Explicitly teaching music notation

In music classrooms, students engage with a variety of forms of musical notation, which enables independent, high-level performance. Musical notation refers to conventional music notation, rhythmic notation, guitar tablature and chord charts.

Explicitly teaching music notation does not have to be purely theoretical. Students may be engaged in imitating, performing, reading, and writing music simultaneously, and jointly construct compositions. Each engagement with the musical language of notation reinforces learning and provides the basis for higher-level musical performances. When learning and teaching notation, students should have the opportunity to link the writing of music, with practising speaking and reading the language of music.

The following strategy provides one way to teach notation by extending common uses of body percussion (Burnard & Murphy, 2017), and combines listening, reading, writing and speaking about music notation. It draws on experiential and embodied pedagogies (Bannan, 2010; Vass & Deszpot, 2017). The purpose of this strategy is to explicitly teach the relationship between sound length and note on a staff. This can be adapted for the skill level of the class.

  1. Begin a whole-class body percussion or bucket drum circle.
  2. Establish a simple beat.
  3. Create call and response rhythms between teacher and students.
  4. Increase rhythmic complexity and include student calling.
  5. Throughout this process, the teacher, or a designated student, notates the rhythms as they are performed.
  6. Students use the rhythms noted on the board during the circle playing to create their 4-bar compositions in pairs.
  7. The teacher reminds the students of the names and meanings of relevant components (and their symbols) of the elements of music such as:
    • rhythm (crotchet, quaver, rest, minim)
    • beat
    • dynamics (piano, forte, pianissimo, fortissimo, decrescendo, crescendo).
  8. The students are encouraged to practice using the musical terms (to develop their confidence with musical language) as they jointly create the composition.
  9. For example:

    a 4-bar composition. Rhythm and dynamics are shown

  10. Students form groups of 4, and each pair takes it, in turn, performing their composition. The group of 4 then use each pairs’ composition as the basis for a new 8-16 bar composition.
  11. Each group of 4 performs their composition to the class. Students listening practice asking questions and offering feedback, practising using key musical language. The teacher models asking questions.
  12. After listening to a performance, a student might ask:
    • "Why did you choose to use so many quavers in this composition?"
    • "I think the range of dynamics you used: from the piano at the start, to the fortissimo at the end, made the piece very engaging"
    • "The repetition of the crotchet and quaver rhythm in the first bar throughout, but using different dynamics, made the piece cohesive."
  13. All students should practice asking a question as an audience member.
  14. Curriculum links for the above example: VCAMUM035, VCAMUM036, VCAMUE041.