RS JR HIGH/MIDDLE SCHOOL CHOIRS
Greetings from the land of tulips! My name is Joseph Tangen and it is my pleasure to serve as R & S Chair for Middle School choirs. I have been the vocal music director for grades 6-8 for the last 10 years in the Pella Community School district. At Pella I direct an unchanged voice 6th Grade Choir, mixed 7th Grade Choir, mixed 8th Grade Choir ,Boysʼ Choir, Girlsʼ Choir, PELLAdrenaline-our middle school show choir, an exploratoryguitar class, and lessons to approximately 180 students per week. In addition to my duties at school, I am also the Pella Childrenʼs Choir director, which is an outreach group of the Iowa Youth Chorus. I also direct the adult choir at Peace Lutheran Church in Pella, Iowa. I hold a bachelorʼs of Music Education degree from Wartburg College.
I look forward to sharing some of the gems that I have found along the way and some selections that I will discover as I review literature from various publishers. If you have questions or ideas to help others at the middle school level, feel free to contact me.
Joseph Tangen
Junior High/Middle School Choirs Chair
jhms-chair@iowachoral.org
| Junior High/Middle School Choir Events 2012-13 | ||
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Sections of Interest:
- Choral Music Hits
- Great Junior High Literature — with repertoire ideas for study and performance
- Things for Your Classroom — with suggestions for motivators, energizers, class activities, interdisciplinary projects, solfege, and classroom management
- Getting Started Kit — with suggestions for new teachers on how to get started with the animal that is middle school/junior high choir
- Choral-Friendly Web Sites — with various MS/JH reference sites
- Successful Songs for Various Voicings (as presented by Brent Peterson at the 2005 IMEA convention)
- Music Theory Activities
- Advocacy Information
Arts Advocacy Quotation:
Elliot Eisner, Professor of Art and Education at Stanford University made the following observation:
"That the arts make substantial demands on those who would use them to make things expressive or lovely will come as no surprise to anyone who has seriously engaged in the arts. The arts — both in creation and in appreciation — require the use of our faculties of abstraction in order to make judgments about relationships that will submit to no crystallized rule. The exercise of judgment in the absence of rule is one of the art's most demanding requirements. Knowing when a painting is done, a poem is completed, or a dance is concluded requires judgment that can be resolved by fealty to no rule. Somatic knowledge must kick in if we are to know whether the relationships are right and the work is done."
"In the end, the arts make three things possible. First, they develop the mind by giving it opportunities to learn to think in special ways. Second, they make communication possible on matters that will not take the impress of logically constructed language. Poetry, after all, was invented to say what prose can never say. Third, the arts are places and spaces where one can enrich one's life. Such outcomes are not educationally trivial. When taken seriously, the arts have much to teach educators: they could provide the models needed to create schools that genuinely educate."