Today Maggie and I are home, as she had a bit of a fever and some muscle aches on Thursday evening... our doctor prescribed a COVID test, which we did yesterday, and we expect results within 48 hours, which would be on Sunday. She has no other symptoms, and the fever disappeared after only a few hours. She felt better yesterday already and today feels her normal self, so we find that encouraging and are hoping that it was some other fast-moving bug. But we are staying masked in the house until we get the results back from the lab. As she feels normal I'm not at all worried about her, and I don't have any symptoms of any kind. For both our sakes I really hope that it is a negative result, and we won't have to stay home and try to teach remotely.
Teaching! That is the reason that I have been incredibly busy since my last blog post, over a month ago... to review...
The Bach concert on the 25th October was quite the experience, both full of joy and also very sad, as we all knew that the confinement rules were coming back down as of Monday 26th October, and there would be no clear idea of when concert performances would resume. It was strange for me to wear a suit again, after so many months spent wearing casual or work clothes, and to do all of the little rituals around preparing to perform.
The audience was seated in such a way that they were distanced from each other, and masked, which was a bit strange. It was impossible to see their expressions during the performance, but based on their reaction afterwards they really seemed to enjoy it, and showed their gratefulness for having some sort of live performance. Christopher, Camille, and Malcolm attended as well, as did some of our old friends from Watermael-Boitsfort.
The next week was the school break for St. John's, and then the school resumed classes via distance teaching for the first two weeks after that, which was a bit weird. Some of the kids were known to me but the majority weren't, and so I had to get to know around 120 different faces. I have two grade six classes of around 20 kids, two grade seven classes of around the same number, one grade 8 class, and one grade 10 class (there is another Grade 8 class that is shared between the other music teachers).
Imagine trying to hold their attention and give them appropriate tasks to do while largely unsupervised and at home, when you haven't had a chance to establish a solid personal connection already! But fortunately for me, we needed to do a sort of interview meet-and-greet so that I could learn about their family musical background, previous music education, performing experience, and so forth, and that could easily be done over teleconference. So I had some time to get my bearings.
My birthday came and went during that first week of online teaching. Obviously as we were in confinement and we were both working all day on my birthday, and we couldn't invite anyone over, the celebrations were fairly low-key. But Maggie made some great breakfast to start the day, and also a nice dinner in the evening. Malcolm had come home as it was the Belgian school holiday, and he made a chocolate birthday cake for me, which was delicious. All in all a very nice day. We had several more nice dinners that week, and it was great to have both Duncan and Malcolm there with us.
Maggie and I continued the teleconference teaching for two weeks and then resumed in-class teaching starting on the 16th November; I've just completed the second week of that, so that makes four weeks now. It's quite an interesting experience being a classroom teacher, with music being a special challenge.
I don't have much material to work with from the previous teacher, as we didn't get a chance to talk or review things before she left, so while that is a bit challenging to know where to start, on the other hand I have a certain freedom to do what I want. After discussion with Thom and Marie-Pierre, who are also taking on some music classes, we decided that we will focus on teaching them the do-re-mi note names, and helping them hear how to sing the different scale steps using them. Regular practice at identifying where a note is on the scale also helps them to sing harmonies. We will also work on rhythmic literacy, using the Kodaly vocabulary (if you did any rhythmic musical education as a kid you might remember hearing the syllables "ta" for a quarter note, "tee-tee" for two eight notes, "tiri-tiri" for four sixteenth notes, etc.) which the Primary music teacher also uses in her classes. And we're also eventually going to be teaching them how to identify and perform in different time signatures.
The idea is that we'll be able to get them all singing music "at sight" much more accurately, which will help with teaching them to sing in choir, perform as an instrumentalist, or to learn the parts for musical theatre productions in the future. One strength of the current performing arts team is that the three of us teaching music and dance and drama in the Middle and High Schools are all professional performers, so we can model performing easily, and can direct the study in class toward performance skills. Rather than make music theory something that you do while sitting down with a pencil and paper, I want to get them using it to sing and eventually play instruments properly first, and then extend that to the written exercises.
The introductory project that we chose to do for music was "Show me what you got!", which involved the kids coming up with a short musical performance, which they planned, rehearsed, filmed and then uploaded to the class server for the teachers to view. As well, they had to write down their planning and brainstorming sessions, their choice of instrumentation, their specific challenges, and the feedback that they received from parents, siblings, or each other during the rehearsal and preparation.
The range of performances was huge, with some of the kids giving quite polished classical performances on the piano, to others who sang quite capably along with commercial recordings, did karaoke, composed their own lyrics, sequenced rhythmic beats on their computers or played drums, did Anna Kendrick's "cup song" clapping / table percussion song from the movie Pitch Perfect, or many other things.
The next task I've chosen for the music classes is to perform Silent Night... the head of school has asked us to have some music ready for the end of term virtual assembly in December, and so I am rehearsing all of the classes in this famous piece. I am hoping that we will be able to have all of the younger kids at least singing the top two voices, and then the grade tens and the Grease male singers can handle the bass and tenor parts, and the older girls can do the two female voices. If all goes well I will be able to put them all (around 150 people) in the seats of the theatre, which has a capacity of 450, and is very well ventilated, and I'll conduct them from the stage with a student pianist helping give them the notes, and we'll film it and show it to the rest of the students.
In my own performing news, pretty much everything that wasn't cancelled, has now been. Technically some things are postponed, but some are quite a long ways off: the Flemish baroque programme has just been moved optimistically to October 2021; the rescheduled Japanese Matthauspassion tour has been cancelled again and theoretically moved to (maybe) 2023... the Christmas Oratorio in Flanders was first scaled down to a smaller baroque programme, then scaled down from three concerts to one, and finally put out of its misery with an outright cancellation. It is not at all unexpected.
I hope that things improve by May 2021 so that I can go to Canada for the Vaughan Williams concert, but I spoke with the conductor and he's not optimistic; they are still not able to rehearse, so it seems very unlikely that we'll be back at it by then. As well the Johannespassion here in Brussels is still on the books, but for how long?
So because of those developments, I'm not complaining about being busy with the teaching, as many of my singer and musician colleagues are stuck without any music in their lives at all! Our family has much to be thankful for.
On that note, while we celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving last month, the fresh turkeys only showed up this week in the Delhaize ahead of US Thanksgiving. I bought one, and we were planning on meeting with the Hammers for a socially distanced dinner outside together, with turkey, my haggis cranberry dressing, etc. until Maggie's fever on Thursday put the brakes on that. We are keeping fingers crossed that her COVID test comes back negative before the dinner bell goes tomorrow...
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