Interactivity offers ongoing teacher prompts and student responses within the context of a meter or tonality. Student responses can be both group and solo. Each serves its own purpose to propel music learning, and both are needed. Group response serves to model appropriate response while reinforcing meter, tonality, and rhythm or tonal segments. Solo musical interaction is necessary for each child for musical independence, just as it is for language, but it is not necessary that every child be able to deliver every bit of content individually. Interactive group experience serves as immersion as much as interaction.
Group Rhythm Dialogue immerses children in rhythm patterns and gives them a chance to “practice” them, reinforcing macro and micro beats in audiation. Group Macro/Micro Beat Activities immerse children in rhythm content and give them the opportunity to “practice” hanging on to macro and micro beats in context, while the group sustains the meter when they cannot. Group Resting Tone Activities immerse children in tonal content, reinforcing resting tone in audiation and modeling the basic tonal dialogue response. Group Tonal Dialogue Activities immerse children in tonal segments and provide opportunity to “practice” in all tonalities.
You can monitor the level of development of the group by the precision of group response with any given content, but solo response is necessary to monitor the level of development of each individual. Children will begin to show competence in solo Rhythm Dialogue in both duple and triple meters with macro and micro beats and some divisions, and competence in group movement and chanting with unusual meters in macro and micro beats as well as duple and triple. Children will begin to show solo competence with Resting Tone Activities, and at least sound like they are in the given tonality in Tonal Dialogue, whether their pitches are yet discreet or not. Once children reach these basic criteria, they will continue to add more and more rhythm and tonal “vocabulary” to their repertoire and deliver more and more precisely in solo and in the group.
Once children are secure with macro and micro beats and some divisions in duple and triple meters, and with macro and micro beats in unusual meters, the sky is the limit. The “matrix” is in place in the musical mind for rhythm patterns to fall in place in any meter. The more patterns children encounter through immersion, the more they will be able to use them.
Similarly, once children are secure with resting tone and they sound like they are in the tonality, whether the pitches are discreet or not, the more they will begin to deliver tonal segments precisely, secure in the tonality. Security in one tonality strengthens security in every tonality, as long as the various tonalities are kept alive in the classroom. When children are secure in tonality, they easily absorb and use tonal segments encountered through immersion. The more children can meet the basic criteria of competence through the experience of both group and solo interactivity, the more they will be able to deliver rhythm patterns and tonal segments precisely in any meter or tonality, individually and in ensemble.
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