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You’re listening to Episode 41 of the vibrant music teaching podcast. I’m Nicola Cantan and today I want to help you bring music history into your studio and make it fun for your students

Hey beautiful teachers. I hope you’re having a wonderful week. Today I want to talk to you about music history and I know what you may be thinking which is that oh my gosh we have to fit another thing into our lessons. How are we supposed to teach music history on top of everything else. We have to do. And that’s kind of how I feel too. We don’t have time to teach music history in an in-depth way at least not to beginners but if we don’t teach it at all if we don’t expose our our students to some elements of music history to some knowledge of composers and the time periods then it’s even harder to convince young students to love classical music. Now they may do anyway. They may love it for the sake of it but music history can be another in to help students connect to these pieces that were written hundreds of years before they were born. And most students once you engage them in the story behind different pieces I find they have so much better connection with the music there’s so much more motivated to learn it and it helps us to open up their minds to new possibilities to new different music genres other than perhaps just a video game music that they will end up loving and exploring for their whole lives.

So today I want to run you through quickly a bunch of different ideas for bringing music history into your lessons. So what I don’t want you to do with today’s podcast is to listen to the whole thing get completely overwhelmed by all the ideas. Think I can’t possibly do all of that stuff and then don’t do anything. What I want you to do and I say this over and over again is do one thing I don’t do all these things at once. I don’t think you should either pick out one of these ideas the one that jumps out to you as being accessible or a good new idea for you and try it out in your studio just give it a go. Just one of these ideas I want to give you lots of different options so that you have them available and perhaps when you’ve tried out that one idea and you’ve implemented it and had success with it maybe come back to this podcast listen again or look at the links on the show notes page which is at vibrantmusicteaching.com/41

For one the numbers that is four one for Episode 41 and perhaps you come back to this later and pick out another idea and then try that. Okay. So here we go. The first one is to simply assign your students each week to look up one fact. Just one super easy assignment. And most students should be able to complete this. This is especially useful for older students. I wouldn’t give this to younger students unless you want to involve the parents and charge them with looking up one facts together. But this is a great way to approach music history because it’s just so easy it’s like a gimme to just approach it by looking up one single fact during the week and you can make it relevant to what they’re studying. So just one fact about Beethoven if they’re going to encounter Beethoven just one fact about music in the medieval period it could be anything but that’s a simple assignment that anyone should be able to do and you can encourage your students or your parents to do it on their lesson day as soon as they go home so that they don’t forget to do it.

All right. So that’s the first idea one fact. Second idea is to have a password system in your studio. This is a really fun way to engage students with music history or theory as well is to have a simple password that students need to get into the room so you can put up a sign on your door that asks a question such as “What year was Beethoven born?” or maybe that’s too hard maybe “What’s Beethoven’s first name?” or “Who is another composer besides Beethoven?”. Simple questions like that, hang it up on your door talks to students about what’s going to be the password next week. So give them the answer to the question tell them you’re going to ask them about such and such or they need to look it up at home or just tell them what the answer is. And next week they need to either remember it or have looked it up and answer the question to come into the room. Of course if they don’t get it straight away you’re going to give them some super obvious hints to help them get into the room so that they can answer the question. But it’s just a fun little way to retain knowledge for a week or to incentivize looking up the information at home so that they can get into the music room for their lesson. Another way to approach this is to get your students to look up one fact but make it a piece of piece context.

By that I mean one little bit of information at a time and they can look it up themselves or you can tell it to them and discuss it with them. That puts their piece into context. You know I really did not enjoy history in general in school. Not at all. And the only time I enjoyed history was when I got to college. And if you don’t know this I studied fashion design in college so my history lessons consisted of art history for my first year and then costume history and then fashion history. So we call costume history before a certain date and then fashion after a certain date anyway. So when I got to college and I had had these history classes in art and fashion history I loved my classes absolutely loved them. And it’s because I had a wonderful wonderful teacher Sarah. She was awesome and she told us by making it relevant. And this might not sound like a revolution but it was amazing to me that the way she made these connections to everything else that was going on she is so passionate about her subject which certainly helps. But I had history teachers who were passionate about their subject before in school but they didn’t make the connections for me to everyday people to everyday life. So what Sarah did was she even if you didn’t care about fashion you would end up caring about it because what people were wearing at the time or the paintings they were painting and the subjects they were choosing were because of all of the context that was going on around them.

