Season Three
Episode 87
Folk Song Collections with Kathy Kuddes
Kathy Kuddes holds Bachelor and Master degrees in Music Education from Millikin University and the University of North Texas respectively, a Kodály training certificate from the FAME/University of Texas program at Festival Hill in Round Top, Texas Supervisors Certification and ESL Supplemental Certification. She is currently the Director of Fine Arts for the Plano Independent School District, a school system of approximately 53,000 students with Kodály specialists in all 44 elementary schools and award winning band, choir, orchestra and music theory programs. She is the Founder and Coordinator of the Plano Kodály Teacher Training Program, and Folk Music Materials Instructor for the companion training program at Southern Methodist University. Kathy has fourteen years of classroom experience and more than twenty years in fine arts administration. She is an active presenter including presentations for the International Kodály Society Symposia in Australia, Hungary, and Scotland, former member of the board of the Kodály Educators of Texas and the Organization of American Kodály Educators. She was the recipient of the 2010 OAKE Outstanding Administrator Award and was named the 2016 Outstanding Administrator by the Texas Music Administrators Conference.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Jessica: Hi Kathy. I'm really excited to talk to you today.
Kathy: Thanks for having me Jessica. I'm excited to be here.
Jessica: Well, thank you for doing it. I would love to know when you first learned about the Kodaly approach.
Kathy: Sure! So like I think a lot of music education majors I had kind of that drive-by experience that you get in undergraduate methods where we did like a day of Orff and a day of Kodaly and a day of Dalcroze and all of those things and beyond just sort of hearing the term I didn't have a really deep understanding of what any of those things meant. I was just really fortunate that early in my teaching career I happened to find myself in Killeen, Texas of all places, which for listeners who maybe aren't central texas familiar, that is the town in which Fort Hood resides, which is the largest US Army base on the continental US. So it's a very unusual community because there's lots of students coming and going from there. Lots of the teaching staff is connected to the military in some way so they come for a year or two and go away somewhere and sometimes come back two or three times. It was a community that the school district and the music specialists had gotten together and a bunch of them had attended the training course at Sam Houston State in Conroe, which was one of the very first North American training programs and so they brought this concept of teaching back to their district and they just started mentoring the rest of us. We had monthly meetings and they talked to us about sequence and curriculum and materials and everything. They answered all of our questions and sort of guided us in this direction and you know, it's one of those moments when I really feel like the universe was directing me 'cause I was - I was pretty intimidated about going to a new district. I had been teaching secondary. I was then teaching elementary for the very first time in my life. To have such confident, incredible mentors with such a clear vision was really helpful to me and the children I served in those early years.
Yeah, it was a really special place in those days.
Jessica: That's awesome. And then did you take your levels shortly after that?
Kathy: I did. They really encouraged us. The district didn't offer any financial support, but there was a lot of emotional support for doing it. I actually postponed it a year because we were there because my husband was in the service at the time and we had just gotten married and about six months into our marriage he got orders for a year long deployment to Korea and so my first summer in Killeen we knew he was leaving in September for a whole year so I said no, I'm not going to spend the whole month training this first summer and so I postponed it until the next summer when he was overseas and it worked out great.
Jessica: Oh that's great. So what - and this is really broad question - but what do you love about the Kodály approach?
Kathy: Well, you know, I say as corny as it sounds it's really everything. One of my mentors - Phyllis King - used to say it'll teach you to balance your checkbook if you let it. I think what drew me to it initially was it was such a thoughtful sequence. One thing building on the next. Familiar to unfamiliar in really small incremental steps that allowed students to be really successful in every new challenge. And as a young teacher in particular you're bombarded with so many choices. There's so many options out there and I started teaching before the internet, but there was I still felt like there were an overwhelming number of possibilities and I just needed some structure to start figuring out what was important and to make time for the really important things. So I felt like the structure that's built into that sequence in the Kodaly philosophy really helped me to make good choices about what I was including in terms of the repertoire and instruction and making the most of what little instructional time I had at that time. The more I learn about, the more I continue to read, especially firsthand Kodaly's thoughts about music and music education just the more it resonates for me.
Jessica: I feel like a late bloomer in terms of coming around to the Kodály approach 'cause my story is I started as an elementary educator, but I had trained under someone who was more general music and he did some fantastic things, but didn't really use any approach necessarily. And then I started my Kodály training and had one summer of it in 2004 and you were my Materials teacher in my Level One back then. And then I had this big gap of 14 years before, you know, I just did Level 2 and 3 these past two summers and had Orff in-between and all that, but I feel like like I said this late bloomer coming around to it. Fitting in these structural pieces and really identifying how that works and it has been life changing for me, you know, as I've started this fall after Level III. And getting all of that in place it just finally flows. I wish I had done it earlier, but I know the way that life kind of came about I couldn't so I would to say to listeners it's never too late. You know! To jump in. And I feel like there's benefits if your in college and you do it before or you do it late like I did. It's never too late to implement and so the sequential learning and putting all that structure in I think that's also my favorite thing about the approach if I had to say one thing.
Kathy: Well, and I think it's what... I think it's the unique hallmark of the approach that I feel sort of the same way about my Orff Schulwerk experience. I was kind of a late bloomer to that. Julie Scott has taken my hand and walked me down that pathway significantly. I also am consciously aware that I think I understand what I can do with the Orff Schulwerk activities more clearly because I have this structure to plug them into.
