I was asked to lead a week long creative residency for the ASO for grades 2-6 in an elementary school. The week started with performances and demonstrations by a string quartet and trio. I was going to be working with students on concepts of writing motives and themes, developing motives, and layering voices so I wanted to use the first day with ASO musicians to demonstrate these concepts for everyone.

After the first day I divided the grades up so that 2nd and 3rd grade would work with an ASO percussionist and I would work with 4th-6th grade on a composition project. With the aid of ASO musicians each grade explored a different concept (6th grade-writing themes/motives; 5th grade-layering voices; 4th grade-developing motives). The musicians played examples that demonstrated concepts and the students were able to guide the musicians in manipulating what they were playing to explore the concepts further.

This led to a composition relay on Wednesday and Thursday in which I worked with half of each grade at a time to come up with material for two compositions. We based the compositions on the Emily Dickinson poem An Awful Tempest Mashed the Air, which is in 3 stanzas, so each piece was in 3 sections. 6th grade came up with the themes for each section, 5th grade layered different voices, and 4th grade developed motives from the themes. I then fleshed the pieces out a little more and orchestrated them for a chamber orchestra to play on a concert Friday.

Students have a tendency to try and tell you what they want something to sound like, but I made them sing their ideas for me. You need a clear idea to sing it, which is why it’s difficult. As you can hear, the majority of the material in both compositions comes from what the students came up with. You can hear both pieces, followed by many of the themes (6th grade), layers (5th grade), and development (4th grade) the students came up with.  The violin class joined the ASO chamber orchestra at the end of the second one, so to get them the music in time to practice I composed the last section and used their theme as the ending.  I did not seek permission from the ASO or the school to publish the recording of the concert, so these are just the recordings from the notation software.

An Awful Tempest I 
     Section 1 theme  
     Section 1 layering 
     Section 1 development 
     Section 2 theme 
     Section 2 layering 
     Section 2 development 
     Section 3 theme 
     Section 3 layering 

An Awful Tempest II 
     Section 1 theme 
     Section 1 layering 
     Section 1 development 
     Section 2 theme 
     Section 2 layering 
     Section 2 development 
     Section 3 theme     

This residency explored the roots of black music, culture, and identity. It started in the Harlem Renaissance and explored how the Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois approached the idea of black identity in their writing and how the music of Duke Ellington and the blues approached or influenced ideas of black identity. It moved through artists ranging from James Brown to Jay-Z, exploring how both the music and lyrics contributes to a sense to cultural an individual identity. It ended with the students guiding the songwriting process of a live band and with every student rapping or singing about identity. I had a quartet of a rapper/trumpet player, keyboard player, drummer, and myself on trumpet and bass (I started on trumpet for Harlem renaissance jazz and one of my original pieces but switched to bass by the time we got to James Brown and the students’ original music).
Play That Song 
Do That Dance 

Third graders were involved in a digital music project in which they wrote, recorded, and packaged their own music while basing the songs on what they  learned this year about the human body.  We combined science, technology, art, and music in one exciting project.  Adam Neal and I collaborated on leading this residency.  We worked with lead classroom teacher Kristen Poteet who had come to us wanting a digital music project.

In our first visit we explored the different layers of the Ciara song I'm Lookin at You , and based on what we heard in that song we wrote our own little song fragments. 
Class 1 
Class 2 

We came up with the following steps in the recording process for the students to keep in mind: 
1.Listen
2.Create
3.Practice
4.Record
5.Evaluate

We also broke songs down into the following layers, which were the recording tracks:
1.Bass line
2.Beat
3.Lyrics
4.Other fun stuff (keyboard, guitar, sound effects, etc.)

After the first visit the students were split up into 17 small groups.  Each group was supposed to write and record their own song with lyrics about the body systems (originally they were also supposed to be able to run the recording equipment, but because each group only had about an hour of individual instruction we decided that it would be better to let them concentrate on the artistic side of the project).  Each group got to work with an instructor twice for about half an hour, and the first time was mainly focused on getting a good bass line, and some groups also recorded a beat track.  The songs were finished during the second session and Adam and I did the final mixing and mastering.  The students then created cover art to package their CDs.  Here are recordings of 3 of the groups:
Circulatory System   
Bones   
Breathin Good   

Journal for Music-in-Education articles about this residency
From 'Musically Challenged'Teacher to Advocate for Music in the Classroom
Digital Composing and Recording as Arts Integration: The Centennial Place Experience

I got to work with a small class on a Revolutionary war operetta that the teacher wanted to do. First we looked at text painting (making the music match the text)by studying various works, including Schubert’s Der Erlkonig and Golijov’s Ainadamar. Then we started exploring what goes into a good melody. We wrote melodies for lyrics that students came up with in their regular class time.

Students wrote the melodies for Taxation without Representation, Boston Tea Party, and Revolutionary War. I based the overture on themes from those pieces, wrote the Fighting incidental music, and The French and Indian War used the melody from Johnny Comes Marching Home. I orchestrated the music for a string trio.

Overture  
Fighting 
French and Indian War 
Taxation without Representation 
Boston Tea Party 
Revolutionary War 

This was an elective course at Drew Charter School. It was a small 5th grade class (10 students) and the goal was to have the students be a band and learn new instruments (guitar, bass, drums, keyboard) and record original music. It was envisioned as an outgrowth of the Inspire program that is a creativity-based collaboration between Georgia State’s Center for Educational Partnerships and all of the music and dance classes at the Drew Charter middle school.

