Lead Sheets for worship

Every church musician should be able to work with a lead sheet. What I mean is that the vocalists should be able to read music, the guitarist should be able to read music, the bass player should know both how to read music and enough theory to improvise with the chords. The drummer should be able to anticipate his drum breaks by actually following the vocal line and any extra accents notated in the lead sheet. The reason that lead sheets are so wonderful is that they don't require page turns, they are adequate to the needs of the musical amateur and even the congregation (without the chords and accents notated). Yes, the congregation should use these same songs that are sung at church in home gatherings. The church will not grow unless we get real with a real musical culture in our churches that extends to homes,families,friends, etc. Thus I am proposing universal note-reading and amateur music making among all.

I want everyone in the next generation to be able to sing in tune

I want all children to become future adults able to sing in tune and to read music.
The Two Syllable Method is the only method which instills the 'relatedness' of pitch in both the ear and the eye.

It begins from birth with special lullabies.

Around age two, the child is introduced to two-note melodies which encourage pitch-matching.

At age three, the parent reads to the child a story with similar two-note phrases. Every time the parent gets to these 'ballooned' musical captions in the story, the parent points and sings- "Hi, Lo, Hi!", introducing the child to reading music.

At age four, two minor third 'sets' are shown with two hand signs moved up and down.

At age five, in Kindergarten, the teacher points at short melodies which were previously heard in the home as nursery rhymes. Now, they read the notes. The white notes are "da" and the black notes are "di".

In first grade, the children read melodies with two notes, then three notes, and then four notes. Later material is previewed by rote, phrase by phrase. Some funny little songs with 'concrete solfege' "Stand, Middle, Sit" ("5, 3-3, 1", "Da, di-di, da",) are heard at home and sometimes sung in class.

In second grade, pentatonic (five note)melodies are read.

In third grade, six and seven note melodies are read.

In later grades, regular music is read- folk songs, world music, and early music. An occasional Renaissance styled "Da-di Madrigal" is read. With occassional use of advanced two-syllable material a sophisticated singing ear continues to develop into adulthood.

If the stylization of these songs seems to be a 'crutch', consider that instrumental study pushed on children is often a 'crutch' of a different sort. Solfege is still another 'crutch'. Solfege and instrumental study do not always ensure a good tuning sense. Solfege verbalizes pitch perception, and instrumental study 'fingerizes', 'motorizes' and 'rhythmizes' it. Both solfege and instruments tend to preoccupy the 'left-brain'. For many, this leaves them with a poor right-brain pitch sense as an adult. Stylized songs, on the other hand, will train the ear progressively and organically, in a very intuitive right-brain fashion. There are many left brain 'handles' that codify what both the left and the right brain has perceived, of course, but these are rapidly understood, intuitively related, and concretely meaningful and appropriate for the progressive stages in the child's development.


If the limitation of using two and three-note melodies seems too severe, consider that these pitch structures are natural to early childhood pitch development; they are 'skeletal' to other material the child is hearing elsewhere, or that you are free to teach if you wish. The child will internally absorb other more advanced material better while being exposed to this simple teaching along the way. Just keep coming back to this simple material, and the other songs will improve.


First grade is too early to introduce the National Anthem for most children, although this may change if my two-syllable songs can be recorded and printed and made available to parents of infants. If children are introduced to this music early, before grade school, more of them may be able to sing the National Anthem at a young age.

I want a two things:


1. I want everyone in the next generation to be able to sing in tune


2. and to be able to read vocal music at sight.



I am preparing to produce a whole series of music education recordings and sheet music to be used from birth through grade school. This series makes it easy for non-musicians to learn how to radically effect the musical intelligence and developmental aptitude of the next generation prior to age nine especially. It is all related to this profoundly simple phrase:

http://www.angelfire.com/mac/mcclain/track1Teach.html

The material for older children and adults is more interesting, of course, but everything in the 'system' is related to this. Taken as a whole, the complete series powerfully instills in the mind how pitches interrelate.

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Thoughts on Pitch Development

Singing involves the ability to mentally hear music. The ability to relate tones (mathematically related vibratory rates) and rhythms (mathematically related time sequences) is developed in early childhood.


A strong musical ear develops naturally in early childhood with HEARING SIMPLE MELODIES and then learning to sing them by rote. These simple melodies, using only 2, 3, or 4 notes of the scale, later become the 'anchor' or 'skeleton' of the adult pitch sense. A lack of clear mental hearing or remembering of these 'skeletal' notes makes for poor pitch intonation of the entire scale later in adulthood.


Most songs purported to be children's songs are not simple enough. They use too many notes of the scale. They do not emphasis the 'skeletal' notes that the child can most effectively hear.


But children often instinctively choose their own music for early experiments in comprehending and matching pitch through singing. Have you ever heard preschool children taunting one another with song? When I was a child I saw a group of children cruelly taunting a boy on the playground with this chant (the numbers below are of the major scale):

"Rand - y . . peed . . his . . pa - ants"
5.........5......3..........6 ...... 5......3

I've also heard this chant sung with the taunting syllable "neea" ('a' as in 'cat')

"Neea . . na . . . . na . . na - na"
5...........3............6 ..... 5......3

There is a famous nursery rhyme that uses this motif:

"Ring a . . round . . the . . ros - ie"
5.......5......3............6 ...... 5.....3


There are specific kinds of simple melodies that help children develop mentally at a young age. They basically fan out from this rather 'modal' or tonally flexible interval set (6-5-3 in major, 4-3-1 or 8-7-5 in minor). This interval set is not so much conceived as a 'key' at first. The child's comprehension of it is as an instinctive interval set, only vaguely related to the highly rational structure of adult major melodies that they are hearing all around them. Children are groping after the kind of melodies they can SING, not just the kind that it can enjoy listening to.


