using beat functions to build up accompaniment
Beat function is a concept from Edwin Gordon, a music educator who ran a lot of experiments on what pre-verbal children actually perceive in music (of the various western traditions) and proposed changes to how we teach music based on his findings. This became codified into Music Learning Theory™ . Full disclosure: I have never taken a MLT course. My experience with it is minimal. I've read Learning Sequences in Music and Rhythm: Contrasting the Implication of Audiation and Notation. I find many of his criticisms of notation and terminology ring true. I am less enamored of other things he suggests, like music aptitude tests. I think this is true of most things one learns — you use what you like and leave the rest. I would like to take the MLT courses at some point, however, because it's good to get the view from the inside, too.
I define the beat functions this way:
Macrobeat is the first beat in the meter. Gordon has very specific ideas about classifying meter which, again, are based on perception and not notation, and as such conflict with what has been taught (and is still taught) in music schools. I am not going to go into all the gory details here. Suffice it to say that with my students, we deal only with duple and triple.
Microbeat is what we usually learn and perceive as simply "the beat." For Gordon (and here I agree), it's how microbeats are grouped into macrobeats that determine the meter and not subdivisions.
Subdivisions are pulses smaller than the microbeat.
I start off with macrobeat with my students. It's a bit challenging, of course, because the microbeat is most often what most people first perceive when trying to find the beat. But we start with macrobeat because it doesn't happen as frequently, thereby giving a beginning, less experienced student more time to physically do what they need to do, particularly when it comes to changing chords. Now you may be thinking, girl, you are only working with two chords — how hard can it be? But if you are used to working with middle school populations, you probably have noticed how many kids have motor skill issues, both fine and large. Even at ages 11, 12, 13… It's extra challenging for them because a) they don't want to be seen as struggling in front of their peers (or anybody, for that matter), and b) they can often hear it doesn't sound good, even once they get the macrobeat — it's square, stiff, and not stylistically correct. As much as I can, I try to be encouraging. It's just a step towards having something that does sound good. It's a foot in the door.
I start with beatboxing /b/, then move to hand drum (a tambourine with a head; I use pandeiro technique, because it's what I know best and it's versatile), then to a chord instrument — ukulele, piano, or guitar. Then it's on to microbeat, beatboxing /k/, slap on the tambourine, and downstrokes on the uke. Then we make a composite, alternating /b k / and so on. This is where it gets a bit better because it starts to sound more like the music the students listen to. For strummed instruments, we can do a little fingerpicking, but I usually let the percussion do the composite job. Next we add the shaker and arpeggiation/fingerpicking for subdivisions. And then we add the composite. Then we learn to do fills. And eventually we move on to creating grooves/ostinatos and looking at typical patterns for certain styles.
All of this takes a long time because I don't see my students very often. I'm trying to focus this year on letting the students pace themselves and they have an ugly self-assessment chart to help us do that. I'm hoping that as we use it, I will be able to see how to make it less ugly. (Part of it is also that I am trying also to use a little less paper. If we were a laptop school, there would be an obvious solution. For now, it is what it is.) I am hoping that the combination of self-assessment and self-pacing will allow the kids who are struggling to see their progress more clearly, while also allowing the kids with more experience to move forward and be challenged.