Composing With the Tone Bars, Part 1

Rain, a melody composed by a child on Music Grid Paper. 

Follow up in the elementary provides great opportunities for music making, whether or not you are a musician, and whether or not you've worked through the Montessori music lessons.  One of my favorite moments happened spontaneously after I'd given a brief lesson about the composer Olivier Messiaen.

I had just finished telling the story to a small group of children in my elementary class, when I began to discuss with the children, their ideas for follow up.  A few ideas were simple enough: one child wanted to listen to Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time at the listening station, another wanted to read more about Messiaen in a book, and still another wanted to go and do other work. But, characteristically, the remaining children wanted to reach for the stars and compose their own music. I had a slight jolt of panic, because I hadn't given many of the lessons in the music album yet. How were we going to compose and notate music?

Scanning the room for ideas, I spotted the tone bars and it hit me. I walked the children over to the tone bars, which were situated below the large, spacious windows in our classroom and placed the Major Scale strip below the tone bars with the 1 on c (the lowest tone bar). After pulling down the corresponding tone bars, I told the children I was going to compose a piece. First I looked out the window and surveyed the gray, drizzly autumn day. The trees outside the window shone bright orange and reddish brown. I told the children I was going to write a piece about the bright colors on the trees. I began to play on the tone bars, making a big show of looking out at the trees and carefully selecting my notes, almost like a painter looking at his subject before making a stroke on his canvas. I made sure to point out that in music, melodies usually end on the1 (the first degree) or 8.

Once I had my melody memorized and could play it two or three times, I took out a blank piece of white paper and drew a 4x4 grid on it. In each square, I drew the number that corresponded to the notes in my melody. I used one number per box. The rhythm didn't matter, I only wanted to notate the pitches. I drew a line above the finished melody and gave it the title “Autumn Trees”. Then, I decorated the margins of my piece with pictures of trees with colorful leaves.

The children were so excited to write their own songs using numbers on the Grid Paper that I had to back out of the way as they crowded the tone bars and began immediately discussing and debating their compositions. This gave me time to slip out of the room and make 30 copies of my Music Grid Paper for them. They worked all morning on their songs, some of them making thick, hand-bound books of melodies, others taking great care to decorate each individual melody. One child, Gabriella, created a thick book of songs and gave them to me as a present, saying it was a donation for the classroom.

Much later, as the children became at ease composing in this way, they extended the work by placing different scale strips below the tone bars and playing their melodies in a different scale. We had fun discussing how different scales changed the character of their melodies. They also had fun transposing their melodies by placing the Major Scale Strip in different positions below the tone bars. This simple way of composing music became a fixture in the culture of our classroom.

If you'd like to do this lesson with your children, you can download it at the shop.

Some children showing off their book of songs. The piece Moon has the word "Major" written below, so you know what scale strip to use when you play the song.