Jessica: Yeah I agree. And one of ... as someone looking on the outside to what your strengths are and seeing all the things that you have brought to the Levels courses that you teach and to the workshops that you share. All that you give to the Plano school community through your role, I just think one of your strengths is being able to dive deep into building and explaining why folk song collections are important and the value of choosing valuable repertoire for students is and so I'm really excited for you to talk about that part because I think it's a little hard to explain maybe in one small interview for sure, but I think it's so important because I think there's some things where for me at least when I was learning about well, building a folk song collection and the importance of that and trying to wrap my head around how to even do that and where to find resources so I think it's an important conversation. And I'd love to kind of build on that and talk about folk song collections and really why. Why should we consider building a folk song collection and using folk songs?
Kathy: Yes. This is such a - you know - this is such a passion topic for me. If I get to ramble, you pull me back okay. Because there's no telling where this conversation might end at.
Jessica: I like that.
Kathy: But I think that the first important question is why. And I think that for me that all began with Kodály's philosophy and for those who don't know his background actually decades before he became interested in music education he was a musicologist and his actual dissertation in 1904 was about the structure of Hungarian folk songs and so he had gone out late at the turn of the century and collected traditional songs from all of the rural villages in Hungary and transcribed them. Cause you can imagine there was really recording technology available so mostly it's sitting in the room with a performer scribbling on a notepad while they performed. So transcribing all of those songs and then putting an analytical structure on top of all of them and letting the patterns that were indigenous
and traditional and happened with a lot frequency to bubble up from the data. So he really approached it from a very scientific point of view, but when he started thinking about education and music education particular he felt really strongly that traditional songs in a child's native language, in his case Hungarian, was an important place to start. Not just because of how it supported language development, but also because of the window it was into the culture and in the early 20th century he was very concerned about the influence of mass media. He was living in the last throes of the Austria-Hungarian Empire where the Hungarians were very much second class citizens and their language was not the official language. It was German. So he was really trying to preserve and protect that indigenous culture for his people.
So I think what gets tricky for Americans is sort of figuring out how to bring that mother tongue language idea forward into a 21st century super-multiethnic classroom and I - just full disclosure - do not have the secret sauce for that just yet. It's something I think about and talk to people about a lot because I don't know that we have quite figured that out yet, but I do think this idea that folk songs because they come out of just the life experience of a group of people represent those experiences really authentically and the best of those, the ones where the tune and text really mesh together beautifully, are the songs that people continue to own and to share with future generations and to pass down and pass along. And I think there's a really important cultural connection in every language group that we should do our best to try to own and share and pass along and as we get further and further from cultures where without technology we sat around and did those types of things as families and communities it becomes a bigger responsibility for the music teacher because often the parents and even the grandparents of a lot of our children don't own their own musical culture. So trying to find a way to connect all of the children in our classrooms back to that is a huge undertaking, but I think it's super, super important and truthfully folk song is absolutely as rich and reflective of the human experience as any sub-genre - art music or pop music - ever would want to be. So why not?!
Jessica: Yes. And I think that's important to recognize the diversity of what we teach with because you know in Kodaly's situation it was mainly or specifically Hungarian. You're dealing with one language. One specific - I'll say - type of people or culture and our culture has so much influence from people coming in and different styles of music, I'll say, and so trying to reach our students and share the multitude of cultural pieces and trying to identify what is American folk music I think is so much harder to really nail down. And like you said, I don't have the secret sauce either, but I think it's important to look at the students we do teach and figure out what we can bring to them to help them see their cultural history. Being sensitive to that for sure.
Kathy: Absolutely. Right. I think it feels a little like a landmine right now because there's just so much conversation about the history of certain songs and where they came from and how they made their way into particularly into educational repertoire and you know... I certainly don't have all of those answers. You try to do better once you know better. It's the best advice I can give. It has always been about the research. That you can't... you shouldn't take a single source as THE definitive source. Especially in folk song. The more sources you have for a single song, the more confident you can be about what you know about it's history and it's background and whatever and then you make decisions about whether to include it or not along the way. It's super tricky and then the other part of your question you were asking about why create a personal collection. And what we talked about in the summer course is, I mean, for me it's a tool of convenience for music educators that again there are so many places to find materials and as you know, my collection of current resources is a little out of control. And so you could spend a whole day of planning searching your resources for the right song or the right version of the right song and teachers just don't have that kind of time so when I talk about a personal song collection what I really mean is gathering all of the materials. Whatever folk song and whatever else into a single place and when I started my training that place was a 3-ring notebook. It's very hard copy and today it's more of a cloud kind of thing, but when all of your repertoire is in one place then you're digging within this finite set of songs that you've already curated for yourself. You've already decided this is a piece of repertoire I have a use for that my children will respond to. That I can stand to sing with them 70 times for the next month. All of those things that have to go into that decision making. You've already done that so you're not having to do that as you sit to try to decide about your lesson plans. Then you can begin to look at 'here are the really great songs I already love. Now which ones are really the right ones for this lesson focus?' That's really what the personal collection is about is sort of focusing your work so that you've done the culling and then curating in advance. And this collection of pieces of songs or whatever the materials are that you're using. Choral rep and all of that. Has already gone through that selection process and you don't have to do that alongside trying to do your lesson planning.
