The school year is now in full swing, and my rehearsals for band and chorus have begun. My students are starting to dust off their instruments and are attempting to play the music I have chosen for them. Choosing music is actually a rather difficult task. There aren't many good pieces written for middle school, especially for chorus. Don't get me wrong, there are some very pretty melodies written for middle school chorus that have all the right voice ranges for that age group, but I have a policy where I do not give the students anything to sing that I would be ashamed to sing in front of an audience myself. Trite lyrics just don't fly in my book. Every fall and spring, I am sent CD's of sample music that makes me cringe. Take this, for example:
This Old Hammer
The site won't let me give you the page directly, so you're going to have to do a little work. Type in "This Old Hammer Roger Emerson". If you dare, please click on "see and hear the music" where you can hear an audio sample of this... thing. Umm, my chorus would laugh in my face if I gave this to them. Wait, I take that back. They like and respect me too much to do that, but they SHOULD laugh. It makes me shiver. Whenever I get mad at the Philosopher King, I just pop that CD in for us both to enjoy.
Picking out band music is not nearly as painful. I gave my band the music to "Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg. Middle school kids seem to love Grieg. His music is fun, his name is fun to pronounce, and there are some great arrangements out there for kiddies. Anyway, their eyes got really big when I passed out the music today. Granted, there are a lot of notes, but once they actually started to play those notes I had them in the palm of my hand. As one of my students told me yesterday in chorus, "Man, you have GREAT taste in music!" And that's why I'm the master ;)
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5 comments:
I KNEW you were using that song as torture! Ahhh so you thing you have me beat eh? We will see about that Mrs. Bond.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
It sounds like those gawd-awful gospel CDs Steve used to have before I threw them away (shhhh).
I actually don't mind some gospel, but this is ridiculous. When you are repeating the same phrase over and over amidst some stupid rock guitar solo in the background, it just stops being music I could possibly defend using. The sad part is that most of the songs I am sent are much like this one. I end up panicked because I can't find anything decent for the kids to sing! It shouldn't be this difficult!!!
So what's your stance on High School Musical? I noticed on the homepage of the site you linked to that they were offering High School Musical pieces. I honestly haven't heard much of the music, fortunately, but I have experienced the ridiculous hype at work. For example, we had a "pep rally" in anticipation of High School Musical 2. It was dumb.
Yeah, the kids are trying really hard to convince me that High School Musical has songs that we should sing. I've never seen it, but I've heard some of the music. I'm not too impressed, but if I don't find something super fun for middle school that actually has value soon, I might have to give in and give them "Breaking Free". I'm not happy about it. I'd much rather give them something from a real stage musical, but it has to be from a musical they like and something that isn't obviously sung by a male or female. It's hard.
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