“What song could this be? See what comes to your mind while I draw. What can you sing back?”
I love to present kids with a “secret song” by drawing an ideograph. Perhaps I had drawn the ideograph when first presenting the song in order to clarify their understanding, or perhaps it’s their first time seeing this ideograph. Cued by the simple pictures, the song gradually comes to them as I draw. By the end of the song, kids recall the whole song and can sing it on their own. Sometimes, the teacher hasn’t yet sung a word.
A favorite way to represent songs is by drawing “ideograph maps.” Ideographs are a series of simple visual symbols or pictures used to represent musical phrases, sound patterns, or language chunks of a song instead of traditional notation. Identical phrases use identical symbols; similar phrases use slightly varied symbols. They help learners perceive, perform, and compose music through accessible visual language, emphasizing musical structure, repetition, and variation (Bennett & Bartholomew, pp. 101–107).
I also refer to ideographs as “picture scores” or “symbol scores” when introducing the concept to students or other music teachers who are unfamiliar with practices from the SongWorks approach. Whatever you call it, ideographs help kids to develop a sense of how music is organized through musical phrasing, structure, and form.
It’s all about discovery! Students love the problem-solving challenge of figuring out how to read and sing ideographs or “picture scores.” In my own teaching practice, I use symbols or pictures that are simple enough to draw in real time while singing. After reading, young students can have a go at singing and drawing their own score themselves.
Sample Ideograph from SongWorks I:
First Arrangements by Reordering Symbols
“Now, how would I sing it this way?” When kids are familiar with reading an ideograph—when they know how the symbols connect to sound and what to sing for each symbol—then they delight in mixing up the phrases. Students can explore re-sequencing symbols to create new versions of a song.
In my classroom we call this making “tricky scores” or following a “tricky finger.” To read an ideograph, the teacher leads students by pointing to symbols as cues for singing. Sometimes the teacher’s “tricky finger” will point to symbols in a different, unexpected order—repeating certain phrases, skipping back, or skipping forward—to create a new arrangement of the song in real time.
Other times, the teacher’s “tricky marker” will draw the symbols out of order and we all have to figure out how to sing it. After seeing it modeled, kids can easily replicate the process and create their own “tricky scores.”With delight and playfulness, this is a way for kids to create their own arrangements, experimenting with repetition and sequence. Reflecting on how different arrangements sounded, we discover that arrangers use musical thinking as they explore how to begin, end, and structure a song meaningfully.
We are Composers!
“Now let’s be composers!”
Working with either the original ideograph or their own arrangements, students can do what composers do by adding performance indications such as tempo, dynamics, and articulation. “Try adding a crescendo, a decrescendo, a fermata, an accelerando, a ritardando—how does the music sound now?”
Depending on their grade in school and their familiarity with musical symbols, students can show expressive elements such as dynamics or tempo through traditional markings or in their own way through visual representation. For example, one student might indicate that the music has a crescendo by drawing the conventional symbol (<) and another student may draw the symbols getting bigger and bigger. Both ways show compositional thinking!
The teacher can support students in being intentional with their creative ideas by inquiring about musical interpretation. How did the music sound when we performed it that way? What feeling, story, or idea does it convey? We discover that composers communicate meaning by choosing expressive characteristics in combination with rhythm, melody, and lyrics to convey emotion and mood.
Possibilities for your classroom when playing with ideographs:
- Arranging: Students create and perform their own reordered ideographs
- Composing: Students annotate their own ideographs using expressive markings
- Independence and musicianship: Students playfully engage in active reading and arranging, while playing with expressive characteristics and reflecting on musical choices.
Reference
Bennett, P. D., & Bartholomew, D. R. (1997). SongWorks I: Singing in the education of children. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, pp. 101–107.