Jessica: I think it's like you said - we don't have time to go through a million different things and find the exact piece, but having that collection definitely saves time because then, like you said, you're going right to that one place and you also mentioned that it has your favorite pieces and that's something that's helpful too is it takes time to figure out what songs work for you or what songs you really really love and want to bring to your classroom. I find the songs that I really love always are songs that students will grab on to because they see that I love them so much and want to do them and don't mind doing them 70 times so I think it's great to start that folk collection. And I also think it can be tricky knowing how to start the folk collection. Like where to begin collecting materials. do you have resources that you recommend starting with or places to go online to find authentic really great folk resource pieces.
Kathy: Sure. Yeah. So sort of shameless plug - Kuddes Music.com there's a whole, one whole section in that website is dedicated to links to online collections of various kinds. That is a good place to start digging in. So one of the things I feel really strongly about is songs are not a thing that live in print. Songs live in the performance. So if I have a choice the ideal world for me is a print collection with a recording with a really quality recording attached so that I get a sense of what the appropriate performance practice for those songs is from a culture someone who really knows. And then I have the print resource to make sure I'm getting the language right, do I really have pitches correct, will I know what the game directions are and all of the good stuff that you can put in print that you don't get strictly from the recording. So I would say one of the very first collections that really resonated for me and I used a ton in the classroom was the Ruth Crawford Seeger American Folk Songs for Children, which is still in print. It's a fabulous collection.
Ruth Crawford was the second wife of Charles Seeger who was the first curator of the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress and she was a composer in her own right, but she did a ton of transcribing for John and Alan Lomax and their folk song collections. But this collection of children's songs really came from her own personal repertoire as she was transcribing songs for them, she was discovering all of these children's songs and she had four small children at home and was listening to the songs they picked up and then they were in - she had them in a preschool situation where the parents were expected to, in addition to a little bit of tuition, they were also expected to volunteer a certain number of hours a week at school and so she would go to the preschool and sing and play games. Sing songs and play games with the children and so over time she acquired a pretty hefty collection of songs that she knew kids responded to. So that's a print collection. And then there's companion double cd set by the same name. The performers are actually her adult children who were the little ones that she was taking to preschool at the time that this was printed and in the works and coming to fruition as a print collection so it's a really nice companion set. You will get to hear and one of those children is Pete Seeger, a really important and Mike Seeger, his younger brother who was another really important - in fact, all of them really are... Peggy and Barbara were the girls and they've all had an impact in folk music in one form or fashion so there performances have a real authenticity to them when you hear them. The majority of that song material is from an anglo perspective.
So if you had a largely African-American population the place that I would probably send you is the Bessey Jones Collection Step It Down and there's, again, a companion recording called Put Your Hand on Your Hip. That is field recordings of Bessey Jones and the children from the Georgia Sea Islands singing and playing those games. Again, the performance style is very important in those songs and so hearing children who grew up singing and playing those games authentically reproducing those for you is really helpful if that's not your traditional background. And one of our fellow Texans, Gabriela Montoya - Steir from San Antonio published El Patio De Mi Casa a few years ago after her Kodaly training by the way. But it's a series of Spanish Language mostly northern Mexico background songs from her background and with again a companion performance cd of her and her children singing these songs the way that they learned them from their relatives. So anytime you can get that great mix of an aural experience of what the performance really sounds like by someone who knows the culture, knows this music really well, and the benefit of all of the background and detail that you get in a print resource then go for it!
Jessica: I hadn't really thought of it that way, you know. I always thought of it as print, but I hadn't thought of the combination of the aural and what a fabulous addition that would make to helping you really understand the entire... the music and what it really... the feel of it and then heart of what it really should sound like. Yeah.
Kathy: Yeah absolutely. Absolutely. The notation is really so much more limited than we give it credit for. As trained musicians we tend to give the printed notation a lot of credit for telling us what we need to do musically and the truth is really it doesn't. It leaves so much to the interpretation of the performer and you know, when you're a professional singer it's all about finding a new interpretation to make the song your own, right?! But when we're trying to pass on traditional music or pass back traditional music to generations of children from these cultures I think part of being sensitive and really honoring that is to know something about the performance practice for which these songs come and you just can't find that in a book. You have to get out there and listen so you know, for listeners who want to dig into the aural side of it I'm a big fan of the Smithsonian Folkways, especially the older recordings. The old field recordings. John Lomax's collection. A lot of Bessey Jones and Georgia Sea Islands and all the other places. The Texas Prison Farms and all the places. And to just hear those singers in their own environment and bringing those songs forth. And then you can go back to the print collections with a deeper understanding than I think when you look at the notation and go, "I get how they were trying to capture this, but now I know what to do with this notation."
Jessica: Well, that's a good challenge for me because I tend to look so much at notation. I'll get in a rush where I have to find the pieces or I'm looking for this thing or I'm looking through my collection. I need to take more time and really listen. So thank you for reminding me of that! That's a good challenge for me to go back to 'cause I think sometimes, I don't know, for me I just don't think of that or I forget because I'm looking for something and it's easier to look at the notation than to take the time and really hear it too.
Kathy: Sure.
Jessica: So thank you for that. How do you determine then which songs, like where to place it within curriculum and when to use it with students depending on, you know, obviously there's text to consider and what melodic elements are in there and rhythmic elements and all of that, but how do you determine which songs and where to put them with grade levels?
Kathy: Sure. Well so one of the first questions that I sort of bristle at at workshops and stuff is when somebody will say 'well what grade should I do this song?'
