Before, I start, I know some people are going to yell "Kodaly!" - but I don't have the opportunity right now - and others are probably going to yell "just teach the instrument" - but that isn't working! so please... I need some practical ideas here!

Basically I have been, for the last few weeks, giving a friend some flute lessons. (adult re-beginner, with a few basic notions of the flute and music but not a lot, as it turns out!) It has become apparent tonight (though why this didn't occur to me earlier I don't know - d'oh! having been so well taught as a child I'm kicking myself for needing so long to realise....) that what my student needs is to be taught MUSIC because she's completely clueless in that regard. She does usually hears if she hits a wrong note but usually doesn't know *why* it's wrong and therefore how to put it right, and her sense of rhythm/pulse is all over the shop.

Tonight when I realised this we did some stuff away from the flute and you could see lightbulbs turning on all over the shop

We've decided that from now on we'll do approx. half and half music/flute.

So... I need some ideas how I can help her with this basic stuff. I foolishly assumed that as she had some flute lessons as a child she knew all this but... I was wrong!

Problem: she has a major aversion to clapping, which I discovered in her first lesson as I find that's a brilliant way of doing rhythm before you have to worry about fingers in the right place etc. We have done tapping on the thigh instead which seems to help, and I've suggested tapping/thinking/saying the rhythms of basic pieces which we have done (merrily we roll along etc) as she walks down to work of a morning. Unfortunately my front room is a LOT to small to do walking and rhythms round it, which was my first instinct.

Problem: she's not a singer, she's a growler, and tends to be massively out of tune. Having stood next to her in many a service, I've become convinced this is a problem of confidence control and range, not of amusia. We proved today that within a small and low range she can repeat back notes that I sing to her really quite accurately... the Ab below middle C to the Eb above... it ain't a lot to work with, but we'll work on that!

Problem: she's still "working out" both notes and rhythm... basically notation is still a foreign language she is translating into "put these fingers down".

Fortunately she's totally agreed with me that the music thing is what she needs to concentrate on, with the flute for the meantime a by-product of learning how music works.

Ideas please! I'm trying to think back to lessons when I was 7 and what we did that helped....

Instilling a sense of pulse/working on understanding how time signatures work. I had her beating confidently in 2/4 3/4 and 4/4 this evening, to her susprise I think as well as mine. Hoping this will begin to make more sense to her now she can see how they "fit". We've done finding the pulse and I'm hoping she'll make sense of the walking with rhythms thing... but any ideas on how to help her develop a stronger sense of basic pulse so she has something to "hang" rhythms onto would be great.

Singing: how can I improve her confidence and (hopefully) her range? She's obviously hearing the notes, and within that range can sing them back with no problem, but it's not a terribly useful range. Obvious applications to music in general but I also know she'd really like to be able to sing more confidently and in tune at church. Long term project I think

Fluency in note reading... even if it's with a very small number of notes that can then be added to once they are absolutely secure, how can I help her think in music so she's not "translating" the notes before she plays them?

My brain is fried so I hope this makes some sense! My starting music lessons when all this was absorbed osmotically are an awful long time ago... I don't have access to, either financially or just for opportunity, any Kodaly/Dalcroze/any other sort of musicianship training to give me ideas. All I have are my own brain cells and the help of others!

I need her to feel the music, and hear it in her head, and so be able to play it and correct the mistakes which occur. She has a vague sense of music but it's all outside, and it shows....Any ideas on how to help this with no budget and a tiny teaching space would be appreciated

I'm just so glad it finally clicked where I was going wrong... she's the first real beginner, I mean absolute beginner in terms of pulse etc, that I've taught so it took a while for the penny to drop.

If you could rummage in your collective brain cells and come up with anything relevant I'll be forever grateful

ps: I meant to say... I'd like her to keep up the flute in relation to what we do musically, as even if she's not playing much that's exciting on it, she can be improving her tone and breathing - as playing the flute is her eventual aim it seems worth it.

& basically I need to work out what the underlying principles are that she needs to have - ie sense of pulse for one - and how I can most efficiently help her grasp them.

thanks....

I teach pianists to read direction and distance. Ascending notes on the score = going higher on the piano; descending = lower.

Line to adjacent space and space to adjacent line = next finger.

Space to space and line to line = missing out a note.

Naming notes only comes into play when pupils are stuck.

Sorry if this is no help on the flute, Sarah. I can only play the piano

Steve

Hmmm I think it has to be note by note on the flute... I need her to see a note and do a fingering. Some of the fingerings are more intuitive but by no means all... not quite as straightforward as having them set out for you as they are on the piano... one of the bonuses of being a pianist!

