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Symphony Orchestra Musicians Show Twillman Students How Pitch Shapes Music
Twillman Elementary School first graders, from left, Sophina King, Desirae Williams, Isabella House, Jaylen Pennington, Ronnie Fowler and Arthur Jackson use a cord to demonstrate low, medium and high pitches for their classmates while Deborah Bloom, a violinist with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, helps out. Bloom and fellow violin player Jooyeon Kong visited the school to reinforce what the students learned about pitch in music.
A pair of musicians visited Twillman Elementary School, in the Hazelwood School District, to teach the school’s first grade students a music lesson.
Deborah Bloom and Jooyeon Kong are violinists with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and they taught the students about the role pitch plays in music. They played duets and performed activities with the students to help them hear and visualize low, medium and high pitches.
“It’s partly to help the teachers,” Bloom said of the orchestra’s outreach efforts. “And it’s partly to add another dimension and to inspire students to take music lessons they like.”
“Visits like these reinforce what they learn in school and makes those lessons relevant,” Kong added. “These students had just been working with pitch in the classroom.”
Twillman Elementary is part of the Des Lee Fine Arts Education Collaborative housed at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. This collaborative helps offset the costs for area arts organizations to work in Des Lee Schools. The SLSO’s Community Partnership Program presents more than 100 in-school presentations in area schools every year.
Bloom first told the students that pitch is not the same thing as volume in music. Pitch is more like the notes on a scale, ascending or descending. Both musicians provided the group with brief career overviews – they both started playing instruments at early ages, Bloom at 4 and Kong at 8.
Bloom then explained that she and Kong are symphony members and that they work with more than 90 other musicians while Kong showed a group photo of the musicians at Powell Symphony Hall, where they perform concerts. For their first song, they played a Mozart duet.
Next, they engaged the students in an activity, “Highs and Lows.” They asked the children to say “It’s a beautiful day,” in the highest and lowest voice they could muster. Next, using an oversized flash card, Kong pointed to different animals – a mouse, a dog, a cow, a bird, etc., while Bloom asked what pitch the students believed the animals made.
Then, the violinists asked for five volunteers to come forward and help them show pitch to the rest of the students. Bloom handed each one a silver instrument that looked like a giant kazoo with a small hammer attached to it. The students each took the objects, called tone chimes, and on cues from Bloom, they sounded five different tones, from low to high.
Between a Bach composition and a Bartok duet that lasted only 60 seconds, Bloom called for more volunteers. Holding a cord, Bloom asked the six students if they wanted to be a high, medium or low pitch. Depending on their answer, she had them hold parts of the cord over their heads, at their waists or near their feet. This activity helped show the students how pitch forms shapes and lines in music.
Because certain activities required students to talk to one another, Bloom set up a signal with them that would alert the students to return their attention to the visitors – she sharply played a several notes on her violin.
The visitors rounded out the assembly by playing another piece from Bartok. Later in the day, students received copies of the book, “Where the Wild Things Are,” by Maurice Sendak, courtesy of Booksource. (story courtesy of the Hazelwood District Communications Dept.)