Jessica: Right.
Kathy: Because I think that pigeon holes songs into sort of being single use for one thing and where my second graders are this year might not be where your second graders are this year. And so, you know, sort of labeling it with a grade level on it I think is a really dangerous kind of precedent to get into. So I tend to think of songs in terms of their teachable elements so I'm looking for rhythmic patterns, melodic patterns, formal structures, harmonic progressions, or whatever that will be sort of the focus of my instruction. And then looking for songs that have really good examples of those kinds of things and whatever your kind of focusing on with your content then I think the trick is to find really great examples of those things in the materials that you're using in class. So one of the things we talk a lot about during Level III is not every song that has a certain rhythm or melodic pattern is the right one to present or reinforce that for students. So I think, you know, the first kind of... the first blush is maybe sort of content. I need songs for mi-re-do. Here are the twelve that I just got ready at hand and then taking another look at okay, but what are the...where does that pattern happen? What is the rhythm attached to it? Is it rhythm we know? Is it rhythm we don't know yet? Is it at the beginning of the song or is it at the end of the song? Is it someplace where they will recognize it immediately or do we have to dig into it more? And then I think you start layering on what else can I do with it? Do I have an extension with a game? With an accompanimental ensemble - with instruments or voices or whatever? Is there... and then is all of that developmentally appropriate for the children I'm getting ready to teach? And so it's one of the reasons that you often see kind of a standard sequence of elements and then you'll see sort of an older beginner sequence a lot of times in Kodály methodology books because if you're teaching with 5th and 6th graders who have never done a lot of notation reading, they're not going to sing the so-mi-la songs.
Jessica: No. No they're not. I have those older beginners. Yeah... no they're not going to do Snail, Snail or Bow Wow Wow. You know?!
Kathy: Yeah. Correct. And as much as the kinders love those songs and we do those a thousand times for you, you're not going to get buy-in from 4th graders doing those same tunes so that's why you see the mi-re-do sequence often recommended for those older kids because the song material is more mature thankfully. Not all of it; some of it. And there are other things in those songs. There's more challenge in general. Text in the game structures. All that kind of stuff. And you're going to move a lot more quickly with those older kids with those three notes to five so you're preparing all of that sort of thing. So it's a long winded answer of how to layer the decisions about songs, where they belong, and I think that it's really helpful to think about songs that are what I call 'recyclable.' So for instance, a song that has a very simplistic rhythm that you might introduce with just a rhythmic focus one year might come back for the melodic. The next year you might introduce the dance or instrumental activity or something the following year so it keeps turning and each time it returns you just add another layer of challenge to the work because there getting - the students are getting more. They're understanding more. They're becoming more discreet kind of listeners and understanders of the music and so it's kind of difficult to always be learning all of this new repertoire all of the time and so when you can find a song that can come back periodically year after year it's like an old friend who shows up in class.
Jessica: It is! And it's like that for the students too because then they're like 'oh I remember this song!' They attach to it when it's been presented and then practiced and then the next year bringing it back for something new or like you said adding that extension then it's not only familiar, but now it's 'oh! there's something more with it that they can connect to and I think so often we think 'well, this song is for 2nd grade. It's only 2nd grade or this song is only 3rd grade.' By doing that I feel like it limits what you can do with it. I like that turn you used - the recyclable. Where you can bring something new and I've also found that some years your second graders will be a very strong group. They get some things very quickly and you can move through. And then the next year you find okay, we didn't even get through a large portion of it. We moved slower and being flexible about where the songs fit and when they're ready for that material is good too. Yeah... I also thought when you were talking about how when we look at song material we should consider where the element lies within the song and identifying if a song is really the most valuable one for specific content and I was told, I've been told this a couple times, where it's better to do less repertoire and have it the most valuable than it is to have loads and loads of songs that are just kind of okay for it, but to really... we don't have to have 20 so-mi-la songs that, you know, ... yes, they have that element, but narrowing it down to maybe the 5 best that really... you love and that really solidify that element for wherever it falls is better than using 20 pieces. You know!?
Kathy: Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for quality over quantity. Especially with the kind of instructional schedules that most of us have. We just have to get super efficient.
Jessica: If you see them once a week or some teachers have it once every eight days or so, that's hard to get that in. So picking that quality - yeah, definitely! Do you have - and there's probably no good answer for this - it's like asking you to pick your favorite song or ... well, I am asking your favorite song! Do you have a favorite folk song or one that you return back to?
Kathy: That's so impossible because there are so, so, so, so many. And I love them all for different reasons.
Jessica: It's kind of like kids, you know?!
Kathy: Exactly. Or my favorite ice cream flavor, you know! They're all so wonderful in their own way. You know, some are just fun and we do them just for the fun of them. Some are do them for the beauty that they bring and some are just really useful and you do them because they're really useful too. They're so many. I don't know. It's hard to choose.
Jessica: I was thinking through me - I actually went through my song collection before we came on to talk. I was going down the list of all the songs and I'm like 'well I love this one' and for some I really love canons. I just tend to go towards canons or partner songs because I love how then they get that harmony element, but in a pretty simplistic way that they can confidently do. Those were the ones I kept coming back to. And then like you said, just the fun ones. There's some that have a calypso rhythm or some kind of syncopation and the students really enjoy that and I do as well. Exactly.
Kathy: Yeah!
... Our talk continues in S3:E88 with play parties and folk songs!
