Janmashtmi

4 Responses to Janmashtmi

1. deep ssinghal says:

   August 24, 2011 at 10:29 pm

   nice video ………………….
2. Chavi kapoor says:

   August 28, 2011 at 10:58 pm

   This resources is extremly benifical for us as learners because it will not only help us out in every aspect but it will also provide us now tactics for effective teaching.
3. sangita verma says:

   August 29, 2011 at 4:36 pm

   1……

   PROBABLY THE MOST DIFFICULT PART OF TEACHING MUSIC FOR THE MUSIC TEACHER IS VOCAL HEALTH. THE FOLLOWING TIPS WILL HELP INSURE THAT YOUR STUDENTS ARE NOT INJURING THEIR VOICES IN YOUR MUSIC LESSONS

   We use our voices far more rigourously than most. Learning these simple guidelines will help you protect your voice as well!
   The single most important thing we can do for you students vocal health is to start off any singing activity with vocal wearm-ups.
   These Warm-ups have 3 basic principles behind them:
   1. Good Posture
   2. Proper Breathing
   3. Be gentle with your voice and Warm-up before intensive use.

   1. GOOD POSTURE – An exercise for practising is to have students pretend they are all puppets dangling on a single string attached to the top of their heads.

   Be conscious of how you and your students breathe. Deep breathing is essential for safe, healthy, effective voice production. When you breathe in, aim to feel as if you take in air as low down in your body as possible without your shoulders having to rise. Allow tummy muscles to relax outwards as you breathe in.

   2. PROPER BREATHING – Begin your singing with exercices that focus on proper breathing. Panting like a dog or holding hands on the diaphram to feel it expanding outward while breathing in deeply are two such exercises.

   After that it’s time for a gentle vocal warm-up.

   3. VOCAL WARM-UP – First, ask students to massage their faces, lips, and throat to relax tension. Have the class hum an “m” sound gently up and down their voice range to to start the vocal warm-up.

   Then, sing a series of round open vowels such as “Mmmeee-Mmmay-Mmmah-Mmmoe-Mmmoo” on one note and then repeating moving up and down the scale.

   Check breathing – relax your tummy muscles outwards as you take a breath in.
   These exercises will insure properly warmed-up voices. you will be amazed how these simple exercises will make voices (including your own!) sound alive and free.

   some other easy ways of teaching MUSIC are following……..

   2..
   The Practice Tape
   Hopefully, the student brought a blank cassette tape to the lesson, upon which I tape record a five-minute set of vocalises, mostly ones from Basics of Singing, which don’t come on the CDs. I used to have the student sit while I recorded into tape-recorder, but my recorder was out of batteries one day, so I recorded using the Karaoke machine. This actually works better because the student is involved (she has to hold the mike to me while I sing a demo, then point the mike to the keyboard for the repetitions).

   The vocalises include legato and staccato exercises, together with scales and octaves. My instructions are that the student do the exercises four times each day, in two sets of two (i.e., twice through in the morning, twice again after school; or twice through after school and twice through after supper.) ROSE’S RULE: Practice every day means practice every day. Don’t come in here and tell me you practiced for four hours yesterday and that covers you for the week.

   Make sure that you ask the student if she understands how to do the exercises, and go through them all during the first few lessons as a warmup.

   You will often find that students have a problem with legato singing. They introduce an “h” sound between the notes. Be patient. First, they must hear what they are doing. Hearing the mistake is a skill in itself. Then they must correct it-and the control they have over their instrument can be quite limited. Just make sure your own legato is perfect, and they will get it eventually (by imitation, if nothing else.) I am very serious about this last point-I’ve been to choral workshops where the presenter is trying to get a legato sound from the chorus and the presenter’s own legato lacks at lot!! What you do, your students will do.

   If the exercise is at the extreme of the student’s range, have her sing it staccato, then go back to legato where she is more comfortable, and work on it. Don’t compromise on this point, but, again, be patient, it can take years (I mean YEARS) to develop a perfect legato through the entire range of the student’s voice. And DO take the student into her head voice, even it she insists she can’t sing that high. Get past the “crack” at about c#’ or d’ and lo, she can sing that high and higher! (Boys, too.) We’ll cover pitch problems in a future article, but be assured, there IS hope, you can correct pitch problems.

