Season Three
Episode 84
Orff and Modern Band with Martina Vasil
Martina's Bio:
Dr. Martina Vasil is Assistant Professor of Music Education and Director of the Modern Band, Orff Schulwerk, and Dalcroze Summer Institute at the University of Kentucky (UK). She teachers collegiate courses in general music, popular music education, and qualitative research. She continues to teach PreK-6th music at Lexington Montessori School. She is Orff Level III and Dalcroze Level II certified. Martina was a member of the inaugural Modern Band Higher Education Fellowship and has brought Modern Band training to teachers locally and internationally (Liberia). Martina's research centers on popular music education, Orff Schulwerk, and music teacher education. She has been published in the International Journal of Music Education, Journal of Music Teacher Education, UPDATE: Applications of Research in Music Education, and the Orff Echo. She recently published a book chapter, "Popular Music Education and Orff Schulwerk," in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education (2019).
TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Jessica: Martina thank you for talking today.
Martina: My pleasure. I love talking about these things.
Jessica: So can you tell us a little about yourself - what you teach or what you love about teaching.
Martina: Yeah so right now this is my fifth year at the University of Kentucky. I'm an assistant professor. My main load is that I teach undergrads general music methods so I'm their introduction to teaching music to children. I also teach graduate courses and research so I do Intro to Research class and qualitative course training at Kentucky. So we offer Dalcroze, Orff Levels, and Modern Band training here. I also still teach children, which has been a new thing so this is my second year teaching preschool through 6th grade at a local Montessori school. You know, before that I was teaching K - 8th. What I love about teaching is just how different it is every day. I get bored pretty easily and I do remember sometimes teaching band in the past I would get in a rut, but with general music it just seems like things change so often that I can be more creative with my lesson planning and you just never know what students will come up with. Even the college students. So there's a lot of laughter and joy in my day and I really appreciate that about my job.
Jessica: I love that about older students too because I think we expect it from the younger students, but then it can be as joyful for the older students as for the younger students in discovering and creating and all of that. So most of the listeners are familiar with Orff Schulwerk, but this idea of modern band is something that's even kind of new for me to consider. So can you tell us exactly what you mean by that.
Martina: Yeah I often hear people using it incorrectly 'cause they'll say well I'm doing the modern band in my class. It's actually not - that's not the name of the pedagogy. It's the type of class so like you have band, choir, orchestra. You have a modern band class. Basically it's like other classes where you have a typical set of instruments, but for modern band this would be electric guitar, bass guitar, drum set, vocals, computer music, but you can actually go beyond that. There have been modern band programs in California that's all mariachi. So I'd say the main criteria for a modern band class is that the repertoire is music that the students choose, which is usually pop music. And then you kind of take it from there. So what I really love about modern band is, you know, you can walk into a classroom or adopted program and you can do it in your general music class with whatever you have on hand. What I really love to do with my college students is, you know, we watch those Jimmy Fallon videos where he plays - he just uses classroom instruments to play songs with The Roots and that's kind of how my journey with this started. And then I kind of learned more about it. So yeah, modern band is the ensemble and then the pedagogy is something else, which I guess we're going to get into in a second.
Jessica: Yes. 'Cause I was reading the article that you wrote for Teaching with Orff and so going through that this morning and kind of reading through and going okay, what exactly... you've got the modern band, but then what exactly is the pedagogy behind it and how is that... how is it similar to Orff and how do they work together. So can you kind of share on that? About I mean, do you put Orff and modern band together or is it just a great way to look at it as how they're similar and how they can be used?
Martina: For me I just started naturally doing the two together because I was Orff trained first. Orff was my first approach as a little undergraduate baby. I went to my first workshop and got hooked. And I've done all three levels of training and I would call myself an Orff teacher first. That's my main identity. But I've always had this itch for pop music so when I started to learn about this modern band and Little Kids Rock, I just started immediately to blend the two together. And I always say the Jimmy Fallon style is the perfect example for how that's done because it's - the repertoire is pop music and then I'm using what I have at hand to cover the songs or even to create your own music.
But even as I began thinking through this, as I was just doing this naturally, I was like,"man this really just works together." And the article I wrote just breaks it down so I'll explain to listeners that David Wish is the founder of Little Kids Rock and they're the group that kind of picked this word: Modern Band. David Wish was a first grade teacher who was at a bilingual school and so when he started teaching guitar lessons after class he was really interested in kids learning music the way they learn a language. And so he looked into this Krashen's Five Hypothesis of English Acquisition. So I'd say if you want to think of it in a simple way, the pedagogy behind modern band is similar to how people learn a second language so there are five hypotheses.
The first one is acquisition learning and I would say think of this as when a baby's babbling and they pick up language because they're just surrounded by it. It's just an informal way. Krashen talked about this for language and David was just like, "children can do that with music too." So I consider that completely with Orff because we always do sound before sight. A lot of it is the teacher modeling and the students imitating. And this is one of the hypotheses.
The second one is the monitor hypothesis so this is the idea that as you're learning something your brain is constantly going and looking for errors and trying to correct it based on a foundation that's established. I think that fits right with Orff because you've got imitate - explore - create. The imitate phase is when you're really providing children with that foundation of musical knowledge and then when they explore and create, they're using their monitor. They're listening like, "Did that last note on the xylophone sound right? Am I home?" You know - and this happens with modern band too you know where they're playing these chord progressions and like 'how did that sound? Does your song sound finished? Let's try that again.' So you're also building a foundation in modern band. It just looks a little different because of the guitars and the drum sets and it looks a little different.
The third hypothesis is natural order. So it's the idea that just as we gather language, it doesn't have to be a specific order on how you're picking it up. And allowing this in your classroom. I think as teachers we have a lot of stress on us and we have to put our objectives on the board and our learning statements and sometimes you can lose that idea because you're trying to get to that end goal. But allowing the little space in the classroom for kids to make some choices on how they're going to learn something is important to this natural order idea. I do think that it's supposed to happen in the Schulwerk, but sometimes it doesn't just because of all the constraints we're under. You know, my article I kind of include some quotes from Orff like "You never know where it's going to go" and just trying to keep that sacred space in your classroom if you can to allow some of that student choice to do that.
Jessica: They have so much buy in too when they get a say into how it can go. It is true because sometimes you don't know exactly where it's going to go or you think it's going to go one way and the student brings this brilliant idea up and learning to go with that takes time I think. You know, not necessarily the first year or even immediately after your Orff Level I, but it takes time. I think that natural order of letting it progress is great.