Episode 87
Folk Song Collections with Kathy Kuddes
Kathy Kuddes holds Bachelor and Master degrees in Music Education from Millikin University and the University of North Texas respectively, a Kodály training certificate from the FAME/University of Texas program at Festival Hill in Round Top, Texas Supervisors Certification and ESL Supplemental Certification. She is currently the Director of Fine Arts for the Plano Independent School District, a school system of approximately 53,000 students with Kodály specialists in all 44 elementary schools and award winning band, choir, orchestra and music theory programs. She is the Founder and Coordinator of the Plano Kodály Teacher Training Program, and Folk Music Materials Instructor for the companion training program at Southern Methodist University. Kathy has fourteen years of classroom experience and more than twenty years in fine arts administration. She is an active presenter including presentations for the International Kodály Society Symposia in Australia, Hungary, and Scotland, former member of the board of the Kodály Educators of Texas and the Organization of American Kodály Educators. She was the recipient of the 2010 OAKE Outstanding Administrator Award and was named the 2016 Outstanding Administrator by the Texas Music Administrators Conference.TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Jessica: Hi Kathy. I'm really excited to talk to you today.
Kathy: Thanks for having me Jessica. I'm excited to be here.
Jessica: Well, thank you for doing it. I would love to know when you first learned about the Kodaly approach.
Kathy: Sure! So like I think a lot of music education majors I had kind of that drive-by experience that you get in undergraduate methods where we did like a day of Orff and a day of Kodaly and a day of Dalcroze and all of those things and beyond just sort of hearing the term I didn't have a really deep understanding of what any of those things meant. I was just really fortunate that early in my teaching career I happened to find myself in Killeen, Texas of all places, which for listeners who maybe aren't central texas familiar, that is the town in which Fort Hood resides, which is the largest US Army base on the continental US. So it's a very unusual community because there's lots of students coming and going from there. Lots of the teaching staff is connected to the military in some way so they come for a year or two and go away somewhere and sometimes come back two or three times. It was a community that the school district and the music specialists had gotten together and a bunch of them had attended the training course at Sam Houston State in Conroe, which was one of the very first North American training programs and so they brought this concept of teaching back to their district and they just started mentoring the rest of us. We had monthly meetings and they talked to us about sequence and curriculum and materials and everything. They answered all of our questions and sort of guided us in this direction and you know, it's one of those moments when I really feel like the universe was directing me 'cause I was - I was pretty intimidated about going to a new district. I had been teaching secondary. I was then teaching elementary for the very first time in my life. To have such confident, incredible mentors with such a clear vision was really helpful to me and the children I served in those early years.
Yeah, it was a really special place in those days.
Jessica: That's awesome. And then did you take your levels shortly after that?
Kathy: I did. They really encouraged us. The district didn't offer any financial support, but there was a lot of emotional support for doing it. I actually postponed it a year because we were there because my husband was in the service at the time and we had just gotten married and about six months into our marriage he got orders for a year long deployment to Korea and so my first summer in Killeen we knew he was leaving in September for a whole year so I said no, I'm not going to spend the whole month training this first summer and so I postponed it until the next summer when he was overseas and it worked out great.
Jessica: Oh that's great. So what - and this is really broad question - but what do you love about the Kodály approach?
Kathy: Well, you know, I say as corny as it sounds it's really everything. One of my mentors - Phyllis King - used to say it'll teach you to balance your checkbook if you let it. I think what drew me to it initially was it was such a thoughtful sequence. One thing building on the next. Familiar to unfamiliar in really small incremental steps that allowed students to be really successful in every new challenge. And as a young teacher in particular you're bombarded with so many choices. There's so many options out there and I started teaching before the internet, but there was I still felt like there were an overwhelming number of possibilities and I just needed some structure to start figuring out what was important and to make time for the really important things. So I felt like the structure that's built into that sequence in the Kodaly philosophy really helped me to make good choices about what I was including in terms of the repertoire and instruction and making the most of what little instructional time I had at that time. The more I learn about, the more I continue to read, especially firsthand Kodaly's thoughts about music and music education just the more it resonates for me.
Jessica: I feel like a late bloomer in terms of coming around to the Kodály approach 'cause my story is I started as an elementary educator, but I had trained under someone who was more general music and he did some fantastic things, but didn't really use any approach necessarily. And then I started my Kodály training and had one summer of it in 2004 and you were my Materials teacher in my Level One back then. And then I had this big gap of 14 years before, you know, I just did Level 2 and 3 these past two summers and had Orff in-between and all that, but I feel like like I said this late bloomer coming around to it. Fitting in these structural pieces and really identifying how that works and it has been life changing for me, you know, as I've started this fall after Level III. And getting all of that in place it just finally flows. I wish I had done it earlier, but I know the way that life kind of came about I couldn't so I would to say to listeners it's never too late. You know! To jump in. And I feel like there's benefits if your in college and you do it before or you do it late like I did. It's never too late to implement and so the sequential learning and putting all that structure in I think that's also my favorite thing about the approach if I had to say one thing.
Kathy: Well, and I think it's what... I think it's the unique hallmark of the approach that I feel sort of the same way about my Orff Schulwerk experience. I was kind of a late bloomer to that. Julie Scott has taken my hand and walked me down that pathway significantly. I also am consciously aware that I think I understand what I can do with the Orff Schulwerk activities more clearly because I have this structure to plug them into.
