Musician spotlight: Carla Wilson
What do you get when you combine music, geology, cultural history and mythology in the public school classroom? Just ask Carla Wilson. This Musician Spotlight features Carla’s highly successful music curriculum that she developed with Jeff Creswell, a teacher at the Metropolitan Learning Center in Portland, Oregon.
Carla asked if Jeff would be interested in having his class compose a series of music compositions about the Columbia Gorge. Neither she nor Jeff imagined the huge effect this idea would have on the school community. Everyone involved witnessed the magic that took place as music and curricular learning became seamlessly woven together. Teachers gained a renewed commitment to the arts as an essential tool for learning. Students learned to explore how sound is used to compose music inspired by the world around us. And, parents shared in and celebrated their children’s music.
Carla holds a Bachelor of Music Education Degree from Lewis and Clark College and a Masters of Music in Flute Performance from Northwestern University. Carla is known in the orchestra for her experience in and commitment to music education. She has developed curriculum for the Oregon Symphony and the Galef Institute. But this project was different — and bolder.
Carla’s idea: ask four classrooms of fourth- through sixth-graders and their teachers — with no previous special music training — to compose a suite of 15 music compositions about the Columbia Gorge, then perform the score with six professional musicians. The key was to look at a similar work, Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite, and study the elements that pertained to the Columbia Gorge. They decided on 4 main areas of exploration:
- The geologic formation of the Gorge
- Scenic places and their Native American myths
- Modes of transportation
- Explorers and Native Americans of the Columbia River
Carla explains the process:
The first lesson was to write and perform a short composition using a sheet of paper as our instrument. We identified the musical triangle of composer, performer and listener and defined the role each plays in creating music.
Our second lesson was to create a picture composition called a soundscape. Thomas Moran’s painting, The Chasm of the Colorado was inspiration for our musical composition depicting a thunderstorm. Students chose elements in the painting they wanted to represent in sound, identified picture symbols for those sounds, organized and drew those picture symbols on the mural to represent the sequence of sounds within the thunderstorm, and selected sounds from a variety of homemade instruments to represent the symbols in the soundscape.
Next, after a field trip to the Gorge, each class was then divided into groups of four to five students to begin the process of drafting, critiquing, designing and constructing the murals that would reflect their study of the Gorge and provide the inspiration for their movement of the suite.
We listened to The Grand Canyon Suite to analyze how Grofe used musical elements to reflect his impressions of the Grand Canyon. What musical ideas, or motifs, did he use to represent images through sound? What does the music look like? What instruments did he use? What can we tell about the music by looking at the score?
We introduced a simple notation system and asked students to write down short melodic motifs for the characters found in the book The Hunter and the Animals, by Tomie dePaolo. Next, the students were introduced to the six instruments for which they would be composing.
It was then time to compose! The student groups began writing the story they wanted to tell through their music. They discussed and agreed on the images from their mural they wanted to represent in sound and the instruments they would use to represent those images, then created a soundscape to provide the form and structure for their composition. We then guided each student in writing a motif for his or her assigned image.
Fifteen short compositions written by the students and teachers were combined to form the large work, The Columbia Gorge Suite. Six professional musicians performed the entire The Columbia Gorge Suite for the students at the dress rehearsal. The excitement was electric as the students heard their compositions performed by the ensemble for the first time.
The culminating event was a performance of the suite by an ensemble of six professional musicians, two of whom, Tylor Neist and Laird Halling, assisted me with teacher development, classroom presentations and preparation of the score and music for the performance. Paula Cremer, a teacher at MLC, was our conductor. A standing-room-only crowd heard the this World Premier of The Columbia Gorge Suite. In the words of one student, “The performance was wonderful. My parents could not stop talking about it. They said you helped us in so many more ways than just music. I was so sad when the performance was over, and I wanted it to last forever.”
For a more detailed description of Carla’s project, visit ArtWorks!.