I told her today I don't care if she knows the note names at the moment if she can see a note and play the right fingering... in fact I told her that it was OK if she thought that C was a small brown monkey as long as she knew what the fingering for the small brown monkey was Basically I'm trying to get the half-dozen notes that she knows reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally secure and automagical before I try to build on that; at the moment the 3 she learned first as a child are "just about" there.. I think I need to go back more basic than "notes going higher =" - she needs to understand what that might actually sound like, ie just knowing that the melody should rise... the need really is that basic! But thank you for the thoughts

The teacher I worked with for O and A level music was very keen on the French time names (1 beat = taa, 2 beats = taa-aa, 2 x 1/2 beat = ta-té etc.). They can be sung, chanted on one note or spoken in time with a metronome beat or clapping or walking. You could also get her to play rhythms on one note, so no problem with having to change fingering. I quite often get people to do that when I'm working on sight-reading (as an exam accompanist I usually include some sight-reading in every rehearsal because hardly any of the candidates I accompany seem to have learnt any specific skills for it), if their first attempt at an exercise is seriously unrhythmic. I ask them to choose a note that's really easy to play on the instrument.

I've come across people with a smaller range than that who couldn't match pitch at all. Her problem with singing at church is likely to be mainly that that range won't allow her to sing the melody of anything either at "soprano" or at "tenor" pitch. Try getting her to do what I think of as a "rocket taking off" glissando from the lowest note her voice can manage to the highest. Then you can decide whether to try to extend her current 5th up or down to give her the range of the average hymn tune (usually about middle C to the D or perhaps E flat in the next octave, soprano pitch). "Hark! the herald angels sing" is usually played in G and has the congregation struggling on top E!

I hope you will both enjoy experimenting together at whatever pace works for her.

Good luck!

I realised my comment re: Kodaly could be misconstrued...

I'm looking to use Kodaly/Dalcroze/other useful musicianship training type principles... Any ideas in that area have will be very *very* welcome! The way I was taught as a child used a lot of the same ideas and in the last year I've come to realise how fortunate I was.

I'm by no means anti-Kodaly... just I have no Kodaly ability or resource save what I can be taught or can be suggested to me over the net... (I can't, unfortunately, nip into town and sign up for a course or anything) Anything in that vein will be really helpful and please do suggest it!

Thanks for the thoughts so far especially the rocket taking off thing dacapo, that should be very helpful

Sarah, I read your post again in the hope that I might be able to think of something to help. I read this:


Haven't you answered your own question? Why not carry on 'doing some stuff' and develop things from there? That is how the rest of us learned to teach.

Steve

Yep, that is the plan... I just think it's also a great idea to make use of all the resources available to me, and if that means asking more experienced teachers for tips then I will... after all, the more ideas I can get and the more ways I can think of to tackle problems, the more avenues we have to explore. I only have two students... for health reasons I'm unlikely to ever teach full time, sadly... so if I can further my development as a teacher outside of lessons and experimentation then all the better for me *and* my students if it means I make fewer completely stupid errors in how I teach then it's got to be a good thing!

Learning from one's own mistakes is great... learning from other people's (so you get to at least miss out *their* mistakes and just make your own original mistakes ) is just more efficient

And if you can make several thousand fewer than me, you will definitely survive as a teacher.

Steve

Aww shucks, rumbled... my masterplan for teaching

Hehe. Anyway... keep the suggestions coming folks, I need help to crack this particularly hard and thus far apparently unmusical nut (and I'm determined to prove that she's no as unmusical as she thinks she is)

Sarah, I remembered a similar problem with the mother of two of my pupils - the girls for whom I cooked the pizza recently.

Fiona is highly intelligent and used to study; she has a degree. She was learning the piano as a complete beginner and was getting nowhere with notation; rhythm was a foreign land.

I pointed out to here that she was trying to learn all this by osmosis, without making any effort herself to sort things out.

I told Fiona to away from the piano with a score in her lap and to work out for herself how notes relate to one another - that note is middle c so the next one up must be d, down must be b and so on - until she could visualise a blank scord in her mind and supply note names to all the lines and spaces.

I told her then to go to the piano and relate the printed lines and spaces to the notes on the keyboard.

To sort out rhythm, I told her to think about the relative value of notes - starting with a crotchet worth one beat and working out from there. Again, all in her head. She had then to relate this to printed music and work out the rhythms herself.

The point of all this is that students will only make sense of printed music when they are prepared to do the mental processing involved. Doing all this away from the piano meant that Fiona had no 'right notes' to worry about; all she had to do was make sense of the whole buisiness of reading music.

There was considerable resistance to doing this on Fiona's part. It required mental effort that she was reluctant to make. I banged on about it for about a month, a month in which she continued to get nowhere. Realising she was getting nowhere, she resolved to make the effort.

Fiona was successful within the week. In her own mind, she had sorted out direction, distance, relative pitch, the lot. On the occasions she gets stuck, she is able to work out the name of the note and find it on the piano.

It will most likely benefit your friend if you can make her see that a similar process will help her note learning.

Steve

I'll bear that in mind... think she needs to have a bit more music in her before notation's going to help, but we'll see.