How Do You Help Students Connect Concepts from Music Theory with Learning and Interpreting Music? Published in American Music Teachers magazine June/July 2022

Gel Stick Highlighters.   They come in 5 colors and the tactile texture, rich and viscous, is irresistible to kids.  My students keep these in their music bags.  First, we stick on labels printed with the words, steps, skips, and repeating notes.  This way students start immediately reading by pattern, instead of note by note.  Next, we change the labels to scales, arpeggios, and repeating sections.  Just as their first set of markers wears down, students “graduate” to new markers with labels that encourage students to look for peaks in melodic phrases, musical structure, and harmonic cadences.

Starting with their technique books, students identify I, IV, and V chords by color depending on how they visualize a cadential chord’s emotive quality.  In this photo, 4th-grade student Pax likes to think in tints; he calls the penultimate V chord, without the 7th, pink for “love and kindness.” But the V7 chord is darker red because “it sounds hotter like danger or anger.” For Pax, the home chord is usually green, “a safe color” of resolution that represents “home, peace, nature and rest”.  What’s most important is for students to develop their own color palette for the push and pull of phrases and visceral resolutions. At this point, we do use copies of music, kept in binders for reference, so that we don’t litter their original books with too much visual distraction.  Then for comparison, I assign music that doesn’t resolve on the tonic, like Emma Lou Diemer’s “Remembering” from Reaching Out for Solo Piano or Hale Smith’s “Day’s End” from Faces of Jazz for students to explore the idea of Infinity and Beyond.

Pax with Chords marked with colors for emotion!