Jazz in the General Music Classroom
About this Course
As the climate of the school teaching environment changes, so to the music teacher must be able to accomodate themselves career-wise to such change.
Most people, when asked about different musical genres might say "Rock is just a lot of loud banging" or "Jazz is a lot of noodling that doesn't go anywhere." I feel, determining a needs assessment, that this is due to the average persons' not having been educated on what makes a musical genre have such a title. Therefore, my target audience for this course is that of the non-jazz performing school music teacher that possesses high cognitive ability combined with a need for deeper musical listening.
As world cultures assimilate more and more into each other so too does music. If music is to remain a field of study in American schools than musical practices of our cultural must be incorporated into the music curriculum. One aspect of music performance that has not been taught on the whole to students not in specialty study is American Jazz improvisation.
This course will enable middle school general music teachers to teach the combining elements of jazz without having had great personal exposure to jazz. In order to focus this course on the essence of jazz we are focusing on performance techniques of one of it's primary compositional contributors, George Gershwin.
Objectives
After this course the teacher will be able to:
1 Discriminate different musical instrument roles within a performance of Jazz or Pop music by listening to and then match the correct instrument with it's role.
2 State the qualities of Jazz that differentiate one performance from another and give examples
3 State the qualities that are improvised given two separate performances of the same song
4 Ampart on students a more clear understanding of George Gershwin and his role in music and culture.
Unit 1 Compositional Foundation