Martina: I agree. I think that I'm still working on it. I'm still a control freak and just... even with my itty bitties when I work with them now - preschool especially - am I allowing them to flower and have their choice? Stop being so controlling
Let's see - the fourth hypothesis is input so it's basically 'is this understandable?' I think we do that all the time in Orff. That's why we have the removable bars on the instruments. That typical process of speech to body percussion to instruments. We have this very nice scaffording that goes in and allows children to immediately grasp; immediately understand. And I think some teachers are afraid of modern band because they see these electric guitars and basses and think 'Oh my god - how do you get kids started on this?' It's the same idea. Just start with a one finger chord. Or play one note on bass. And pop music is super repetitive and actually super simple and if you've ever seen the axis of awesome video on YouTube, they play like 50 songs using 4 chords. So I think that's a really easy commonality. Very common between Orff and modern band.
And then last is the effective filter. So it's how much anxiety students feel when they're in their classroom. So if a student has a high effective filter that means they're feeling really stressed. They're really anxious. They don't have a lot of confidence. You want to try to lower that effective filter. Teachers can do this with some humor, through simplifying the input, allowing choices. Orff teachers all the time do group stuff before asking for solos. We do that in modern band. We do a class composition before you ask them to pair up with someone or to do it in a group. Just knowing what your kids are comfortable with. If you've got a transfer student and you're in the middle of doing recorder stuff, you probably want them next to you and you're probably going to work with that student instead of throwing them to the wolves. And I think Orff teachers are really good about doing that and you see it in modern band too. We really want to lower the anxiety so students take more risks and then can be more creative and musical.
Jessica: One of the things I've found that's most helpful for my students with lowering that risk - like you said, doing the big group first and then doing it smaller and having that example and walking them through the steps of how they're going to do it. So that when they do it in a smaller group or with partners it's like you said, lowered anxiety. But I also find giving them just kind of the tools, for lack of a better word, really say understanding pentatonic scales before diatonic scales if you're on bars. Or with drumming even giving them the vocabulary of tone and bass before you ask them to improvise with different rhythms that are familiar and having them speak it and having them tap it before they play it. And I find the first thing I think of when you talk about anxiousness or about feeling comfortable in a classroom is the improvisation aspect. So they can do the imitate, but then the exploring they kind of get a little more anxious about and then the creating, some of them can really get more anxious about not doing it right or not even knowing where to start. So I think a big part or at least in my classroom is just having them really comfortable with imitating and then really comfortable with exploring and then moving on and having given them plenty of tools so that that is lowered and they know how to do it.
Martina: Yeah. This just reminded me when I was - I do Modern Band training on campus - and teachers come in too with anxiety. They're not comfortable with guitars and I just remember a point during the training when I thought 'Oh my gosh this is Orff,' we were doing electric guitar stuff and he wanted to teach us how to solo on the guitar. And you're like 'oh my gosh I can't do that.' So he just has us place his first and third finger and we're just echoing patterns from him. And he did something like (singing): "My name is Brian. I'm just using these two notes." And he's just kind of got this background track going on and we're just practicing it. And then he's like 'We're going to go down the line and whenever you're ready, you sing and play your name." I'm like this is Orff! You know - speech to instruments. We're all adults so we took the solo, but giving that choice to kids. Doing something as a group, using something that they're really familiar with (their name), and simplifying it even on this huge electric plugged in guitar that's loud. You're just moving basically one finger. So you're lifting your third finger, the first one's down, doing the rhythm of your name. I'm just blown away by this.
Jessica: So when you were in that course learning and doing the (singing): "My name is Michael,"and doing the things on the, you know, the simple patterns and the improvising, what did the teacher do to help the adults feel comfortable improvising on those instruments that they maybe had never played?
Martina: Yeah. A ton of humor. A ton of checking in: How you feeling on a level 1-10? How's your anxiety? A lot of group playing. A lot of modeling. And a lot of time like we learn a chord and then the groove is just going and he's walking around and checking in. Turn to your neighbor and show them what you've got here. A lot of peer learning. It's really beautiful. And I just kept thinking "This is Orff. This is Orff. This is Orff." Which is incredible because David Wish had no idea who Orff was when he started this thing way back in the day as a first grade teacher teaching kids guitar after school every day. For me if you ever look up his story, it's just incredible to me.
Jessica: So when you say popular music because that can mean a lot of different things to different people, what does that mean?
Martina: To me like my operating definition has certain qualities to it. It's music that a lot of people like. It's consumed by a large amount of people. And this can be measured in lots of ways. So if it's on the Billboard 100. Did it win a Grammy Award that year? Is it like popular with the Disney movies? Like all the music from Frozen right now - I consider that popular. Honestly any Disney music I feel like is crack for kids. They just love it all. They can't get enough of it. It doesn't even matter how old it is. If it's Disney, done. You know, basically anything that's really prominent at the time, but I find that I'm doing some modern band programming now with my college students. We're doing it with a group of refugee kids in Kentucky. Mixed age group. We just ask them, you know, what's the music you like? Then we listed all their songs. We just did Despacito with them last week. Instrumental version. They came up with new lyrics. That's not popular right now, but it was something that they like. It's something that you'd consider a pop song. So it is very difficult to define. I would just say broad appeal and what the kids like at that moment is what I consider popular.
Jessica: And there may be people who disagree with this, but I mean I don't use all pop music in my classroom, you know. It's a very Orff based program, but I do pull in pieces and then we compose around like you said those simple chords. There's so many songs that only have like 4 chords and then we can do ukulele or barred instruments or add drumming. The students can create around that framework. But I really do believe that there are benefits to pulling in popular music into our classrooms. And like I said, some people may disagree with that, but I would love to share the benefits to bringing that into our classrooms.
Martina: Absolutely and I'll talk about the benefits for adolescents and then go to children because this was actually my research baby to begin with when I taught K-8 general music. The middle school students drove me crazy so I went back for my Doctorate and like I've got to figure out why was I so unprepared for middle school general music? What could I have done better? 'Cause I was doing a little bit of pop and that was so successful compared to anything else. And so there's actually a lot of research on musical preferences with adolescents. Adolescents - we're talking people age 12-18 in the United States. So that's basically grades 6-12. And you know they've done surveys with kids and all these different studies and they're like adolescents listen to a lot of music, but overwhelmingly most prefer to listen to and create popular music. Research shows that there's a lot of benefits 'cause the kids are asked why do you like pop music so much? And they found that it helps them connect with their peers. Like you want that social acceptance? And you want to be with your friends. I'm sure we've all friends who like the same band and you can talk about it forever. I was a weird kid. I just liked the Beatles - like not even my generation - but I had my Beatles friends, you know.
