Follow-up: Key Signature Castles!

After a lesson about key signatures, the children had a great follow-up idea that I wanted to share with you.

I had introduced the lesson on key signatures from my Montessori album by telling the children a story from Making Music in Montessori. I asked them to imagine being a knight on horseback in medieval times approaching a stately castle at the entrance to an unfamiliar but lovely new kingdom. Flapping on the ramparts of the castle you see a heraldic flag displaying the coat of arms of the monarch of that kingdom. In music, the monarch of a kingdom (a scale) is called the tonic.

We can think of a key signature as the design on that heraldic flag! Whenever you go to play a piece of music, you’ll see, at the very beginning, the heraldic symbol of the monarch, or tonic, that rules the particular kingdom that all of the notes in the piece inhabit.

For me, key signatures do indeed resemble coats of arms, with their lovely sharps or flats perched like little ravens in a pleasing, organized pattern on the horizontal black and white staff lines and spaces, all next to that elegant, sweeping clef symbol.

If you think plain black and white stripes are perhaps a bit dull for a flag design, consider this flag of the French region of Brittany:

Not the most beautiful flag (I can here my Breton friends exclaiming “Sacre bleu!” from here), but I think you’ll agree it at least resembles a musical staff.

Anyway, for follow-up the children ran with the imagery and created little castles with key signature flags on their ramparts.

Behold: the simple, elegant, striped coat of arms that sits atop the gate to the kingdom of Do, or C, in the English note naming system. The children got the idea to write the name of the key’s tonic on the door. Clever!

And here be the kingdom of Re (D), with its stately tower housing, no doubt, the queen’s extensive music library.

Alas, pictured in this photo are the entrances to the kingdoms of Fa#, Do, Re, Sol, and Si. (F#, C, D, G, and B, respectively.) Notice the intimidating triple prison towers of the castle of Fa#, with the architect’s use of the “#” sign as an ornamentation. The kingdom of Fa# is full of pitfalls for the weary traveler indeed.

And here are all of the castles of the sharp keys in order from left to right, displayed, appropriately, on top of the classroom piano.

Well, I hope that gives you a useful idea. More later!