Music
I am pleased to be teaching music at St. Ignatius. I earned a BA in Jazz Guitar Performance from the University of North Florida. I have over seven years' experience teaching Music in a Catholic school, leading and accompanying children's choirs, and directing Junior High musicals. I have taught private and group guitar lessons for twelve years, and I have been accompanying Masses since I was in Junior High. I enjoy performing in pit bands for community and professional musical theater productions as well as writing, recording, and performing pop music with several bands. I intend to help our students become comfortable with their voices in private and public, read and write the language of music, and build a lifetime relationship with music.
Kindergarten, First, Second and Third
Classes meet three times per week for thirty minutes.
Students sing and move to songs that illustrate basic musical concepts. Rhythm instruments are added as accompaniment to outline the steady beat and simple rhythms. Students will dramatize many songs and learn to be good audience members. We will learn liturgical songs to sing at Mass and celebratory songs for special occasions and holidays.
Fourth and Fifth
Classes meet two times per week for forty minutes.
On Thursdays, the Fourth Grade will be divided into Beginning Band and Recorder Class. Recorder players rehearse progressively more difficult songs to earn belts in the Recorder Karate program.
In our General Music class, students will listen to and perform songs that illustrate more advanced musical concepts. Reading and writing music are practiced with real-life musical examples. Students will explore harmony singing and vocal technique with attention to blending registers.
Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth
Welcome 6th graders, and welcome back 7th and 8th graders! The first change you’ll notice is that we’ve done away with music contracts and have this information sheet instead. This way you don’t have to worry about getting it signed and returned for a grade, but I still strongly recommend sharing what we will be learning and how you will be graded with your parents. I will have copies available for them at Back To School Night as well.
The second big change for 7th and 8th grade is that we’ll be meeting as a full class two times a week instead of switching back and forth. One advantage to this scheduling change is that we’ll have a louder group vocal sound while we’re all singing together. In the past it was difficult for everybody to sing out in a such small groups. I look forward to hearing the big vocal sounds we had at the last Christmas program all year long. Since we won’t be drumming in small groups this year, we will be adapting some of our Body Percussion Rondos into percussion ensemble pieces.
Another new fun unit we will work on this year is Popular Song Study. Each class will bring in a few popular songs to consider for an in depth study. We will analyze the songs to determine their time signatures, tonality, melodic contour, instrumentation, rhyme scheme, and theme. This will also help us understand the different tastes our classmates have, and maybe help us discover some new favorite songs.
We will also explore more podcasts from the Pandora Musicology Show to get a closer look behind the scenes of how songs are created.
Later in the year we will study more about the electric guitar and the different sounds available through the use of effects pedals. In other rock music news, we’ll learn how to compose beats for the drum set, and get to play one too.
Once we’ve got a good idea of ways we can play with sound, we can try our hand at producing and engineering some recordings as a class. If we get something we like, we can even make a remix.
Lots of fun awaits us, let’s make sure we work through our Music Theory assignments in time to get to all the fun extra activities.
The St. Ignatius School Choir
This year I’m excited to announce the formation of the St. Ignatius School Choir. This volunteer group of 5th-8th graders will meet every Wednesday morning to rehearse songs for all the school Masses. They will also have a chance to perform a song at the Christmas Program and other special events throughout the year.
The group is open not only to singers, but to instrumentalists as well. We will assign parts once the group is finalized, hopefully before the first Mass!
We will begin by creating a small repertoire of songs that are appropriate for the different parts of Mass. To build onto this list we will learn requests from members’ favorite songs to sing at church. Choir members will also have the opportunity to suggest songs for the Masses that reflect their various themes, to ensure that we have a balance of familiar songs as well as new songs that have not been used for school Masses in the past.
Within our choir we will have a small group of singers that will act as our descant choir. This group will be comprised of independent singers who can handle singing harmony and descant parts while the other voices in the group lead the congregation with the melody.
This choir is a wonderful chance for students to share their talent and creativity in a role of both leadership and service.