The other reason is to separate from your parents. You know, most adolescents go through that phase. My sister used to blast Rent, the Musical, because it made my mom mad. She's like, "Turn that down!" But it's like it's my sister rebelling. I'm different than you. I'm different than my parents. I'm forming my own identity. This is my music not your music. Adolescents like to figure out - I mean they're figuring out who they are so I just remember friends going through different stages like there was the alt-emo music and all of a sudden they're doing Justin Bieber. They're trying to figure out what's with you. So music is really important for that. Like music and fashion mixed together.
Music - pop music is important for processing emotions so I always ask my college kids like do you remember your first break-up song? That song that you always used to cry to. It's always some kind of pop song that helped them like why did this happen to me? Yes, life does go on. It's not the end of the world. Alongside the social connections there's like a group think that happens when you're liking a band or following a band and that's kind of beneficial for adolescents. I always like to think of that Bieber fever that came out how many years ago. I don't know what it is now - it's some new band now.
Jessica: It's a lot of the Tik Tok stuff right now. Like my daughter's in 7th grade and it just seems like whatever like - she'll hear music on the TikTok video and find out what that music was and then that becomes the new song she starts listening to and it goes from there. I'm back and forth on TikTok. It really depends on what content you're choosing to watch just like any social media. There is some really great pop music on there and she definitely connects with her friends from it and gets independence from me and is processing who she is through that and then taking that musical aspect from that social media and going with it. I've found a lot of students ask for those songs like "Hey can we do that song from TikTok, you know?" They identify with it.
Martina: Yeah. You're having a front row seat in your home and you have an adolescent and you're teaching them. You're just surrounded.
Jessica: I am. Yeah! The good, the bad, the ups, the downs - I'm kind of living it at home and then, you know, I love middle schoolers. I just think they are amazing and slightly under - like misunderstood, you know. I think music is a huge way to impact them and really just for them to express themselves and so I think popular music is one way to do that.
Martina: Absolutely. Yeah. The good news is everything you're doing is backed strongly by research and there's a lot of research on how beneficial it is to include popular music and to use it with adolescents. There's less with children and I'm a little bit mixed on it because I think general music is meant to expose to a broad range. I do think pop music gets left out a lot and people are not realizing that you know, so many educational theorists always talk about going from the familiar to the unfamiliar. So why are we constantly exposing children to something they've never heard of before? I'm not happy that parents aren't singing songs to their kids as much anymore or listening to cds. You can't really fix that - it is what it is so why don't we use some of the songs that kids know already to make those connections and take them further. I'd just be so happy - I'm seeing it happen - I'm seeing teachers you know when the post, they will deliberately program a popular piece at the end of the year concert. What I would like to encourage teachers to do is work towards being a little more on their feet with stuff. It was really cool. When Baby Shark was the big thing, I saw teachers just immediately using their Orff skills, using whatever training they have, making adaptations to bring that music into their classroom and building off of it. Just taking Baby Shark and then doing a variation off to it and then teach them about Theme and Variations or some ways that you can keep your pedagogy basically the same and just kind of update the repertoire a bit. If that makes sense. So that's what kind of happens.
You were talking about my John Cena lesson that's also in Teaching with Orff. I went to visit my family and my nephews kept singing "Babada da... John Cena!" I was like who? What? It's John Cena! Like who's John Cena? They were nuts about it. So I looked it up and I was like huh. That only has four notes in it. I was like huh. I bet we could do this on recorder. And so it just became this whole lesson. All you're using is C-B-A-G. And the way I made it more Modern Bandy and really being true to Orff is letting the kids figure it out and not force feed it to them. If you're going do this with 4th and 5th graders, they've spent a little time on recorder. You know do a warm-up on the four notes and then I recorded myself playing the pattern to the backbeat to the original recording. "Can you figure it out?" They could figure it out. It didn't take them long at all. I gave them like a minute and that's way faster than saying 'echo me.' So just being a little more open to kids self-direct themselves. They learned the theme song and that's the imitate kind-of. They're imitating a recording. We added a xylophone ostinati - again I recorded myself playing with the backbeat of the John Cena song and then I played a simple side tubano part. Recorded it to the backbeat and let them listen. So they figured the xylophone part by ear, the drum part by ear, the recorder part. Then they got to pick what part they wanted to play and we rotated. Then the next part was: "Okay, now you're going to make your own theme song" 'cause we learned that John Cena has a creed like loyalty, hustle, respect. So they had to pick their creed and come up with a new theme song using the same four notes. So it was moving from there's a famous guy and his theme song - we imitated it through that exploration-creation stage. I've had a lot of teachers in Kentucky sit with their fourth and fifth graders say they just love it because their creed is like 'work hard - be nice - be respect' like it's so sweet what they come up with. Or they'll be funny like my creed is to eat-sleep-and read. Or something.
Jessica: That's so cool. That's again going from familiar to unfamiliar because they're taking it and applying it. And what a better way to really get them thinking too about other important things outside of music like what do you care about? Make that your creed and then come up with your own melodic example like John Cena.
Martina: Yeah. And one of the other teachers told me you know you might have issues like "ughhh... wrestler. I hate wrestling." But it opens up the conversation like "you may not like it, you know, it is entertainment, but it's also think about how hard he's worked" because the video that I show, it's a YouTube video and it has images of him as a kid. Eight years old holding up that wrestling belt. This has been his dream since he was a kid. You kind of have to respect that. It's certainly not that every kid is going to like a wrestler, but certainly grabbed all the boys' attention and that can be hard to do in music classes so I felt like my nephews loved it. I think other kids will like it too. There's just always kid culture - they're always like into the same thing at the same time, you know.
Jessica: That's true. Yeah. So to those teachers who maybe aren't sure where to even begin to pull in pop music, what would you suggest?
Martina: Talk to your kids. Watch them. I think so many people have recess duty and lunch duty. Walk around and listen like what are they doing? Are they honing in on something? Can you ask them? Can you even do a quick little survey in class. Especially with the older ones. With the younger ones you can do basic popular stuff like Justin Timberlake - what's that dance song from Trolls? Just Dance?