Jessica: Yeah I agree. And one of ... as someone looking on the outside to what your strengths are and seeing all the things that you have brought to the Levels courses that you teach and to the workshops that you share. All that you give to the Plano school community through your role, I just think one of your strengths is being able to dive deep into building and explaining why folk song collections are important and the value of choosing valuable repertoire for students is and so I'm really excited for you to talk about that part because I think it's a little hard to explain maybe in one small interview for sure, but I think it's so important because I think there's some things where for me at least when I was learning about well, building a folk song collection and the importance of that and trying to wrap my head around how to even do that and where to find resources so I think it's an important conversation. And I'd love to kind of build on that and talk about folk song collections and really why. Why should we consider building a folk song collection and using folk songs?
Kathy: Yes. This is such a - you know - this is such a passion topic for me. If I get to ramble, you pull me back okay. Because there's no telling where this conversation might end at.
Jessica: I like that.
Kathy: But I think that the first important question is why. And I think that for me that all began with Kodály's philosophy and for those who don't know his background actually decades before he became interested in music education he was a musicologist and his actual dissertation in 1904 was about the structure of Hungarian folk songs and so he had gone out late at the turn of the century and collected traditional songs from all of the rural villages in Hungary and transcribed them. Cause you can imagine there was really recording technology available so mostly it's sitting in the room with a performer scribbling on a notepad while they performed. So transcribing all of those songs and then putting an analytical structure on top of all of them and letting the patterns that were indigenous
and traditional and happened with a lot frequency to bubble up from the data. So he really approached it from a very scientific point of view, but when he started thinking about education and music education particular he felt really strongly that traditional songs in a child's native language, in his case Hungarian, was an important place to start. Not just because of how it supported language development, but also because of the window it was into the culture and in the early 20th century he was very concerned about the influence of mass media. He was living in the last throes of the Austria-Hungarian Empire where the Hungarians were very much second class citizens and their language was not the official language. It was German. So he was really trying to preserve and protect that indigenous culture for his people.
So I think what gets tricky for Americans is sort of figuring out how to bring that mother tongue language idea forward into a 21st century super-multiethnic classroom and I - just full disclosure - do not have the secret sauce for that just yet. It's something I think about and talk to people about a lot because I don't know that we have quite figured that out yet, but I do think this idea that folk songs because they come out of just the life experience of a group of people represent those experiences really authentically and the best of those, the ones where the tune and text really mesh together beautifully, are the songs that people continue to own and to share with future generations and to pass down and pass along. And I think there's a really important cultural connection in every language group that we should do our best to try to own and share and pass along and as we get further and further from cultures where without technology we sat around and did those types of things as families and communities it becomes a bigger responsibility for the music teacher because often the parents and even the grandparents of a lot of our children don't own their own musical culture. So trying to find a way to connect all of the children in our classrooms back to that is a huge undertaking, but I think it's super, super important and truthfully folk song is absolutely as rich and reflective of the human experience as any sub-genre - art music or pop music - ever would want to be. So why not?!
Jessica: Yes. And I think that's important to recognize the diversity of what we teach with because you know in Kodaly's situation it was mainly or specifically Hungarian. You're dealing with one language. One specific - I'll say - type of people or culture and our culture has so much influence from people coming in and different styles of music, I'll say, and so trying to reach our students and share the multitude of cultural pieces and trying to identify what is American folk music I think is so much harder to really nail down. And like you said, I don't have the secret sauce either, but I think it's important to look at the students we do teach and figure out what we can bring to them to help them see their cultural history. Being sensitive to that for sure.
Kathy: Absolutely. Right. I think it feels a little like a landmine right now because there's just so much conversation about the history of certain songs and where they came from and how they made their way into particularly into educational repertoire and you know... I certainly don't have all of those answers. You try to do better once you know better. It's the best advice I can give. It has always been about the research. That you can't... you shouldn't take a single source as THE definitive source. Especially in folk song. The more sources you have for a single song, the more confident you can be about what you know about it's history and it's background and whatever and then you make decisions about whether to include it or not along the way. It's super tricky and then the other part of your question you were asking about why create a personal collection. And what we talked about in the summer course is, I mean, for me it's a tool of convenience for music educators that again there are so many places to find materials and as you know, my collection of current resources is a little out of control. And so you could spend a whole day of planning searching your resources for the right song or the right version of the right song and teachers just don't have that kind of time so when I talk about a personal song collection what I really mean is gathering all of the materials. Whatever folk song and whatever else into a single place and when I started my training that place was a 3-ring notebook. It's very hard copy and today it's more of a cloud kind of thing, but when all of your repertoire is in one place then you're digging within this finite set of songs that you've already curated for yourself. You've already decided this is a piece of repertoire I have a use for that my children will respond to. That I can stand to sing with them 70 times for the next month. All of those things that have to go into that decision making. You've already done that so you're not having to do that as you sit to try to decide about your lesson plans. Then you can begin to look at 'here are the really great songs I already love. Now which ones are really the right ones for this lesson focus?' That's really what the personal collection is about is sort of focusing your work so that you've done the culling and then curating in advance. And this collection of pieces of songs or whatever the materials are that you're using. Choral rep and all of that. Has already gone through that selection process and you don't have to do that alongside trying to do your lesson planning.