So through teaching this art history or fashion history Sarah made it relevant to everything that was going on and made me care about not that I didn’t care about awards were. I don’t want to seem like I was callous or cavalier about them. It just it didn’t make any connection and it just seemed like a bunch of dates to me in regular history class in school. But Sarah connected these things together so that I could see how this was affecting that was affecting that because of course it was. If you think about our present times everything is affecting everything else and zooming in on little details can allow people to see the big picture. So this idea of a piece of piece context is all about that. It’s about giving your students one bit of information about what was going on at the time their piece was written or something about that composer or that time period that will help them enact do it. And it could be as simple as the fact that all men at the time were wearing wigs and Beethoven did not wear a wig or it could be about a war that was going on. It could be about really anything. It doesn’t matter what it was some convention some custom anything you think your student is going to connect to is going to help them put that piece into a situation and imagine it being written I imagine it being performed at the time.

Little details can go a huge way to that. So those first three ideas your look up one fact your password and a piece of piece context. Those are the simplest quickest to win ideas that I want you to try out. Another idea is to have a much bigger project on the go such as a composer of the month. I just caution you before you approach this idea of a composer of the month is if you’re going to do this. And if you’re going to commit to this maybe for the next academic year or something like that I’d encourage you to plan it all out before it even starts. Because I think the worst thing about a project like this is that it ends up getting really stale because you fall behind because life will happen. A month is not a long time to prepare the next thing. So make sure you’re ahead of the schedule if you’re going to do something like this because doing it on the fly sounds extremely stressful to me even if it doesn’t sound stressful to you. It is likely to sort of fall off the wagon and to end up with six weeks on one composer or eight weeks and that’s fine if you want to set it up that way but just make sure it’s clear in your mind before you start and that you have it all mapped out at least a rough outline of what you’re going to do so you can just throw it together at the last minute if you need to.

So for your composer of the month you could have a display board in your studio with information all about one composer. Let’s take Beethoven’s as I keep mentioning him today and then the next month it’s Mozart and then the next month it’s John Williams. You could have a whole mixture and there’s actually a ton of different packs for this from classroom teachers who do it on teachers pay teachers. So if I were you I would just look those up and grab one of the I’m sure there’s some freebie so you can try out the idea and then some paid versions from some of the great TPT sellers. And as I say designed for classrooms but no reason you can’t use it in your music teaching studio. You could also do that. Every student learns one piece from that composer that month maybe more or less challenging depending on the levels of your student and the piece the composer that you’ve chosen. But I would suggest if you do do it that it be a quick win piece rather than a big project piece. So have every student learn this piece as an almost sight reading like a one weaker level for them so that they don’t get sidetracked on other stuff and they don’t end up presenting this but that is just a fun little extra assignment.

Another way to incorporate this of course is using the first three ideas that I gave you. So everyone looks up one fact about the particular composer each week. Everyone has a password to remember each week about the composer or everyone has a piece of piece contacts to go along with the piece they’re learning. That’s a lot of pieces. You could also lead do this in the lead up to a themed recital and a themed recital is another idea that you could try out to bring music history to life in your studio. You could set it up that everyone learned a piece by a certain composer for a recital or at least a good portion of your students do it doesn’t have to be everyone or that everyone learns one piece from a particular time period for a particular recital such as all Baroque or all classical or in all film music and you learn about those composers as you go through the process of preparing for that recital. Another idea is to take music history out of your requirements for everyday lessons or every week lessons and put it into music history camps or workshops and this is something I do a lot myself.

