The song has been a success with its second -degree students. Daisy Lee, 8, says, in fact, is the favorite song he has learned. “It’s an easy song, and I like rhythm and rhythm,” says Daisy, who added that his older brother really likes the success of the 80s.
The perfect teaching tool
Like generations of educators who came before him, Edwards uses the recorder to teach young students about the foundations of music, such as how to concentrate, how to breathe and how to recognize a certain sound note.
Obviously, it is a job for which the recorder is well adapted.
“There really is no other instrument, apart from the keyboard, where it is so easy for a beginner to make a sound,” says Michael Lynn, a baroque recorder and flute at the Oberlin College and Conservatory.
It is especially easier to play than other wooden winds such as the saxophone and the flute, he says, because both require that they form their lips in a certain way of producing a sound. With the recorder, all you have to do is blow in the nozzle at the top, like a whistle.
It is also cheap, and the size is correct, says Karen Dolezal, former music teacher at the Athensori School in Athens, Georgia, who is now removed. “It is a small and portable instrument that small hands can master,” he explains.
Both educators say it’s great to teach children to read music. Unlike the guitar, which is written in its own language of chords, or the piano, which generally implies reading and playing multiple lines of musical annotation at the same time, the recorder only requires that you read and touch a line at the time. That allows children to quickly understand songs.
Brady Gerber, a music journalist based in Los Angeles, learned the recorder at school in the early 2000s. He remembers his simple delight because of how easy it was the instrument of playing.
“The recorder was incredible because I could play real music,” Gerber recalls. “I could learn a song relatively easily.”
The recorder also helped him navigate the first days of his autism. “It was strangely empowering,” he says. “I didn’t get to work very hard to do something. I didn’t feel like a stranger.”
Even so, the recorder is not exempt from difficulties. A particular problem is its holes. There are seven on the front and one on the back. Producing different sounds with them requires covering specific holes with the thumb and fingers. It can be a bit complicated.
“[The recorder] It is a very sensitive instrument, “says Edwards, the music teacher at Georgia. He first bought and practiced in his own recorder to be able to teach his student confident how to play:
“If your fingers do not cover 100%holes, the correct note does not come out.”
Daisy of eight years agrees. “Sometimes I just get the notes badly because I don’t cover the hole completely,” she says. “It can be a challenge, but it is supposed to be a challenge, so that is something good.”
Of the Renaissance to the Classroom
While there are good reasons why the recorder ended as the GO-T instrument for primary students, it did not start that way. Its real increase dates back to the fifteenth century, when it was the instrument Du Jour Duration The Renaissance, and not only among 8 -year -old.
“Very often he played in consorts,” says Lynn, the music historian, referring An instrumental set type Popular dead those times. “Then you would have recorders of different sizes playing together. A high recorder, a tenor recorder and a bass recorder.” (The recorder that children play at school is actually the soprano version).
A big engraver fan in his reign of the Renaissance? Enrique VIII. King Tudor was also a musician and composer, and wrote several songs specifically for the instrument.
King Enrique VIII – Two compositions for recorders 1540
Pootoly, his popularity begged Wane. “Around approximately 1740, 1750, the recorder boy or began to go out of style,” says Lynn. It was complemented with the transverse flute (that is the one that holds sideways), which remained the flute of choice until the beginning of the 20th century.
It was then that an instrument manufacturer born in France called Arnold Dolmetsch caused a rebirth of a recorder. I was promoting it as an instrument to teach music in schools.
Dolmesch and Carl Orff, the influential German music and composer educator behind “Carmina Burana” They are largely responsible for the recorder to end in so many classrooms.
Well, they and the manufacturing industry.
With the increase in plastic injection molding in the 1940s and 1950s, the companies began to the recorders that produced mass and sold them in bulk to the school districts for only $ 1 each.
At the beginning of the 1960s, says Lynn, the recorder begged on the primary classrooms.
Remember to have learned the recorder when I was a child and see plastic versions everywhere. “They were very popular,” says Lynn. “That was really the beginning.”
He points out that his childhood springs, those plastic recorders have better with improvements in technology and manufacturing.
A serious instrument
More than half a century later, the recorder is still able to “cross buns.”
“It’s not just a toy,” says Dolezal. “It’s a serious instrument.”
Lynn agrees: “It is certainly an misunderstood instrument from a public perspective because most people have heard play a very good recorder.”
That is partly due to the fact that most students in the United States learn the recorder as an introduction to other wooden wind instruments and never Play at a higher level. If they did, Sayes Lynn would quickly discover how difficult it is to dominate beyond the basics and perhaps take the instrument more seriously.
In Parkside Elementary, it seems that students already are.
