The Revenge of the Recorder aka the Ongoing Orff Experiment

Slowly but surely I am persevering with looking into applying Orff Schulwerk ideas in the classroom.  And I have just reached the chapter of Doug Goodkin's Play, Sing & Dance about using the instrument that sends shivers down many music teacher's spine - the recorder!

Personally, and having been initially thrown out of recorder classes for not practicing (I was 7!), I returned to playing it during my teacher training and now love playing the tenor recorder as it has a warm, rich sound.  A number of teachers I know laugh and make comments about not understanding how someone with my qualifications can stomach the sound of the recorder.  Worse, others have told me that it is irrelevant in the age of the ukulele.  I believe that these thoughts are at best a little misguided, and at worse closed minded and borderline uneducated.  I agree that the recorder can be a little grating with classes of 30, but after spending hours tuning ukes and guitars only to see the pupils retune them as the pegs are not in a straight line, I know which one I prefer!

Orff originally began using the recorder as the next step in musical development after students had gained knowledge and understanding of rhythm, pitch and harmony through singing, untuned and then tuned percussion.  Also, as Goodkin points out, the recorder can be the first step in taking the students from instruments where tuning the notes is not so much of an issue to having to consider it while learning a purely melodic (as in single note at a time) instrument.  The descant recorder is also the right size for most early Key Stage 2 students to begin learning notation and melody before moving onto the more 'advanced' instruments of the wind, string and brass families.

From reading Goodkin's book, I am now revising the way I am going to develop the KS1 and 2 curriculums I am working on:

1. Less tuned percussion in Year 1 and more developmental work on singing and untuned percussion to develop rhythmic skills, although they do enjoy a good two note oscillating ostinato;
2. Year 2 has more tuned percussion added in to provide more complex pitched ostinati;
3. Years 3-4 have the recorder added to develop the students melodic awareness;
4. Years 5-6 start learning wind, string and brass instruments.

Years 3-4 is also the first time we can start looking at 2-3 part melodic pieces, as I have found out with my Year 3-4 choir where the group has gone from being good unison singers to confidently performing in 3 parts.  The recorder can be the instrumental version of this and, as an added bonus, can blend effectively with the voices if you so wish.

Hopefully by approaching the teaching of musical skills in this manner, by the time the pupils hit KS3, they understand musical notation and can play and, importantly, improvise confidently.  This will then be the best time to start ukuleles/ guitars/ drum kit etc.  

To support this development singing also needs to be an integral part of the curriculum throughout and I believe that we are avoiding doing this in the KS3 years.  I believe that the best way to bring this back in is to get the classes to sing through the music they are to learn so that their brains already know the route the music takes before they set off on each acoustic journey.  I have been using this approach more and more in my instrumental teaching and it does seem to give the pupils more confidence in their performance.

The recorder might be old hat, but sometimes just because something is old fashioned does not mean it is irrelevant.