   For the scale, I demo do-re-mi forwards and backwards on the practice tape, but I also teach them one of my favorite tongue twisters, “Red leather, yellow leather; good blood, bad blood.” (If you are not familiar with this, each phrase goes on a scale note, that is, “red leather, yellow leather” on do, “good blood, bad blood” on re, etc.) The student is not allowed to write this one down, nor do I demo it on the tape, because I am already starting to work on memorization.

   It’s amazing how much improvement results from these simple vocalises. You can really tell which students are practicing, and your positive feedback to the student will encourage her to continue the drills……….

   3…
   Frowns, Smiles, and, eventually, Snakes
   Hopefully, the student has also brought her music manuscript book and has memorized the solfege syllables for the major scale backwards and forwards. Usually they’ve done the first and THINK they’ve done the second, but, well…

   In the manuscript book, I now write out the “frowns”. These are seven exercises, do-re-do, do-re-mi-re-do, do-re-mi-fa-mi-re-do, etc. I write them out in the key of C, in half-notes, with a barline between each pattern. Only the highest note in each pattern is labeled with its syllable.

   Then I take the student through the patterns in order. Sometimes it takes quite a while for the student to catch on, because I only play “do” and they must sing the rest unaccompanied. If they have not had sight-singing, they simply do not know what they are expected to do. They will sing “do” and stop, and there will occur the silence of complete puzzlement. You have to be very patient. Don’t over-explain. If they have a problem, have them start to sing the entire scale, and stop them abruptly. Gradually, they will get the idea. Of course, some students zip right though this because they’ve had sight-singing in school.

   Next, I prove I went to kindergarten by ripping out a page of manuscript paper and making 8 little squares, each labeled with a scale syllable. Then we “go fish” and do the exercises randomly. Again, some students may not understand what is expected (when you pull the square with “la”, you sing the pattern labeled “la”, i.e., do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-sol-fa-mi-re-do.) The little squares go in an envelope which is taped to the inside cover of the manuscript book.

   That’s as far as you can go with most students in the first lesson, but with others, you can get to the “smiles” (high do-ti-do, do-ti-la-ti-do, etc.). Make sure you explain why they are called “frowns” and “smiles.” Ask the student to observe the contour of the musical line. In the “smile” patterns, the student only hears the low do, she must find the high do herself and then sing the pattern If a student is really capable, I only write out the first two or three patterns and assign her the rest as homework.

   Next month (October, 2001) I’ll have an article in Teaching the Big Kids on the “Frowns, Smiles, and Snakes”. Although the October article is directed to a classroom or chorale setting, you will easily see how to adapt it to private lessons. By the way, I do this for all my young students, no matter what their skill level, and my students love the “snakes!”…………

   4…

   If you play an instrument, you have equipment. As teachers, we have to help our students deal with musical equipment, ranging from the instrument itself to parts for it, playing aids, tuning aids, mp3 players, digital recorders, music stands and metronomes.
   Some equipment is important and yet, when you want to make progress in a student’s playing, it can feel hard to take time to address the equipment questions, especially within a half-hour lesson, and you might not have time to engage in a lengthy discussion of it outside of lessons.

   Below are 7 approaches to this issue. Read them and please feel free to add a comment at the end about how you handle including musical equipment in your teaching.

   1. Include Equipment in the Lesson Plan
   Identify all the equipment issues you can and think about when in the course of a student’s progress they start to have an impact on playing and learning. Then make sure that addressing them is a part of your lesson plan. Don’t leave these issues to chance, or they will soak up time you didn’t expect to give.

   2. Make Handouts or Web Pages
   Write down your thoughts and recommendations on equipment and purchases of them, such as what to look for in a bow or violin, the different types of keyboards or pianos and ways to buy or rent them, how to use valve oil, what kind of rosin to get, whether you recommend electronic tuners, what kinds of metronomes work well and why. Handing out this information on paper, or placing it on a page of your Music Teachers Helper website can save everyone a lot of wondering, and time.