We spent time listening to a variety of music from James Brown through current pop music, along with some music they would have been unfamiliar with. We analyzed what was happening in the song, from the various layers and instruments to overall form. The students had time to explore their instruments and I gave them individual instruction in the midst of the group playing. We spent a lot of time just working on establishing grooves together and ended by multi-track recording this song that they wrote together:  

The 5th grade at Centennial Elementary was focusing on the concept of gradual change in nature and wanted me to bring that into my residency. They were exploring the ideas of constructive change and destructive change. I thought that was a great vehicle for exploring musical minimalism, a compositional style epitomized by Philip Glass that uses gradual changes in layering motives to create trance-like, kaleidoscopic music far more interesting than its individual motives. I had two other brass players with me the whole time, so everything was written for brass trio (2 trumpets and a trombone).

I started by writing 2 pieces for my brass trio, one that started from a basic theme and built up, representing a constructive change, and another that started with a lot going on and worked down to nothing for a destructive change. I don’t have a recording of this visit, so this is from the Finale midi file of the constructive piece (I hate Finale brass sounds so I use string sounds instead):  

We played both and talked about how the music changes. I took the constructive one and broke it down to demonstrate what I called the techniques of gradual change, which were layering, changing length, adding notes, taking notes away, changing notes, and the effect of constant change from having different length motives played against each other.

Starting in the next visit there was an overview of the techniques of gradual change covered in the first visit and then we started the composition process. Each class had come up with a process of gradual change in nature to represent with in music. Two classes did constructive processes and one did a destructive process. The constructive process started like the example above, with a simple motive. Several students sang possibilities and then the class voted. After that they used the techniques we had gone over to manipulate that motive. They would tell somebody in the brass trio how to change what we were playing and we had to keep track of the changes as they told us. With the destructive process they came up with layered motives at the beginning and then used the processes we had talked about to simplify and break down the piece (this wasn't nearly as effective as having them build up and I'll keep that in mind in the future if I do something similar).

This was all recorded instead of being written down and I transcribed it for the players between visits. We added some body percussion parts, some singing, and several band students played along for the final recordings.

Constructive Change #1   
Constructive Change #2   
Destructive Change          

This was my first residency and first experience trying to figure out how to create meaningful creative music in the classroom. My approach is different now, but I'm still very happy with these results. Years later I still can't believe how good this sounds. The students were engaged and creative in their part of the composition process and it inspired me to do some of my personal favorite composing for my part. In this residency I worked with a woodwind quintet in four 2nd grade classes.  The goal was to have the children make musical decisions and show musical creativity in helping me compose a piece for the quintet. This was to be done in a way that related to their study of the water cycle and states of water.

We started by showing how music can be used to represent other things.  I transcribed a section of Debussy's La Mer (The Sea) for the quintet and had the students listen for how Debussy made his piece sound like the sea.  The students were then asked to come up with different ways they see water (river, sewer, rain, cloud, ice, etc.) and have different members of the quintet improvise and try to play something to represent what they chose.  The students chose which instruments would play and guided the players in how to approach their playing with a list of adjectives that we provided (smooth, choppy, fast, etc.).  They were able to experiment to see which instruments and what kinds of melodies worked best for whatever they were trying to depict.

This moved to me asking the students what a composer might do to write about an elephant.  After getting some ideas from the students, the quintet played my transcription of Saint-Saens' L'Elephant and the students were asked to listen and see if Saint-Saens used any of the ideas that they suggested.  L'Elephant was used to introduce the next concept, which is notating music with a drawing.  As the bassoonist played the theme to L'Elephant, a picture was drawn on the board representing the movement of the melodic line.  After the students had an idea of how this worked they were split up into three groups, one for each state of water.  Each group was to compose a theme for their state of water and notate by drawing it.  To make sure that they were actually thinking musically instead of just drawing they had to sing their melodies before notating them.  I then had to turn their drawings into notation that the quintet could play.
 
I notated the drawings for the melodies and added my own accompaniment, and during the visit the students chose which instruments would play which parts (I wrote all parts out for all instruments) and what order the parts would appear in the completed piece.  After the students had decided on the form of the piece I wrote transitions between sections and parts for the students to sing for the final piece.  You can hear my interpretation of the drawings (with the instrumentation that the students chose) and hear how they sounded with accompaniment (also with instrumentation by the students) for two of the classes.  The clips of the melodies by themselves are computer generated from my notation software, but the clips with accompaniment are played by the woodwind quintet, and on some of them the students are also singing. 

Class 1

Liquid-the students came up with a variety of music about taking a bath

    Bubbles:   

    Singing in the Bath:   

    ...which I combine with another one of their drawings:  

   ...to get something like this:  

   ...which I then combined with the Bubble theme, which sounded like this:  

   The students also wanted to throw in the Sesame Street song Rubber Ducky:  

Ice:  Without accompaniment     With accompaniment  

Vapor:  Without accompaniment     With accompaniment  

Class 1 final recording:  

Class 2

Ice:  Without accompaniment     With my accompaniment  

Vapor:  Without accompaniment     With accompaniment  

Liquid:  Without accompaniment     With accompaniment  

Class 2 final recording:  

Class 3:  

Class 4: