Capybara Song
Rhythm Modes, Beat Levels, and Canon
My daughter loves her little stuffed Capybara. If you don’t know what a capybara is, it is the largest rodent on the planet. They are native to South America and live in the dense forests.
I was writing a canon to accompany a series of activities I’ve been developing on the rhythm modes, executing them at various beat levels. The word “capybara” was stuck in my head from my daughter’s precious toy, and it was on the tip of my tongue as I was trying to create lyrics. In this post I’ll share my Capybara song and some of the ways we manipulate the canon to explore various concepts. But first…
Housekeeping:
I’m giving a FREE WORKSHOP to kick off the school year on Aug 15 at 7 PM Eastern Time. I’ll be going over an overview of the method is applied to public school teaching and how to start playing with these ideas in your classroom.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE FREE WORKSHOP
In this TEAMM event we’re going to de-mystify Dalcroze training and talk about the various experiences people have with summer programs! I’ve invited TEAMM All-Star Kayla to the meeting to share her unique perspective from her experience this summer, and we’re going to all talk about how Dalcroze training might differ from other pedagogies, and how the various training centers differ as well. It will be a ton of useful info, reflecting right after the summer when the memories are fresh! See you there! If you want to come learn about this subject and you AREN’T on the TEAMM, then you should upgrade today!
From the Archive:
Mary's Lamb and Edvard Grieg
This is a CLASSIC MusicXT lesson. It flows from a traditional folk song into a romantic era classic... and it is an absolute BLAST for the kids. There are powerful moments of learning, literacy, creativity, movement and fun. There is also a connection with this Capybara lesson, as it explores rhythm modes! Check it out now!
This is a lesson that builds off of the “Beat Level Circles” lesson from last week, so if you haven’t read that one perhaps you should backtrack!
One of the great uses of the Beat Level Circles is as a tool to help students change tempo on a rhythm, and effortlessly speed it up twice as fast or perform it twice as slow. It’s easy enough to do this with steady/even rhythms, but it becomes more difficult with uneven rhythms. The Rhythm Modes are a great way to experiment with various categories of rhythm and translate between them quickly. For instance, there are a group of rhythms that we can call “Long Short Short.” Depending on the tempo and the beat level, we might say a half note and two quarter notes is “Long Short Short” but we might also say the same for a quarter note and two eighths. Another common Long Short Short rhythm is an eighth and two sixteenths.