Jessica: Can't Fight the Feeling...Can't Stop the Feeling
Martina: Yes! If you're really not sure, you can't go wrong with doing basic body movement to pop music so a lot of times with Orff training you'll learn for K-2 you want them to gain vocabulary with their body parts so you have the cards like 'nod your head' 'clap your hands' 'bend your knees.' You can lead a simple body sequence to a pop song. Their ears will immediately perk up and you can use, if you're really not sure, that Justin Timberlake song is always going to be popular. With older kids you can get more into, like grades 3-5, they start to really develop their preferences. You can't go wrong with Disney tunes. I had a student who - she wanted to do a scat lesson. Scatting. This is with fifth grade. I told her you know, there's a ton of Disney movies that have scatting like in the Jungle Book. She took a bunch of clips and the kids like - boom! They were zoomed in. They were like oh my god - this is Disney. And it totally made the connection for them and they listened to some Stevie Wonder and he's scatting. And then they tried some scatting syllables and it just became this beautiful Orff experience that was embedded in something they knew already - the Disney movies. So I'd say Disney is a great place to go. Check out the Kids Bop Channel, but don't use the Kids Bop music because kids hate it. They're like this isn't the real thing. Check the original song too because Kids Bop sometimes cleans it up, but at least Kids Bop will show you what's popular in the moment. So those would be my two big recommendations.
Jessica: What do you do about - because I have encountered this - if your students are into explicit music or into music that has content that you're like mmm I just can't do that in the school setting? How do you find ways to either navigate them towards other pieces or guide through that? Because that's one area that I feel like I don't know that I've really perfected that. I don't know that I ever will. But just guiding them to something that they agree on and like, but also that is appropriate.
Martina: I think that's why it's important to kind of get that private survey like with your middle school kids. You're getting individual sheets. That's what I did with this community group because we've got ages 6-16 mixed in there so we just made a whole big list and we were like looking through it. There's one - I don't even know who they are, but it was really inappropriate - and we could really never do that one. But Despacito has a really good beat and we could do the instrumental version and they like that reggatone kind of dancing and they can write their own lyrics to it so rewriting lyrics, doing a parody of a song. Having that conversation about I know you guys like that song. You know it's not appropriate for school. Yeah, we know. Blah, blah, blah. We're going to rewrite the lyrics and make it appropriate. Sometimes it might be a good idea to send a note home to parents saying 'Hey. I'd really want to use materials your kids know. To make sure it's a good educational experience, some of these that maybe aren't appropriate, we want to rewrite the lyrics. They're learning this, this, and this when they're doing that. And then another thing is sometimes they might like a song by an artist that's inappropriate, but that artist has other songs that are. So we even did an Eminem song with this community group I have that's like this One Clean, One Mockingbird. It's a song he wrote for his daughter. He's like look I know you're sad, I'm doing the best I can for you. It's completely clean. One of his few completely clean, but it was a great thing to start with and from that lesson we learned that there's a hook and then the spoken part. So the kids wrote their own hook and then the spoken part. We didn't even cover the song - we just had it as a model. So that's another thing you can do is find the clean song. You don't only have to cover songs to be doing stuff with popular music.
Jessica: So many great ideas. I love it. I love even how much more clearly I'm understanding what you can do with Modern Band and how it really does follow the imitate - explore - create model and how we really have so many options with that it in our classrooms when we might feel like we don't.
Martina: Yeah, and I will add that ukuleles are the best thing that's every happened.
Jessica: Oh my gosh, I love those!
Martina: And I was surprised myself because this community group - we've been coming only five weeks now for one hour at a time. And the 6 year olds can play between C Major and F chords on the ukulele. It just blew me away. They don't keep the ukuleles though. They've only played it five times. Five hours. And they can play. So kindergarten can do this if you want to add a little ukulele in there. C is not hard. Or open strings is a C6 chord. And even just that addition of the ukulele just brings like a little 'ooh - this is more recent. I see people playing this like in bands.'
Jessica: Where else could we find information about Modern Band?
Martina: I think the place to start is LittleKidsRock.org because they've got a ton of free resources there. My college kids use it. You can click on the student jam zone and you can pull up chord charts and anything you want so you can look up songs. You can type in 'easy' and it will pull up all the easy and they've got the chord charts out for you and piano parts. There's a link to the song on Spotify. Another great organization is the Association for Popular Music Education (APME) and I'm VP of that group - so there's a plug. But we're working on the resource side. We want to make it like the AOSA site where it has the members only resource center with lesson plans and stuff. We're building that up right now so as people start to join, we're going to have like my John Cena lesson plan in there and stuff. And all sorts of stuff for K-12 or K-college even. But LittleKidsRock.org first because everything's open and free. APME - we're going to have a members only side that's going to have resources there.
Summer training opportunities are Modern Band Summit is always in Colorado in Fort Collins in July. It's very affordable for teachers. Little Kids Rock makes sure they put in some money there. I think it only costs $100 to register. And then the dorms are there so it's super cheap to stay. It's just a big party. If you go on the website, there's a video. It's mostly real working teachers teaching. You know a lot of conferences it's the top down where it's only the professors. This is like people in the trenches doing Modern Band with their kids. There are sessions on like how to introduce bass guitar and all the little like if you don't know how to do anything, just attend and you'll be able to pick up so many skills on that. And there's a lot of happy hours sponsored by Little Kids Rock so you get to get your tickets, but it's really a sweet community that's built over a few days in Colorado and they raffle off instruments there. There's a chance for you to get up on stage if you want to try some of your new skills and you've got these K-12 teachers rocking it out in little bands with the people from their schools that they go with. It's pretty amazing and that's a really great way to get started if you want to see what it's about. If you want to start smaller, Little Kids Rock does do workshops in the nation and then some higher ed institutions do so here in Kentucky we're actually doing the training March 21 and 22. It's $150 for the weekend. It's 9-5, and 9-5 both days. You get a real crash course, but we do guitar, ukulele, electric guitar, electric bass, drum set. Even a little hiphop and how to introduce rapping to kids like yellow-yellow-orange-yellow like kindergartners can rap and it's super accessible. So nothing beats hands on experience. I think we know that with our Orff training so if anyone is interested in this I highly recommend looking at one of the workshops to go to or that Modern Band Summit.
Jessica: Oh that'd be amazing. Thank you so much. If someone wanted to reach out to you for more information, where could they contact you?
Martina: Just email me at my Kentucky email: martina.vasil@uky.edu.
Jessica: Thank you for talking!
Martina: Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to talk about this and I hope more people use it. It's wonderful. Kids love it.