Jessica: I think it's like you said - we don't have time to go through a million different things and find the exact piece, but having that collection definitely saves time because then, like you said, you're going right to that one place and you also mentioned that it has your favorite pieces and that's something that's helpful too is it takes time to figure out what songs work for you or what songs you really really love and want to bring to your classroom. I find the songs that I really love always are songs that students will grab on to because they see that I love them so much and want to do them and don't mind doing them 70 times so I think it's great to start that folk collection. And I also think it can be tricky knowing how to start the folk collection. Like where to begin collecting materials. do you have resources that you recommend starting with or places to go online to find authentic really great folk resource pieces.
Kathy: Sure. Yeah. So sort of shameless plug - Kuddes Music.com there's a whole, one whole section in that website is dedicated to links to online collections of various kinds. That is a good place to start digging in. So one of the things I feel really strongly about is songs are not a thing that live in print. Songs live in the performance. So if I have a choice the ideal world for me is a print collection with a recording with a really quality recording attached so that I get a sense of what the appropriate performance practice for those songs is from a culture someone who really knows. And then I have the print resource to make sure I'm getting the language right, do I really have pitches correct, will I know what the game directions are and all of the good stuff that you can put in print that you don't get strictly from the recording. So I would say one of the very first collections that really resonated for me and I used a ton in the classroom was the Ruth Crawford Seeger American Folk Songs for Children, which is still in print. It's a fabulous collection.
Ruth Crawford was the second wife of Charles Seeger who was the first curator of the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress and she was a composer in her own right, but she did a ton of transcribing for John and Alan Lomax and their folk song collections. But this collection of children's songs really came from her own personal repertoire as she was transcribing songs for them, she was discovering all of these children's songs and she had four small children at home and was listening to the songs they picked up and then they were in - she had them in a preschool situation where the parents were expected to, in addition to a little bit of tuition, they were also expected to volunteer a certain number of hours a week at school and so she would go to the preschool and sing and play games. Sing songs and play games with the children and so over time she acquired a pretty hefty collection of songs that she knew kids responded to. So that's a print collection. And then there's companion double cd set by the same name. The performers are actually her adult children who were the little ones that she was taking to preschool at the time that this was printed and in the works and coming to fruition as a print collection so it's a really nice companion set. You will get to hear and one of those children is Pete Seeger, a really important and Mike Seeger, his younger brother who was another really important - in fact, all of them really are... Peggy and Barbara were the girls and they've all had an impact in folk music in one form or fashion so there performances have a real authenticity to them when you hear them. The majority of that song material is from an anglo perspective.
So if you had a largely African-American population the place that I would probably send you is the Bessey Jones Collection Step It Down and there's, again, a companion recording called Put Your Hand on Your Hip. That is field recordings of Bessey Jones and the children from the Georgia Sea Islands singing and playing those games. Again, the performance style is very important in those songs and so hearing children who grew up singing and playing those games authentically reproducing those for you is really helpful if that's not your traditional background. And one of our fellow Texans, Gabriela Montoya - Steir from San Antonio published El Patio De Mi Casa a few years ago after her Kodaly training by the way. But it's a series of Spanish Language mostly northern Mexico background songs from her background and with again a companion performance cd of her and her children singing these songs the way that they learned them from their relatives. So anytime you can get that great mix of an aural experience of what the performance really sounds like by someone who knows the culture, knows this music really well, and the benefit of all of the background and detail that you get in a print resource then go for it!
Jessica: I hadn't really thought of it that way, you know. I always thought of it as print, but I hadn't thought of the combination of the aural and what a fabulous addition that would make to helping you really understand the entire... the music and what it really... the feel of it and then heart of what it really should sound like. Yeah.
Kathy: Yeah absolutely. Absolutely. The notation is really so much more limited than we give it credit for. As trained musicians we tend to give the printed notation a lot of credit for telling us what we need to do musically and the truth is really it doesn't. It leaves so much to the interpretation of the performer and you know, when you're a professional singer it's all about finding a new interpretation to make the song your own, right?! But when we're trying to pass on traditional music or pass back traditional music to generations of children from these cultures I think part of being sensitive and really honoring that is to know something about the performance practice for which these songs come and you just can't find that in a book. You have to get out there and listen so you know, for listeners who want to dig into the aural side of it I'm a big fan of the Smithsonian Folkways, especially the older recordings. The old field recordings. John Lomax's collection. A lot of Bessey Jones and Georgia Sea Islands and all the other places. The Texas Prison Farms and all the places. And to just hear those singers in their own environment and bringing those songs forth. And then you can go back to the print collections with a deeper understanding than I think when you look at the notation and go, "I get how they were trying to capture this, but now I know what to do with this notation."
Jessica: Well, that's a good challenge for me because I tend to look so much at notation. I'll get in a rush where I have to find the pieces or I'm looking for this thing or I'm looking through my collection. I need to take more time and really listen. So thank you for reminding me of that! That's a good challenge for me to go back to 'cause I think sometimes, I don't know, for me I just don't think of that or I forget because I'm looking for something and it's easier to look at the notation than to take the time and really hear it too.
Kathy: Sure.
Jessica: So thank you for that. How do you determine then which songs, like where to place it within curriculum and when to use it with students depending on, you know, obviously there's text to consider and what melodic elements are in there and rhythmic elements and all of that, but how do you determine which songs and where to put them with grade levels?
Kathy: Sure. Well so one of the first questions that I sort of bristle at at workshops and stuff is when somebody will say 'well what grade should I do this song?'