   3. Equipment as Teaching Aid
   Find ways to explore equipment as part of learning to play the instrument. For example, I bring in a case of a dozen bows of various types and prices from a cooperative retailer every fall so that my students, regardless of level of ability, can focus on their violin sound by tuning their ears into the differences between bows. This exploration of essential equipment also makes bowing exercises and bowing awareness fun. The students gain valuable experience with bow weights, feels, and the astonishing difference in sound generated by bows that may otherwise all look the same.

   4. Balance Equipment and Learning
   Exercise your leadership in choosing when to insist on certain equipment such as a shoulder rest, or a particular size of mouthpiece, and choose when to let things go until the student is ready to understand it, or in some cases, to be able to afford it. But before letting any equipment go by the wayside, be sure you take the time to help the student get used to using it, adjusting it, making it work for them. Don’t let them decide it doesn’t work if they’ve never actually experienced how it’s supposed to feel or to be used. I’ve seen students ready to throw away their shoulder rest without realizing they’ve been putting it on backwards!

   5. Be Sensitive to the Expense
   We all deal with the balance between the money invested in lessons, and money spent on equipment. For some students, extra expenses are difficult, and it’s important not to be too rigid about the need for particular kinds of equipment. Scope out the prices on equipment you think is workable, versus that which you think isn’t worth the money. I like to keep on top of shoulder rest models and appreciate when one comes out that’s adjustable and functional but inexpensive. At the same time, buying something cheap that is also not good quality can end up being more expensive if the student has to go out and buy a different kind to find one that works for them.

   6. When Equipment is Essential
   When you’ve determined that certain equipment is essential to your style of teaching, you need to hold your ground. A student who invests in lessons can afford to invest in essential equipment; otherwise they’re being pennywise and pound foolish. I had one little girl whose mother kept promising to buy a shoulder rest but didn’t for a month, and it stalled the girl’s progress, so I had to be quite firm.

   7. Stay on Top of Developments
   Keep educating yourself so you are aware of new makes and models, so that you don’t get into a rut insisting on the same old equipment just because you’ve always done so. Many new types and prices of electronic tuners and metronomes have come out in recent years, so I have to keep reassessing their value. In some areas, teachers can get wrapped up in widely disparate opinions about equipment models such as rosins, or shoulder rests, or get invested in the idea of going without a shoulder rest, and it really is important to tailor your response to each student, and what impact that equipment or that model actually has on that student.

   5……
   Quality learning through song without words
   We should treat pure vocal music – singing without words – as a frontier for developing more effective musical education. Nicholas Bannan has conducted workshops on this in Australia, and participants testify to the peculiar power of the experience. Using hand gestures, body-language and his own voice he led the hundred or so people into melody and harmonies sung as common vowel-sounds.

   It is essential to the method that not only the choir or class, but also the teacher-leader, does not use language. From the beginning of the Bannan workshop to just before the end not one word was uttered by him or anyone else. For at least thirty minutes the participants learnt tunes, created triads, moved in harmony to the subdominant and then the dominant and other chords by following Nicholas’ signalslass, but also the teacher-leader, does not use language. From the beginning of the Bannan workshop to just before the end not one word was uttered by him or anyone else. For at least thirty minutes the participants learnt tunes, created triads, moved in harmony to the subdominant and then the dominant and other chords by following Nicholas’ signals…………

   …………….. THESE ARE SOME EASY WAYS OF LEARNING MUSIC……………

   By PGT Music..
   Sangita Verma
4. abhilasha says:

   January 5, 2012 at 1:31 pm

   I LIKED YOUR SCHOOL WEBSITE THERE ARE SO MANY ACTIVITIES MENTIONED I M NOT OF UR SCHOOL BUT I LIKE UR SCHOOL VERY MUCH BUT WHY NO PHOTOS OF JANMASHTMI