Episode 84
Orff and Modern Band with Martina Vasil
Dr. Martina Vasil is Assistant Professor of Music Education and Director of the Modern Band, Orff Schulwerk, and Dalcroze Summer Institute at the University of Kentucky (UK). She teachers collegiate courses in general music, popular music education, and qualitative research. She continues to teach PreK-6th music at Lexington Montessori School. She is Orff Level III and Dalcroze Level II certified. Martina was a member of the inaugural Modern Band Higher Education Fellowship and has brought Modern Band training to teachers locally and internationally (Liberia). Martina's research centers on popular music education, Orff Schulwerk, and music teacher education. She has been published in the International Journal of Music Education, Journal of Music Teacher Education, UPDATE: Applications of Research in Music Education, and the Orff Echo. She recently published a book chapter, "Popular Music Education and Orff Schulwerk," in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education (2019).
TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Jessica: Martina thank you for talking today.
Martina: My pleasure. I love talking about these things.
Jessica: So can you tell us a little about yourself - what you teach or what you love about teaching.
Martina: Yeah so right now this is my fifth year at the University of Kentucky. I'm an assistant professor. My main load is that I teach undergrads general music methods so I'm their introduction to teaching music to children. I also teach graduate courses and research so I do Intro to Research class and qualitative course training at Kentucky. So we offer Dalcroze, Orff Levels, and Modern Band training here. I also still teach children, which has been a new thing so this is my second year teaching preschool through 6th grade at a local Montessori school. You know, before that I was teaching K - 8th. What I love about teaching is just how different it is every day. I get bored pretty easily and I do remember sometimes teaching band in the past I would get in a rut, but with general music it just seems like things change so often that I can be more creative with my lesson planning and you just never know what students will come up with. Even the college students. So there's a lot of laughter and joy in my day and I really appreciate that about my job.
Jessica: I love that about older students too because I think we expect it from the younger students, but then it can be as joyful for the older students as for the younger students in discovering and creating and all of that. So most of the listeners are familiar with Orff Schulwerk, but this idea of modern band is something that's even kind of new for me to consider. So can you tell us exactly what you mean by that.
Martina: Yeah I often hear people using it incorrectly 'cause they'll say well I'm doing the modern band in my class. It's actually not - that's not the name of the pedagogy. It's the type of class so like you have band, choir, orchestra. You have a modern band class. Basically it's like other classes where you have a typical set of instruments, but for modern band this would be electric guitar, bass guitar, drum set, vocals, computer music, but you can actually go beyond that. There have been modern band programs in California that's all mariachi. So I'd say the main criteria for a modern band class is that the repertoire is music that the students choose, which is usually pop music. And then you kind of take it from there. So what I really love about modern band is, you know, you can walk into a classroom or adopted program and you can do it in your general music class with whatever you have on hand. What I really love to do with my college students is, you know, we watch those Jimmy Fallon videos where he plays - he just uses classroom instruments to play songs with The Roots and that's kind of how my journey with this started. And then I kind of learned more about it. So yeah, modern band is the ensemble and then the pedagogy is something else, which I guess we're going to get into in a second.
Jessica: Yes. 'Cause I was reading the article that you wrote for Teaching with Orff and so going through that this morning and kind of reading through and going okay, what exactly... you've got the modern band, but then what exactly is the pedagogy behind it and how is that... how is it similar to Orff and how do they work together. So can you kind of share on that? About I mean, do you put Orff and modern band together or is it just a great way to look at it as how they're similar and how they can be used?
Martina: For me I just started naturally doing the two together because I was Orff trained first. Orff was my first approach as a little undergraduate baby. I went to my first workshop and got hooked. And I've done all three levels of training and I would call myself an Orff teacher first. That's my main identity. But I've always had this itch for pop music so when I started to learn about this modern band and Little Kids Rock, I just started immediately to blend the two together. And I always say the Jimmy Fallon style is the perfect example for how that's done because it's - the repertoire is pop music and then I'm using what I have at hand to cover the songs or even to create your own music.
But even as I began thinking through this, as I was just doing this naturally, I was like,"man this really just works together." And the article I wrote just breaks it down so I'll explain to listeners that David Wish is the founder of Little Kids Rock and they're the group that kind of picked this word: Modern Band. David Wish was a first grade teacher who was at a bilingual school and so when he started teaching guitar lessons after class he was really interested in kids learning music the way they learn a language. And so he looked into this Krashen's Five Hypothesis of English Acquisition. So I'd say if you want to think of it in a simple way, the pedagogy behind modern band is similar to how people learn a second language so there are five hypotheses.
The first one is acquisition learning and I would say think of this as when a baby's babbling and they pick up language because they're just surrounded by it. It's just an informal way. Krashen talked about this for language and David was just like, "children can do that with music too." So I consider that completely with Orff because we always do sound before sight. A lot of it is the teacher modeling and the students imitating. And this is one of the hypotheses.
The second one is the monitor hypothesis so this is the idea that as you're learning something your brain is constantly going and looking for errors and trying to correct it based on a foundation that's established. I think that fits right with Orff because you've got imitate - explore - create. The imitate phase is when you're really providing children with that foundation of musical knowledge and then when they explore and create, they're using their monitor. They're listening like, "Did that last note on the xylophone sound right? Am I home?" You know - and this happens with modern band too you know where they're playing these chord progressions and like 'how did that sound? Does your song sound finished? Let's try that again.' So you're also building a foundation in modern band. It just looks a little different because of the guitars and the drum sets and it looks a little different.
The third hypothesis is natural order. So it's the idea that just as we gather language, it doesn't have to be a specific order on how you're picking it up. And allowing this in your classroom. I think as teachers we have a lot of stress on us and we have to put our objectives on the board and our learning statements and sometimes you can lose that idea because you're trying to get to that end goal. But allowing the little space in the classroom for kids to make some choices on how they're going to learn something is important to this natural order idea. I do think that it's supposed to happen in the Schulwerk, but sometimes it doesn't just because of all the constraints we're under. You know, my article I kind of include some quotes from Orff like "You never know where it's going to go" and just trying to keep that sacred space in your classroom if you can to allow some of that student choice to do that.
Jessica: They have so much buy in too when they get a say into how it can go. It is true because sometimes you don't know exactly where it's going to go or you think it's going to go one way and the student brings this brilliant idea up and learning to go with that takes time I think. You know, not necessarily the first year or even immediately after your Orff Level I, but it takes time. I think that natural order of letting it progress is great.
