St. Patrick’s Day Beginning Composing

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In my never-ending quest to change everything on my website to portrait orientation, I have updated these two St. Patrick’s Day composing pages and put them together into one PDF file. It’s time-consuming, which is why it is taking me so long!

The first page is for composing on the staff.  I wrote a little poem and put the rhythm above the staff. The student can write a melody with bass notes, or just the melody.

The pre-reading page has the rhythm written above shamrocks, and they write the finger numbers of their melody on the shamrocks.

I always suggest to my students  to start and end on the same note if they want a singable melody and I suggest D using only white keys for an Irish sounding melody.  It is always amazing to me that some students have an innate ability to come up with a good melody! Other students write notes willy-nilly here and there and it sounds rather like me composing 12-tone music for a theory class. 🙂

Some students want to compose melody and accompaniment, so I suggest they start with fifths in the left hand and use D minor and C parallel fifths. If they get carried away and want to expand their composition, check out the staff paper I’ve posted that has a braced grand staff, measures, and bar lines. It’s one of the pages in this bundle.

If you don’t know how to print only one page in a PDF bundle, there is a tutorial in my FAQ.