Season Three
Episode 83
Barred Instruments within the Orff Approach
If you ask most music educators about what they know about the Orff approach, most will mention something about the barred instruments. These instruments are a tool used to facilitate learning within the Orff approach, though the process of teaching using the approach can be done with everything and nothing. Meaning that you can teach using this approach with any instrument - voice, drums, recorders, percussion - or with no instruments at all - just your body. The barred instruments are just one tool to help guide student learning. And I love them. I love the flexibility in how the bars can be taken off to create different scales and how they can be played simplistically with just tonic and dominant steady beats accompanying singing as well as playing ambitious polyphonic pieces.
Episode 83
Barred Instruments within the Orff Approach
This is the third episode focusing on the Orff approach. The past two episodes focused on drums and recorders. I shared three original pieces in each of those episodes along with links to the pieces to allow you to use them in your classroom. Today I’m sharing three barred instrument pieces that I’ve created and used in my classroom with students. The first piece was a collaborative effort with my eighth grade students this year.
This piece began as a result of wanting students to experiment with chord structures and creating ostinato patterns using roots, thirds, and fifths. This is one way to approach songwriting, but not the only way. Many times I start with the melody first and then add chords underneath. We went about it completely opposite.
We wrote out the scale degrees, had spent time talking about I/IV/V chords, and major/minor sounds. We started off talking about chords - how they’re built and created. From there we chose G as our home pitch so our first chord began with the G chord. I had 8 measures designated with the focus being on one chord per measure. We discussed how we’d want the final chord to be the V chord so that it would result in a nice cadence at the end moving from V-I (D-G). For the rest of the chords, I simply asked students to choose a scale degree and that would be the root of the chord for each measure. I literally wrote out the root letters on the board with bar lines between the letters to designate measures. Each letter represented four beats. We played through the 8 measures by playing a steady beat on the roots of the chords and ended on beat one of the first measure again. If there was one that sounded like it wasn’t where we wanted to go then we tried another root for that measure.
Together students decided on:
G-D-C-G-E-G-C-D
Or
I-V-IV-I-vi-I-IV-V
We played around with creating an ostinato pattern on the roots of each chord.
Then we played around with the roots, thirds, and fifths to come up with the bass xylophone part.
I compared what pitches within each chord had not been used between the bass line and the bass xylophone parts (for the most part) and created a part for the LAX that would complement the other parts. We found a place where we could walk down between pitches from measure 5-6 and one of the students created how that would happen and demonstrated it.
For the melody on the soprano xylophones, I realize that the rhythm is the same as the bass line with a repeating ‘ta syncopa titi’ compared to ‘ta syncopa ta’ but we liked it so we kept it.
I wrote this piece during Orff Level II. I began by playing around with a single moving drone from D and A to D and B. Most of my time was spent playing this on the piano so that I could figure out different melody lines with my right hand. And again, I played around with chords and passing/neighboring tones. I love unusual meters and being that I time teaching students meter of 5 and 7 in my 7th grade classes, I wanted a piece that would work with this concept.
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