Martina: I agree. I think that I'm still working on it. I'm still a control freak and just... even with my itty bitties when I work with them now - preschool especially - am I allowing them to flower and have their choice? Stop being so controlling
Let's see - the fourth hypothesis is input so it's basically 'is this understandable?' I think we do that all the time in Orff. That's why we have the removable bars on the instruments. That typical process of speech to body percussion to instruments. We have this very nice scaffording that goes in and allows children to immediately grasp; immediately understand. And I think some teachers are afraid of modern band because they see these electric guitars and basses and think 'Oh my god - how do you get kids started on this?' It's the same idea. Just start with a one finger chord. Or play one note on bass. And pop music is super repetitive and actually super simple and if you've ever seen the axis of awesome video on YouTube, they play like 50 songs using 4 chords. So I think that's a really easy commonality. Very common between Orff and modern band.
And then last is the effective filter. So it's how much anxiety students feel when they're in their classroom. So if a student has a high effective filter that means they're feeling really stressed. They're really anxious. They don't have a lot of confidence. You want to try to lower that effective filter. Teachers can do this with some humor, through simplifying the input, allowing choices. Orff teachers all the time do group stuff before asking for solos. We do that in modern band. We do a class composition before you ask them to pair up with someone or to do it in a group. Just knowing what your kids are comfortable with. If you've got a transfer student and you're in the middle of doing recorder stuff, you probably want them next to you and you're probably going to work with that student instead of throwing them to the wolves. And I think Orff teachers are really good about doing that and you see it in modern band too. We really want to lower the anxiety so students take more risks and then can be more creative and musical.
Jessica: One of the things I've found that's most helpful for my students with lowering that risk - like you said, doing the big group first and then doing it smaller and having that example and walking them through the steps of how they're going to do it. So that when they do it in a smaller group or with partners it's like you said, lowered anxiety. But I also find giving them just kind of the tools, for lack of a better word, really say understanding pentatonic scales before diatonic scales if you're on bars. Or with drumming even giving them the vocabulary of tone and bass before you ask them to improvise with different rhythms that are familiar and having them speak it and having them tap it before they play it. And I find the first thing I think of when you talk about anxiousness or about feeling comfortable in a classroom is the improvisation aspect. So they can do the imitate, but then the exploring they kind of get a little more anxious about and then the creating, some of them can really get more anxious about not doing it right or not even knowing where to start. So I think a big part or at least in my classroom is just having them really comfortable with imitating and then really comfortable with exploring and then moving on and having given them plenty of tools so that that is lowered and they know how to do it.
Martina: Yeah. This just reminded me when I was - I do Modern Band training on campus - and teachers come in too with anxiety. They're not comfortable with guitars and I just remember a point during the training when I thought 'Oh my gosh this is Orff,' we were doing electric guitar stuff and he wanted to teach us how to solo on the guitar. And you're like 'oh my gosh I can't do that.' So he just has us place his first and third finger and we're just echoing patterns from him. And he did something like (singing): "My name is Brian. I'm just using these two notes." And he's just kind of got this background track going on and we're just practicing it. And then he's like 'We're going to go down the line and whenever you're ready, you sing and play your name." I'm like this is Orff! You know - speech to instruments. We're all adults so we took the solo, but giving that choice to kids. Doing something as a group, using something that they're really familiar with (their name), and simplifying it even on this huge electric plugged in guitar that's loud. You're just moving basically one finger. So you're lifting your third finger, the first one's down, doing the rhythm of your name. I'm just blown away by this.
Jessica: So when you were in that course learning and doing the (singing): "My name is Michael,"and doing the things on the, you know, the simple patterns and the improvising, what did the teacher do to help the adults feel comfortable improvising on those instruments that they maybe had never played?
Martina: Yeah. A ton of humor. A ton of checking in: How you feeling on a level 1-10? How's your anxiety? A lot of group playing. A lot of modeling. And a lot of time like we learn a chord and then the groove is just going and he's walking around and checking in. Turn to your neighbor and show them what you've got here. A lot of peer learning. It's really beautiful. And I just kept thinking "This is Orff. This is Orff. This is Orff." Which is incredible because David Wish had no idea who Orff was when he started this thing way back in the day as a first grade teacher teaching kids guitar after school every day. For me if you ever look up his story, it's just incredible to me.
Jessica: So when you say popular music because that can mean a lot of different things to different people, what does that mean?
Martina: To me like my operating definition has certain qualities to it. It's music that a lot of people like. It's consumed by a large amount of people. And this can be measured in lots of ways. So if it's on the Billboard 100. Did it win a Grammy Award that year? Is it like popular with the Disney movies? Like all the music from Frozen right now - I consider that popular. Honestly any Disney music I feel like is crack for kids. They just love it all. They can't get enough of it. It doesn't even matter how old it is. If it's Disney, done. You know, basically anything that's really prominent at the time, but I find that I'm doing some modern band programming now with my college students. We're doing it with a group of refugee kids in Kentucky. Mixed age group. We just ask them, you know, what's the music you like? Then we listed all their songs. We just did Despacito with them last week. Instrumental version. They came up with new lyrics. That's not popular right now, but it was something that they like. It's something that you'd consider a pop song. So it is very difficult to define. I would just say broad appeal and what the kids like at that moment is what I consider popular.
Jessica: And there may be people who disagree with this, but I mean I don't use all pop music in my classroom, you know. It's a very Orff based program, but I do pull in pieces and then we compose around like you said those simple chords. There's so many songs that only have like 4 chords and then we can do ukulele or barred instruments or add drumming. The students can create around that framework. But I really do believe that there are benefits to pulling in popular music into our classrooms. And like I said, some people may disagree with that, but I would love to share the benefits to bringing that into our classrooms.
Martina: Absolutely and I'll talk about the benefits for adolescents and then go to children because this was actually my research baby to begin with when I taught K-8 general music. The middle school students drove me crazy so I went back for my Doctorate and like I've got to figure out why was I so unprepared for middle school general music? What could I have done better? 'Cause I was doing a little bit of pop and that was so successful compared to anything else. And so there's actually a lot of research on musical preferences with adolescents. Adolescents - we're talking people age 12-18 in the United States. So that's basically grades 6-12. And you know they've done surveys with kids and all these different studies and they're like adolescents listen to a lot of music, but overwhelmingly most prefer to listen to and create popular music. Research shows that there's a lot of benefits 'cause the kids are asked why do you like pop music so much? And they found that it helps them connect with their peers. Like you want that social acceptance? And you want to be with your friends. I'm sure we've all friends who like the same band and you can talk about it forever. I was a weird kid. I just liked the Beatles - like not even my generation - but I had my Beatles friends, you know.