You know I’ve been talking about group workshops on the podcast in recent weeks and I do for group workshops in my studio every year. Two of those are prepare for performance opportunities and two of those are other themes of my choosing and one of my favorite themes to choose is a particular composer so that we can explore them throughout the workshop and do improvisations based on their pieces and ensembles versions of their pieces and talk about the period that they were alive during art that made music during and different things in relation to that composer. So I love to spotlight one particular composer in these workshops and I think that’s a great way to approach it. If you struggle to fit in music history on a week to week basis maybe you take it out of the pressure system and maybe you take it off your plate for regular lessons and you put it into workshops or camps and we’re leading up to summer as this goes live so you may be thinking about camps for this summer or special workshops that you do during summertime and this would be a great option as a theme for one of those is to pick a composer. Go deep on that particular composer in a level and age appropriate way and have a chat about them maybe or books about them together and explore music by them as well. So I am I’m releasing a full group workshop plan in just a couple of days now inside vibrant music teaching which is all about Beethoven.

It’s called Beethoven bash and it takes games and puts them together with improvisation ideas based on a couple of Beethoven’s pieces that you can do as a group with multi-level students of any level and it brings it all together in a 90 minute workshop plan. Of course it can easily be reduced down if you want to do less than 90 minutes so that’ll be available to vibrant music teaching members in just a couple of days. There’s also a blog post on the colorful key site but a WC do that. I did a couple of years ago now so you’ll find a link to that in the show notes which is that vibrantmusicteaching.com/41. Another way to bring music history into your studio is to do games of course of course. And these can be done at group workshops or in regular lessons in body time and partner time. You could do a lot of these when you have a bring a buddy to lessons week or any other time that you have to play games. We have quite a few music history games in the library and there’s actually more coming out on the first and a couple of days. We have moments with Mozart. Yes I love my music history puns. Here comes another one. Check your list Beethoven’s bucket down history hoarder and composer clash so far and there’s more being released each month. And there’s one being released as I say in just a couple of days as this goes live so chances are it’s already up in the library as you’re listening.

Another way to bring music history to life is using books. And there are some wonderful books out there. I have sums in my lending library. So when students are waiting or when they have overlapping lessons and when I have siblings together and one is working quietly while the other one is at the piano these music history books are a great thing to bring out and you can also lend them and give them to students to bring home particular times when it’s relevant to them or just when they feel like it. So some of my favorite books are detailed in a YouTube video that I did a little while back. There’s a link of course to the YouTube video on the show notes page for easy access or you can just go to youtube and search for the colorful keys channel and the video was called five favorite books about music history for kids or something like that if you search for that on YouTube. I’m sure it’ll pop up. So those are all my ideas for you. As I said I want you to figure out one of these maybe do in combination if it doesn’t seem overwhelming to you but if you’re buzzing right now just pick one that has run through them quickly again. You’ve got the idea to just assign looking up one fact at a time each week to your students and got the idea of doing passwords to let them into your studio all about music history and little details and facts about music history.

We’ve got the idea of having a piece of piece context just one detail about something that was going on outside music or in the composer’s life of the piece that they’re learning. You could also try having a composer of the month system where you set up a board or all learn a particular piece by a particular composer each and every month or plan micro assignments around that you could do a themed recital all about one composer or one particular period of music history or you could play games at workshops or camps or in your lessons or explore books and set up a lending library perhaps of books or just would suggest these books that I have in that YouTube video to your piano parents so that students can engage with music history in a different way especially your voracious readers.

So that’s it for our music history ideas. I hope you’ll try one of them out. I’m actually giving a workshop. If you’re listening to this live very very soon which is called tips and tricks for hosting great group workshops. So if you’re interested in the idea of running group workshops in your studio you’ll definitely want to come along to this. You can get it to it at vibrant music teaching dot com slash groups. Just the word groups and that’ll take you to the sign up page for that and I hope you enjoy exploring some more music history with your students having fun with it and engaging them with these pieces that were written so long ago in a new and relevant way. Happy teaching

Vibrant music teaching members can get all of the games and resources I mentioned today in outside the library. And if you’re not a member and you want access to those awesome sounding punny music history games then you can sign up at vibrantmusicteaching.com/join and get access to all of those as well as tons of other resources courses games principles improv prompts to help make your teaching life easier and more enjoyable.

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