Musical aptitude is typically developed through singing more than through instrumental playing in the formative preschool years. This singing must be family oriented, modeled as a fun activity by the parents, and positively motivated with encouragement rather than with negative pressure. A significant degree of musical aptitude for music is lost in children when there is no musical culture of singing in the home during their infancy and toddler years. Whatever aptitude a child is born with, they will lose some of it by age nine in a non-singing culture. To be the child's most effective early teacher, the parent must expose the toddler and preschool child to melodies that the child can most effectively remember, mentally hear clearly, and eventually sing in tune precisely. The parent can sing just two notes (a minor third apart) at first, making up little songs about cleaning the room, picking up toys, putting on shoes, dealing with a big brother, playing with a puppy, etc. The parent can make up these songs, or they can use the ones I have composed and compiled in my book 4, Nursery Rhymes. These songs are later read without words (through my Da-di system) in the first vocal music reading lessons at age five or six.


The minor third is the easiest interval to sing. The Two Syllable Method ("Da-di Method") is the only method based on this interval.

We develop the child's ear first through melodies which employ it:

"Hey .... Mis - ter .. Shoe!"
5 ......... 3 .... 3 ...... 5

"Da .... di .. di ... Da"
5 ........ 3 ... 3 ..... 5


After the inundation stage in infancy, in which lullabies are heard, there is a drastic reduction of notes to focus the child mentally. First, two notes are used, then three, then four note melodies. Precise 'singing ear' pitch awareness expands in a number of fairly particular ways in relation to various scales and cultural factors. If early awareness of the most essential "embryo" notes is strengthened and encouraged, the underlying structure of music will be sensed more deeply later in life, because, the underlying structures of adult music are essentially two found in nursery rhymes:


1. the minor third, sometimes embellished with a note a major second above the top note- ("Ring Around the Rosie"), and


2. the double major second (3-2-1 in major, that is, two major seconds stacked together- "Hot Cross Buns").


From these joined together comes the pentatonic scale, from which we later get the full major and minor scales and various modal scales, through the 'rational' modulation of these elements at perfect intervals. The child grasps at music's most essential scale structures then, through nursery rhymes.

Playing piano at Church Triumphant and learning about "aggressive" faith.


http://www.churchtriumphantlc.com/

Here is what I am believing God about: I will get a printer set up that is compatible with my old UMac computer at the church so I can print up "Stand Middle Sit" and the other first grade material, and then as God gives me favor, use the recording facilities there at the church to record the curriculum and make it available for use in the fall for an after school program the church will set up.

If this doesn't sound like a big deal, believe me it is. The devil has hindered me a long time from doing this because he knows it will greatly benefit many aspects of God's Kingdom.

Musical training builds mental and cultural wholeness

Pitch is right-brain-intuitive, "connective" and "feminine", if you will. Rhythm is left-brain-rational, "male" and "separating". Our culture values left-brain thought- technical and "separating". Connective right-brain thought is valued somewhat, but only for the technical, competetive purposes of the connected group, usually the corporation or bureaucracy, rather than the community. We emphasise corporate cooperation and culture toward world commerce over community cooperation toward local commerce and culture. Our imbalance is reflected in popular music's mechanical rhythms.

http://www.angelfire.com/mac/mcclain/preschooler.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Tribalism

http://neotribe.tribe.net/thread/169fb770-3cf6-4c2a-8917-8de99169a717

http://uhlm-shadi.tribe.net/thread/e2896b34-0853-4dbb-a651-fcdb936dbb2a

http://remarkk.com/2007/01/
http://remarkk.com/2007/02/25/essay-what-is-an-open-creative-community/

i googled as follows and it made me gag. it wasn't what i wanted at all.


http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=neo-traditional+renaissance+%22new+towns%22+business&spell=1

who are these people who are 'designing' and where are all these places they are supposed to be designing, anyway? I'm not so interested in architecture. Architecture is afterward. I want culture.

Nobody thinks the way i do about all this. The wikipedia entry on 'neo-tribalism' gets some of my thoughts. Forming a deliberate community seems difficult, and fraught with kookiness. What we are after is not a cult, not a religion. It is not a 'technicoligically contrived internet 'community' tribe of geeks who meet in chat-blog places. It is not survivalism, not anti goverment anti UN conspiricacy theoryism. It is certainly not white supremacist. It is more like a small town. food co-opish... 'you can't go back' yeah, but it is still about the Land. Land. Land. work and land is all we have. The earth, your neighbor, together working. some 'system' competition, but by deliberate intent, not some god of blind force we worship and bow down to, no, it bows down to us, we are the lords of the impersonal forces, the "crown of creation" and He regained the lordship for us when we lost it- real doing business, but a different way of culturally conceiving of it, of investing it, of grouping it, cooperating to form it, more local, alot of it, but not exclusively local... not all globalism and big structure is bad, common...not anarchism, no, no... not even libertarianism... it has to do with balance, (left-right brain balance?) a more musical culture, really. creating a musical culture. yeah. oh, and, well, Him, behind it. We can do nothing without Him.