The other reason is to separate from your parents. You know, most adolescents go through that phase. My sister used to blast Rent, the Musical, because it made my mom mad. She's like, "Turn that down!" But it's like it's my sister rebelling. I'm different than you. I'm different than my parents. I'm forming my own identity. This is my music not your music. Adolescents like to figure out - I mean they're figuring out who they are so I just remember friends going through different stages like there was the alt-emo music and all of a sudden they're doing Justin Bieber. They're trying to figure out what's with you. So music is really important for that. Like music and fashion mixed together.
Music - pop music is important for processing emotions so I always ask my college kids like do you remember your first break-up song? That song that you always used to cry to. It's always some kind of pop song that helped them like why did this happen to me? Yes, life does go on. It's not the end of the world. Alongside the social connections there's like a group think that happens when you're liking a band or following a band and that's kind of beneficial for adolescents. I always like to think of that Bieber fever that came out how many years ago. I don't know what it is now - it's some new band now.
Jessica: It's a lot of the Tik Tok stuff right now. Like my daughter's in 7th grade and it just seems like whatever like - she'll hear music on the TikTok video and find out what that music was and then that becomes the new song she starts listening to and it goes from there. I'm back and forth on TikTok. It really depends on what content you're choosing to watch just like any social media. There is some really great pop music on there and she definitely connects with her friends from it and gets independence from me and is processing who she is through that and then taking that musical aspect from that social media and going with it. I've found a lot of students ask for those songs like "Hey can we do that song from TikTok, you know?" They identify with it.
Martina: Yeah. You're having a front row seat in your home and you have an adolescent and you're teaching them. You're just surrounded.
Jessica: I am. Yeah! The good, the bad, the ups, the downs - I'm kind of living it at home and then, you know, I love middle schoolers. I just think they are amazing and slightly under - like misunderstood, you know. I think music is a huge way to impact them and really just for them to express themselves and so I think popular music is one way to do that.
Martina: Absolutely. Yeah. The good news is everything you're doing is backed strongly by research and there's a lot of research on how beneficial it is to include popular music and to use it with adolescents. There's less with children and I'm a little bit mixed on it because I think general music is meant to expose to a broad range. I do think pop music gets left out a lot and people are not realizing that you know, so many educational theorists always talk about going from the familiar to the unfamiliar. So why are we constantly exposing children to something they've never heard of before? I'm not happy that parents aren't singing songs to their kids as much anymore or listening to cds. You can't really fix that - it is what it is so why don't we use some of the songs that kids know already to make those connections and take them further. I'd just be so happy - I'm seeing it happen - I'm seeing teachers you know when the post, they will deliberately program a popular piece at the end of the year concert. What I would like to encourage teachers to do is work towards being a little more on their feet with stuff. It was really cool. When Baby Shark was the big thing, I saw teachers just immediately using their Orff skills, using whatever training they have, making adaptations to bring that music into their classroom and building off of it. Just taking Baby Shark and then doing a variation off to it and then teach them about Theme and Variations or some ways that you can keep your pedagogy basically the same and just kind of update the repertoire a bit. If that makes sense. So that's what kind of happens.
You were talking about my John Cena lesson that's also in Teaching with Orff. I went to visit my family and my nephews kept singing "Babada da... John Cena!" I was like who? What? It's John Cena! Like who's John Cena? They were nuts about it. So I looked it up and I was like huh. That only has four notes in it. I was like huh. I bet we could do this on recorder. And so it just became this whole lesson. All you're using is C-B-A-G. And the way I made it more Modern Bandy and really being true to Orff is letting the kids figure it out and not force feed it to them. If you're going do this with 4th and 5th graders, they've spent a little time on recorder. You know do a warm-up on the four notes and then I recorded myself playing the pattern to the backbeat to the original recording. "Can you figure it out?" They could figure it out. It didn't take them long at all. I gave them like a minute and that's way faster than saying 'echo me.' So just being a little more open to kids self-direct themselves. They learned the theme song and that's the imitate kind-of. They're imitating a recording. We added a xylophone ostinati - again I recorded myself playing with the backbeat of the John Cena song and then I played a simple side tubano part. Recorded it to the backbeat and let them listen. So they figured the xylophone part by ear, the drum part by ear, the recorder part. Then they got to pick what part they wanted to play and we rotated. Then the next part was: "Okay, now you're going to make your own theme song" 'cause we learned that John Cena has a creed like loyalty, hustle, respect. So they had to pick their creed and come up with a new theme song using the same four notes. So it was moving from there's a famous guy and his theme song - we imitated it through that exploration-creation stage. I've had a lot of teachers in Kentucky sit with their fourth and fifth graders say they just love it because their creed is like 'work hard - be nice - be respect' like it's so sweet what they come up with. Or they'll be funny like my creed is to eat-sleep-and read. Or something.
Jessica: That's so cool. That's again going from familiar to unfamiliar because they're taking it and applying it. And what a better way to really get them thinking too about other important things outside of music like what do you care about? Make that your creed and then come up with your own melodic example like John Cena.
Martina: Yeah. And one of the other teachers told me you know you might have issues like "ughhh... wrestler. I hate wrestling." But it opens up the conversation like "you may not like it, you know, it is entertainment, but it's also think about how hard he's worked" because the video that I show, it's a YouTube video and it has images of him as a kid. Eight years old holding up that wrestling belt. This has been his dream since he was a kid. You kind of have to respect that. It's certainly not that every kid is going to like a wrestler, but certainly grabbed all the boys' attention and that can be hard to do in music classes so I felt like my nephews loved it. I think other kids will like it too. There's just always kid culture - they're always like into the same thing at the same time, you know.
Jessica: That's true. Yeah. So to those teachers who maybe aren't sure where to even begin to pull in pop music, what would you suggest?
Martina: Talk to your kids. Watch them. I think so many people have recess duty and lunch duty. Walk around and listen like what are they doing? Are they honing in on something? Can you ask them? Can you even do a quick little survey in class. Especially with the older ones. With the younger ones you can do basic popular stuff like Justin Timberlake - what's that dance song from Trolls? Just Dance?