Jessica: Right.
Kathy: Because I think that pigeon holes songs into sort of being single use for one thing and where my second graders are this year might not be where your second graders are this year. And so, you know, sort of labeling it with a grade level on it I think is a really dangerous kind of precedent to get into. So I tend to think of songs in terms of their teachable elements so I'm looking for rhythmic patterns, melodic patterns, formal structures, harmonic progressions, or whatever that will be sort of the focus of my instruction. And then looking for songs that have really good examples of those kinds of things and whatever your kind of focusing on with your content then I think the trick is to find really great examples of those things in the materials that you're using in class. So one of the things we talk a lot about during Level III is not every song that has a certain rhythm or melodic pattern is the right one to present or reinforce that for students. So I think, you know, the first kind of... the first blush is maybe sort of content. I need songs for mi-re-do. Here are the twelve that I just got ready at hand and then taking another look at okay, but what are the...where does that pattern happen? What is the rhythm attached to it? Is it rhythm we know? Is it rhythm we don't know yet? Is it at the beginning of the song or is it at the end of the song? Is it someplace where they will recognize it immediately or do we have to dig into it more? And then I think you start layering on what else can I do with it? Do I have an extension with a game? With an accompanimental ensemble - with instruments or voices or whatever? Is there... and then is all of that developmentally appropriate for the children I'm getting ready to teach? And so it's one of the reasons that you often see kind of a standard sequence of elements and then you'll see sort of an older beginner sequence a lot of times in Kodály methodology books because if you're teaching with 5th and 6th graders who have never done a lot of notation reading, they're not going to sing the so-mi-la songs.
Jessica: No. No they're not. I have those older beginners. Yeah... no they're not going to do Snail, Snail or Bow Wow Wow. You know?!
Kathy: Yeah. Correct. And as much as the kinders love those songs and we do those a thousand times for you, you're not going to get buy-in from 4th graders doing those same tunes so that's why you see the mi-re-do sequence often recommended for those older kids because the song material is more mature thankfully. Not all of it; some of it. And there are other things in those songs. There's more challenge in general. Text in the game structures. All that kind of stuff. And you're going to move a lot more quickly with those older kids with those three notes to five so you're preparing all of that sort of thing. So it's a long winded answer of how to layer the decisions about songs, where they belong, and I think that it's really helpful to think about songs that are what I call 'recyclable.' So for instance, a song that has a very simplistic rhythm that you might introduce with just a rhythmic focus one year might come back for the melodic. The next year you might introduce the dance or instrumental activity or something the following year so it keeps turning and each time it returns you just add another layer of challenge to the work because there getting - the students are getting more. They're understanding more. They're becoming more discreet kind of listeners and understanders of the music and so it's kind of difficult to always be learning all of this new repertoire all of the time and so when you can find a song that can come back periodically year after year it's like an old friend who shows up in class.
Jessica: It is! And it's like that for the students too because then they're like 'oh I remember this song!' They attach to it when it's been presented and then practiced and then the next year bringing it back for something new or like you said adding that extension then it's not only familiar, but now it's 'oh! there's something more with it that they can connect to and I think so often we think 'well, this song is for 2nd grade. It's only 2nd grade or this song is only 3rd grade.' By doing that I feel like it limits what you can do with it. I like that turn you used - the recyclable. Where you can bring something new and I've also found that some years your second graders will be a very strong group. They get some things very quickly and you can move through. And then the next year you find okay, we didn't even get through a large portion of it. We moved slower and being flexible about where the songs fit and when they're ready for that material is good too. Yeah... I also thought when you were talking about how when we look at song material we should consider where the element lies within the song and identifying if a song is really the most valuable one for specific content and I was told, I've been told this a couple times, where it's better to do less repertoire and have it the most valuable than it is to have loads and loads of songs that are just kind of okay for it, but to really... we don't have to have 20 so-mi-la songs that, you know, ... yes, they have that element, but narrowing it down to maybe the 5 best that really... you love and that really solidify that element for wherever it falls is better than using 20 pieces. You know!?
Kathy: Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for quality over quantity. Especially with the kind of instructional schedules that most of us have. We just have to get super efficient.
Jessica: If you see them once a week or some teachers have it once every eight days or so, that's hard to get that in. So picking that quality - yeah, definitely! Do you have - and there's probably no good answer for this - it's like asking you to pick your favorite song or ... well, I am asking your favorite song! Do you have a favorite folk song or one that you return back to?
Kathy: That's so impossible because there are so, so, so, so many. And I love them all for different reasons.
Jessica: It's kind of like kids, you know?!
Kathy: Exactly. Or my favorite ice cream flavor, you know! They're all so wonderful in their own way. You know, some are just fun and we do them just for the fun of them. Some are do them for the beauty that they bring and some are just really useful and you do them because they're really useful too. They're so many. I don't know. It's hard to choose.
Jessica: I was thinking through me - I actually went through my song collection before we came on to talk. I was going down the list of all the songs and I'm like 'well I love this one' and for some I really love canons. I just tend to go towards canons or partner songs because I love how then they get that harmony element, but in a pretty simplistic way that they can confidently do. Those were the ones I kept coming back to. And then like you said, just the fun ones. There's some that have a calypso rhythm or some kind of syncopation and the students really enjoy that and I do as well. Exactly.
Kathy: Yeah!
... Our talk continues in S3:E88 with play parties and folk songs!
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