Haiku & Pentatonic Composition

• Lauren Thomas
• Posted 6/8/21
• 0 comments

Introduction 

Consider the number of things each of us has learned using music: numbers, ABCs, parts of speech, etc. Children learn a multitude of facts by incorporating melody and rhythm in the general education classroom.  

This article series will explore ways for music teachers and general education to work together for overall student success. With a new subject-area focus each time, get ready to experience music when applied to language arts, literature, history and geography, science, and math.   

Collaborate 

April is National Poetry Month, and students across the nation will be studying couplets, acrostics, haiku, and sonnets. Why not take this opportunity to build a cross-curricular bridge with a language arts teacher at your school? Here is how I did it and how you can, too. 

First, find a willing colleague. Discuss opportunities for the two of you to work as partners. Once they are on board, continue to woo them with your two-birds one-stone approach by demonstrating a lesson that will meet the needs of both music and language arts. 

In this lesson, music students compare the familiar major scale and the newly introduced pentatonic scale. Students review musical expression and compose individual pieces for performance. Students met the sixth grade SC standard of reading poetry with accurate rate, expression, intonation, and phrasing in language arts. 

Language Arts 

Next, equip the students with pencils and paper.  Students are writing a haiku. In my scenario, the language arts teacher assigned each student a part of nature for their haiku’s subject. Some students were to write about water, while others wrote about flowers, some about trees, and the like. 

However, before students are ready for the music section, they must have a haiku of the five-seven-five syllabic pattern (even though this is not the case with all haiku.) My students had just over a week to complete their haiku in language arts class.  

Hint. It is a good idea to have students read haiku and hear it spoken. For this, a simple YouTube search will do the trick. 

Music Class 

With the poem in hand, the musical magic begins!  Before beginning, this part of the assignment ensures that students can hear music that uses the pentatonic scale.   

I recommend finding ethnic music from Asian cultures that accurately utilize pentatonic scales.  As students are listening, identify which Asian country the music you are listening to originates.   

For example – if you are listening to Arirang, identify the song as Korean vs. Sakura, which is Japanese.  Although both pieces are from the continent of Asia, our students need to understand that these songs are from different countries with their own unique cultures.  

Next, explain or review how to create a pentatonic scale. If students are familiar with the major scale, compare it with the pentatonic scale. My students enjoy using Venn diagrams for comparisons.  

If your students are not already acquainted with the major scale, then ensure that your students understand how to construct a pentatonic scale, demonstrating its use in this assignment. In my classroom, students used barred instruments in C pentatonic. They choose their instruments (bass, alto, soprano, or glockenspiel) based on their poem’s text.  They also choose the timbre of metallophone or xylophone that best suits their work. 

The next step is exploring the instruments’ range and timbre while considering their poem’s melodic contour. Would the notes go mostly up, mostly down, repeat, step, skip, leap, make a hill, make a valley?  

The musical concepts my students reviewed during this exploration process were phenomenal. Although some students did not make solid connections between their text and their melodic contour, many students did.   

For example, students who wrote about water often chose to write descending melodies. In contrast, students who wrote about trees developed melodies that went up. Each student finished making their expressive selections by selecting a dynamic level and tempo for their poems. 

Assessment 

Depending on your learners’ musical aptitude, you may choose to have the students notate their melodies on the staff. The majority of my students merely wrote letter names beneath each syllable of their poem. This “cheat sheet” was later used in performance if the student had not already memorized their piece.  

The notation of the rhythm proved most challenging for my students. Considering the poem’s syllabic pattern helped them choose a total of seventeen notes, but the rubato feeling of the topics never held them to a steady beat. 

Because I saw my students once per week, it took them four weeks to complete their composition process. Week 1 was primarily for pentatonic introduction, instrument selection, and expressive decisions like melodic direction, dynamics, and tempi. The second and third weeks were for trial, error, and practice. 

A small number of students reflected on their choices and made adjustments before the final week. Due to my limited number of barred instruments, students rotated between their iPads (with headphones) and using actual instruments. The language arts teacher and I watched the students’ poems come to life the final week. 

Conclusion 

Could students have learned haiku without music? Of course. Could they have developed accurate reading, expression, and phrasing? Most likely. Did music enhance their learning and motivation? Most certainly.  

My administrators supported my collaborative efforts because our school was exploring the idea of adopting a project-based and service-learning curriculum. If you have colleagues willing to collaborate with you, insert yourself into the students’ everyday learning. It will provide them excellent service and keep your colleagues and administrators begging for more.