gallery

So, I was downtown on Friday and I accidentally stumbled onto one of this year's Culture Days activities at the Groop Gallery.  I wandered in after visiting the used bookstore (now on Third around the corner from where it was on George) and had the chance to watch some local artists at work.  It really is amazing to watch a painter, or sculptor create something out of nothing.

It's amazing to watch in person and that could be why The Prince George and District Community Arts Council has the Artists in the Schools Program.  This may shock, but I'm not a confident visual artist and I think having a guest speaker in who can give some art direction and show kids how to create something would be an amazing experience.

I always think about guest speakers or classroom visitors as people who come in to talk about their jobs or share their knowledge and a guest artist fits nicely into that category, even though it was not something I thought about right off the bat.

Sparks Jump Up

So, I lead a Sparks group (tiny pink girl guides, aged 5 and 6) and I realized how much guiding incorporates the arts along with service to the community and basic survival skills.  We spent most of our hour and 15 minutes doing crafts and singing.  We open with a song and close with a song, but we also sing things that have cultural meaning from girl guiders around the world, including Land of the Silver Birch. 

After our class today, when we were talking about songs with cultural meaning and making sure that students think about music, I think something like this, easy to sing and beautiful to sing as a round could be incorporated into a Christmas concert or simply something to include in a Social Studies unit on the Fur Trade or any other part of Canadian history.

Follow your heart

After reading Jana-Rae's post about being art-ish I got to thinking about my sister, Andrea and how she expresses her artish heart with yarn.  She's won a lot of contests (I got to go with her to meet Vana White a couple of years ago because she won a contest) but I'm not sure if she'd say that she was an "artist" and I think that's a shame.  She makes amazing things with yarn, including conceiving and creating the yarn heart below.

Her heart is currently on display in a professor's office at the College of Medicine at UBC (there's a whole story about how Andrea's heart got stolen...but it's not something I can post about here).   I think of her as an artist, but does she?  I'll have to ask.

I think a great open ended art project would be the one that she created the heart for.  The med students were asked to create and submit a representation of a heart, they could use any medium.  The entries varied from a photograph, taken from an airplane of a city with a heart-shaped area of town to detailed drawings and sculpture.  Something like this could be a very interesting science/art connection and students, especially older students who have had more exposure to different art mediums, could really create something amazing.

It's all about the music

For a person who comes from a household where music was not playing very much (when my parents got married they had 5 albums between the 2 of them, including 2 copies of Elton John's Yellow Brick Road) but all of us sing, mostly to ourselves, as we do everything.  Especially my brother and I.

I have vivid memories of little songs I sang to myself as I walked to school and of singing in the bathtub (before I was old enough to take showers).  I hum all the time (so does my brother Ryan, the only time he got in trouble at school was for humming while he worked when he was in grade 1 or 2).

It probably stems from my grandma who sings all the time.  Music just surrounds her, everything she taught us had some kind of music incorporated, from dancing around the kitchen while pies baked to singing while we coloured together.

Grandma was the reason I took 7 years of organ lessons and why I stuck with them so long even after my teacher tried to beat the love of playing by ear out of me.  I have a sister who is an amazing musical technician, she can play anything from a piece of sheet music - our music teacher loved her -, but I have to hear it first and I play by ear even though I can read the music, which infuriated our music teacher.  I was scared of her.  A different kind of musical education might have  helped me become more musically creative and encouraged my natural musical playfulness, I don't know.  But I still love music and play around a bit, when the opportunity exists.

If I ever get the time, or make the time, I'd love to learn how to play the cello.  Someone, I think it was Kim Barlow, once said that the cello is the instrument most similar in range to the human voice and once I thought about it and listened, I  realized she made a very good point.

In terms of musical education, I think it's important to sing with children and to let them sing, but I also think it's important to expose them to different kinds of music, to play music during the day so that they get to know what is out there.  To, in a formal or informal way, introduce them to different instruments, what they sound like and how the sounds change the mood of the music.  Disney's Peter and the Wolf is a good start, but field trips to performances and guests in the classroom or assemblies are very important. 

Music is going to play a large part in my classroom, not matter what the age or the grade level.