The song is a hit with his second -graders. Daisy Lee, 8 -year -old, says this is her favorite song she has learned. “It’s an easy song and I like the rhythm and the rhythm,” says Daisy, who added that her bigger brother really likes the hit at the stadium of the 80s.
The perfect teaching tool
Like generations of teachers who came before him, Edwards uses a recorder to teach young students about the foundations of music, such as how to focus, how to breathe and how to recognize a particular note.
Obviously this is a job that the recorder is very suitable for.
“There really is no other tool other than maybe the keyboard where it is so easy for a beginner to make sound,” says Michael Lynn, professor of record holder and baroque flute at college and Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio.
It is especially easier to play from your fellow wooden spirits such as saxophone and flute, he says, because they both require you to shape your lips in a certain way to produce sound. With the recorder, all you have to do is blow up in the mouthpiece above, like a whistle.
It is also cheap, and the size is accurate, says Karen Dolezal, a former music teacher at the Athens Montessori school in Athens, Georgia, who is now retired. “It’s a small, portable tool that small hands can master,” she explains.
Both teachers say it’s great for learning children how to read music. Unlike the guitar, which is written in your own chord language, or the piano, which usually involves reading and playing multiple lines of musical annotation at once, the recorder only requires you to read and play one row at once. This allows children to quickly hook up the songs.
Brady Gerber, a music journalist based in Los Angeles, learned the school recorder in the early 2000s. He remembers his simple enjoyment of how easy it was to play the instrument.
“The recorder was incredible because I could actually play music,” Gerber recalls. “I could learn a song relatively easy.”
The recorder also helped him to navigate in the first days of his autism. “It was strangely empowering,” he says. “I didn’t have to work extra to do something. I didn’t feel like an outsider.”
However, the recorder is not without its difficulties. One of the problems is more specially his holes. There are seven and one in the front. Different sounds with them requires covering specific holes with thumbs and fingers. It can be a little complicated.
“(The recorder) is a very sensitive instrument,” says Edwards, a Georgia music teacher. He actually first purchased and practiced his own record holder so that he could confidently teach his students how to play:
“If your fingers do not cover the holes 100%, the right note will not come out.”
Eight -year -old Daisy agrees. “Sometimes I just get the notes wrong because I don’t cover the hole completely,” she says. “This can be a challenge, but it has to be a challenge, so it’s a nice thing.”
From the Renaissance to the classroom
Although there are good reasons for the recorder to be an instrument for elementary school students, he did not start this way. Its rise actually dates from the 15th century when the instrument was day -to -day During the Renaissance, not just among the 8-year-olds.
“Very often played in considerations,” says Lynn, a music historian, referring to ensemble Popular in those times. “So you would have recorders of different sizes, everyone played together. ALTO record holder, tenor recorder and bass recorder.” (The recorder the children play at school is actually the soprano version.)
A major fan of the recorder in his Renaissance reign? Henry VIII. The King of Tudor was also a musician and composer, and he wrote several songs specifically for the instrument.
King Henry VIII – Two compositions for recorders 1540
In the end, his popularity began to decrease. “About approximately 1740, 1750, the recorder begins to go out of style,” says Lynn. It was replaced by the transverse flute (this is the one you hold aside), which remained the flute of choice until the early 20th century.
Just then, the instrument manufacturer, born in French, named Arnold Dolmetsh, caused the Renaissance a Renaissance. He began to promote him as a tool for teaching music in schools.
Dolmetsch and Carl Orff, the influential music teacher and a German composer behind “Carmina Burana” “ They are largely responsible for the recorder ending in so many classrooms.
Well, they and the production industry.
As the plastic injection molding increased in the 1940s and 1950s, companies began mass production of recorders and sold them in the bulk of the school districts for only $ 1 per piece.
In the early 1960s, says Lynn, the recorder began to take over the opening classrooms.
He remembers that he learned the recorder as a young boy and saw plastic versions everywhere. “They were very popular,” Lynn says. “That was really the beginning of this.”
He notes that from his childhood these plastic recorders have been improving with improvements in technology and production.
A serious instrument
More than half a century later, the recorder remains capable of much more than “hot crossed buns”.
“It’s not just a toy,” Dolazal says. “This is a serious tool.”
Lynn agrees: “This is certainly an uninformed instrument from a public point of view, because most people have never heard a really fine play on a recorder.”
This is partly because most students in the United States study the recorder as an introduction to other wooden wind instruments and never Play it at a higher levelS If they did, Lynn says, they will quickly find out how difficult it is to master beyond the basics and perhaps to take the instrument more seriously.
At Parkside Elementary, it seems that students are already.
