Follow-up: Playing a Photograph!

Welcome back! Children love opportunities to play the classroom piano. A fun way to get them playing and improvising their own music is to have them sit at the piano in front of a lovely photograph, such as a bucolic landscape scene or a famous painting, and improvise some music that corresponds to the image.

After a presentation about the origin of the universe, some children wanted to follow-up by composing their own music. So, we got out a book of Hubble space telescope photographs. The children found their favorite photos of a distant galaxy, or star scape, or nebula, and played whatever came to mind.

Now, I like to give the children limits when they do creative work. Limiting their palette of colors or materials when they to artwork, or limiting the scale or number of notes they can use when writing music, actually helps the children be more creative. It also gives whatever they create the sense of unity and variety that is so important in great art.

Since space is black, I asked the children to improvise using only the black keys. Of course, there is a practical reason for limiting the children to the black keys; the black keys of the piano form a pentatonic scale (a 5-note scale that contains no half steps). The notes in the pentatonic scale sound great together in any combination. The children can have fun exploring and touching the keys without worrying about clashing notes and dissonances.

The child could also use only the white keys, since the sun seen from space is white (not yellow, as it appears to us on earth). The only problem is that the white keys contain half steps, which tend to clash.

Of course, if a child wants dissonance and doesn’t mind a few notes that clash, he or she can feel welcome to use whatever keys he or she chooses. Still, I would find a way to limit his or her note choices.

For your listening pleasure, here’s what Ebeniezer, the child in the above photograph, played to while looking at a photo of a spiral galaxy. (Apologies for the background chatter.)

Isn’t it lovely how photos from space can inspire music? The children can play their improvisations, as Ebeniezer did, to accompany the afternoon work cycle.

That’s all for now. More later!