Follow-up: Composing with Colors!

Hi! Welcome back. Composing with color is a great follow-up children can do after a lesson about music or art, or after the study of a painter or painting. It works like this:

First, the child examines a painting and analyzes the colors in the painting. The painting could be a famous painting by a notable artist, or it could be the artwork created by one of the child’s classmates. It doesn’t matter. The goal is to make a list of the colors in the painting. For this example, my friend Timothy used a self-portrait by Gaugin.

Next, Timothy took out the tone bars and selected a scale strip. He went with the Locrian scale. (If you want to know what a Locrian scale is, go to your tone bars and pull down all the white tone bars, then play the notes from Si (B) to Si (B). Then, Timothy chose a color to assign to each note in the scale.

Timothy picked yellow for 2, purple for 3, red for 4, pink for 5, brown for 6, orange for 7, and black for 8

Next, Timothy came up with a melody that reminded him of the painting. To notate his melody, he colored in the squares on the grid paper using the colors that correspond to the notes. He came up with the idea to write the number in the box in the same color. (Clever lad.)

The result was a pretty grid of colored squares! I could imagine other applications for composing using colors. Maybe Timothy could use the notes in his melody in a new painting and use that painting as a kind of musical score. Instead of a grid of squares, he could write his melody in colored splotches or lines. You and your children can probably come up with a million possibilities as well.

Here is Timothy’s melodic interpretation of Paul Gaugin’s painting. If you want to play it, you can get out your Locrian scale strip and see what it sounds like!

Have fun composing with colors! More later.