Jessica: Can't Fight the Feeling...Can't Stop the Feeling
Martina: Yes! If you're really not sure, you can't go wrong with doing basic body movement to pop music so a lot of times with Orff training you'll learn for K-2 you want them to gain vocabulary with their body parts so you have the cards like 'nod your head' 'clap your hands' 'bend your knees.' You can lead a simple body sequence to a pop song. Their ears will immediately perk up and you can use, if you're really not sure, that Justin Timberlake song is always going to be popular. With older kids you can get more into, like grades 3-5, they start to really develop their preferences. You can't go wrong with Disney tunes. I had a student who - she wanted to do a scat lesson. Scatting. This is with fifth grade. I told her you know, there's a ton of Disney movies that have scatting like in the Jungle Book. She took a bunch of clips and the kids like - boom! They were zoomed in. They were like oh my god - this is Disney. And it totally made the connection for them and they listened to some Stevie Wonder and he's scatting. And then they tried some scatting syllables and it just became this beautiful Orff experience that was embedded in something they knew already - the Disney movies. So I'd say Disney is a great place to go. Check out the Kids Bop Channel, but don't use the Kids Bop music because kids hate it. They're like this isn't the real thing. Check the original song too because Kids Bop sometimes cleans it up, but at least Kids Bop will show you what's popular in the moment. So those would be my two big recommendations.
Jessica: What do you do about - because I have encountered this - if your students are into explicit music or into music that has content that you're like mmm I just can't do that in the school setting? How do you find ways to either navigate them towards other pieces or guide through that? Because that's one area that I feel like I don't know that I've really perfected that. I don't know that I ever will. But just guiding them to something that they agree on and like, but also that is appropriate.
Martina: I think that's why it's important to kind of get that private survey like with your middle school kids. You're getting individual sheets. That's what I did with this community group because we've got ages 6-16 mixed in there so we just made a whole big list and we were like looking through it. There's one - I don't even know who they are, but it was really inappropriate - and we could really never do that one. But Despacito has a really good beat and we could do the instrumental version and they like that reggatone kind of dancing and they can write their own lyrics to it so rewriting lyrics, doing a parody of a song. Having that conversation about I know you guys like that song. You know it's not appropriate for school. Yeah, we know. Blah, blah, blah. We're going to rewrite the lyrics and make it appropriate. Sometimes it might be a good idea to send a note home to parents saying 'Hey. I'd really want to use materials your kids know. To make sure it's a good educational experience, some of these that maybe aren't appropriate, we want to rewrite the lyrics. They're learning this, this, and this when they're doing that. And then another thing is sometimes they might like a song by an artist that's inappropriate, but that artist has other songs that are. So we even did an Eminem song with this community group I have that's like this One Clean, One Mockingbird. It's a song he wrote for his daughter. He's like look I know you're sad, I'm doing the best I can for you. It's completely clean. One of his few completely clean, but it was a great thing to start with and from that lesson we learned that there's a hook and then the spoken part. So the kids wrote their own hook and then the spoken part. We didn't even cover the song - we just had it as a model. So that's another thing you can do is find the clean song. You don't only have to cover songs to be doing stuff with popular music.
Jessica: So many great ideas. I love it. I love even how much more clearly I'm understanding what you can do with Modern Band and how it really does follow the imitate - explore - create model and how we really have so many options with that it in our classrooms when we might feel like we don't.
Martina: Yeah, and I will add that ukuleles are the best thing that's every happened.
Jessica: Oh my gosh, I love those!
Martina: And I was surprised myself because this community group - we've been coming only five weeks now for one hour at a time. And the 6 year olds can play between C Major and F chords on the ukulele. It just blew me away. They don't keep the ukuleles though. They've only played it five times. Five hours. And they can play. So kindergarten can do this if you want to add a little ukulele in there. C is not hard. Or open strings is a C6 chord. And even just that addition of the ukulele just brings like a little 'ooh - this is more recent. I see people playing this like in bands.'
Jessica: Where else could we find information about Modern Band?
Martina: I think the place to start is LittleKidsRock.org because they've got a ton of free resources there. My college kids use it. You can click on the student jam zone and you can pull up chord charts and anything you want so you can look up songs. You can type in 'easy' and it will pull up all the easy and they've got the chord charts out for you and piano parts. There's a link to the song on Spotify. Another great organization is the Association for Popular Music Education (APME) and I'm VP of that group - so there's a plug. But we're working on the resource side. We want to make it like the AOSA site where it has the members only resource center with lesson plans and stuff. We're building that up right now so as people start to join, we're going to have like my John Cena lesson plan in there and stuff. And all sorts of stuff for K-12 or K-college even. But LittleKidsRock.org first because everything's open and free. APME - we're going to have a members only side that's going to have resources there.
Summer training opportunities are Modern Band Summit is always in Colorado in Fort Collins in July. It's very affordable for teachers. Little Kids Rock makes sure they put in some money there. I think it only costs $100 to register. And then the dorms are there so it's super cheap to stay. It's just a big party. If you go on the website, there's a video. It's mostly real working teachers teaching. You know a lot of conferences it's the top down where it's only the professors. This is like people in the trenches doing Modern Band with their kids. There are sessions on like how to introduce bass guitar and all the little like if you don't know how to do anything, just attend and you'll be able to pick up so many skills on that. And there's a lot of happy hours sponsored by Little Kids Rock so you get to get your tickets, but it's really a sweet community that's built over a few days in Colorado and they raffle off instruments there. There's a chance for you to get up on stage if you want to try some of your new skills and you've got these K-12 teachers rocking it out in little bands with the people from their schools that they go with. It's pretty amazing and that's a really great way to get started if you want to see what it's about. If you want to start smaller, Little Kids Rock does do workshops in the nation and then some higher ed institutions do so here in Kentucky we're actually doing the training March 21 and 22. It's $150 for the weekend. It's 9-5, and 9-5 both days. You get a real crash course, but we do guitar, ukulele, electric guitar, electric bass, drum set. Even a little hiphop and how to introduce rapping to kids like yellow-yellow-orange-yellow like kindergartners can rap and it's super accessible. So nothing beats hands on experience. I think we know that with our Orff training so if anyone is interested in this I highly recommend looking at one of the workshops to go to or that Modern Band Summit.
Jessica: Oh that'd be amazing. Thank you so much. If someone wanted to reach out to you for more information, where could they contact you?
Martina: Just email me at my Kentucky email: martina.vasil@uky.edu.
Jessica: Thank you for talking!
Martina: Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to talk about this and I hope more people use it. It's wonderful. Kids love it.
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