Alex's Amazing Musical!

(Forgive me for using the child’s real name, but I think you’ll be able to see it on the score anyway, and, frankly it takes a long time to blur out children’s identities in these photos. I’m sure Alex’s parents won’t object.)

Alex wrote a composition for piano and tone bars as follow up for a lesson on musical form. (The lesson can be found in Making Music in Montessori, the book.) The focus of the lesson was on three-part, ABA form. During the lesson I played for him a minuet from a Haydn symphony, as well as a clip of Paul Robeson singing “Old Man River.” (I had “Old Man River” in my head for days afterward.)

So, Alex first designed his own scale, which he called the “Halloween” scale. Then he used the scale to
compose a three-part composition for tone bars, piano, and percussion. Below you can see his score.

Alex wrote his “amazing musical” in stick notation and standard percussion notation. The piano part is particularly clever. Above the line, in red numbers, he wrote a stick-notated part for the right hand, and below the line, in black, he wrote the stick-notated left hand part.

In these photos you get a good view of Alex’s “Halloween” scale. It’s a six-note scale that actually sounds pretty creeeeepy…

After he brought home the score, Alex’s parents requested a recording of the piece so they could hear it. So, Alex brought the score back to school with him and copied out the individual parts so he could perform it with some other children.

The individual parts. Notice the multi-measure rests.

Next Alex recruited three other children to perform and make a recording of his piece. The players were (not their real names):

Xander, aged 7, on hand drum
Nanette, aged 9, on piano
Rachelle, aged 11, on maracas
Alex, aged 10, on wood block
Michael, aged 48, on tone bars

Although he really wanted to play his tone bar part himself, it fell to me to play the tone bar part because it was pretty difficult and we didn’t have time for Alex to practice it.

Alex was a little disappointed, but he showed great flexibility and just wrote himself a simple part for wood blocks instead. The other children spent the morning practicing their parts, and we recorded the piece in the afternoon.

Regrettably, I don’t have a photo of us performing the piece, since I was absorbed in playing the tone bars, but we used the voice recorder app on my iPhone to do a recording. Here is our rough take. It’s not exactly as written, but what do you expect after only a couple of hours of rehearsal?

After our recording, we filed the score and parts away so that some day in the future, a different group of children can play “Alex’s Amazing Musical.”

The score and parts. Ready to be submitted to Boosey & Hawkes.

So there you have it. When a child writes a score, he can copy out the parts for others to perform. You can even do a recording!