News from the Music Industry

Making Music by Patricia M. Gane is an unusual supplementary resource. For those unfamiliar with aspects of education in Great Britain, an independent and highly respected organization visits schools to evaluate all aspects of instruction. The reports of these Ofsted Inspectors are vital in evaluating strengths and weaknesses of the instruction. As an Ofsted Inspector, Gane has come to the conclusion that “many teachers wish to broaden the music experience of their pupils, but need help sometimes because of their own backgrounds … and sometimes because of a lack of appropriate material to them.” This resource supplies more than 200 step-by-step activities for private or group instruction designed to engage imagination and to place an emphasis on creating music. The author believes that young players, in particular, often play music without understanding it, and that by engaging them in the activities she suggests they “will come to really understand its magic, its language, and its power.”

The first two chapters are quite fundamental, and concern some basic physical and rhythmic awareness drills. The third through sixth chapters develop such musical concepts as texture, making melodies, the relationship of phrases and so forth. The sixth chapter introduces some projects making improvising less intimidating to young teachers, and the seventh chapter is an attempt to draw many of the themes from the early chapters together.

I doubt that there is any music teacher who could not find several of these projects interesting and fruitful resources in their teaching. Almost all of the projects are well thought out and do seem to work. The question is how much time would have to be devoted to these projects to have a real impact on the development of young musicians, and how many of us would find these activities to be more important than those developing the skills, the musical awareness and communication that we have already identified as crucial in our own teaching style.

Reviewed by Kenneth Lee, Vienna, Virginia