In elementary school, we always had a music segment in our classes. My 5th grade teacher was Mr. Hyatt. He played guitar (and was a SCUBA diver, and was a pretty cool guy – he’d be 85 years old now, if he’s still alive). I remember we learned Dona, Dona, and Hava Nagila. (I wonder if he was Jewish?) We learned The Battle Of New Orleans. We learned some other songs too, but I don’t recall them at the moment.
I always liked sing-along time in elementary school.
My 4th and 5th grade classes had excellent music programs. In 5th grade, we learned songs from the American Civil War era in conjunction with our social studies class.
We barely touched on music. Once a week. Pretty bland stuff. No “Jimmy crack corn” or “The Indian war drum song”.
When you got in junior high you could be in junior band or take choir. If music was your thing.
Our music teacher was hooked on This Land is Your Land.
In middle school we got to sing Blowin in The Wind.
We were taught to play tonettes.
Mid-1960s, so the teachers were in the age demographic that glommed onto the folk music revival of the era. Personally, I think I would have responded more enthusiastically to more of the Classics that Carl Stalling had introduced me to on Saturday mornings.
And of course, there were all those plastic flutophones.
My elementary music classes were more or less all sing-alongs. It wasn’t until 5th grade when we were given the option to rent instruments (I did alto sax) and join band (brand new that year) that I learned anything about reading music or any actually music rudiments. Somehow I still managed to grow up to be a musician.
ETA: there was some recorder. Not much and not good.
We had good music in grade school, and I liked it better than junior high chorus class. I recall one music book with a lot of ethnic folk music, historical tunes, and religious songs too. Rock of Ages was a Jewish song, not a Christian one.
I was fortunate to attend school on Long Island and there were wonderful music programs from first grade through high school. It helped play a role in turning me into a professional musician. One thing I notice when I talk to old friends is that we are all fans of many genres of music because we were exposed at such a young age. I wish this country took music education more seriously, but it’s really all about sports these days.
Two different songs! Rock of Ages (Maoz Tzur) is maybe the only good Hannukah song.
We had music once a week in elementary school. Lots of singing, lots of rhythm instruments, and plenty of filmstrips about composers. The most important thing we learned in music was “Fifty Nifty United States”, which listed the states in alphabetical order, and which I still know by heart.
Yes. It didn’t occur to me that instruments would be taught in elementary school. This thread is about the sing-along music in elementary school. Apologies for being confusing about the subject.
In my Elementary school music class in the early-mid 70s, the music teacher was clearly a former hippie, because all the sing-alongs we did were folky-hippie songs like ‘Windy’ and ‘One Tin Soldier’.
The latter, OTS, was a favorite with us, since it was full of action and violence. And I wasn’t too young to appreciate the inherent irony in the moral of the song [spoiler alert]-- all that murderin’ just to find out that the supposed hidden treasure was just the message ‘Peace on Earth’.
Though, as an adult reading the OTS lyrics now (which can be seen by clicking the above link), it strikes me as kind of an odd reversal from what you would have thought was a stereotypical 60s hippie / commie viewpoint: the valley peasants rise up against the mountain kingdom, but it’s the murdery peasants who are the bad guys, and the Bourgeoisie of the mountain kingdom who are the good guys.
In my elementary school (66-72) we had music once a week. The teacher would wheel in the B&W TV and we’d take out our music books. Most of the songs were folk songs of the 1800s. She’ll Be Comin’ Around the Mountain, Clementine, etc. She’d tune in the TV to PBS and we’d watch Music is Everywhere. There was a woman at a piano and she would lead us in whatever songs she chose for the day. High-tech stuff.
In the 4th grade everyone at our school got one of those cheap recorders. To her credit, the teacher was enthusiastic and tried her hardest, but many of the students just didn’t care and so overall the whole class just sounded horrid.
The singing we did sounded a bit better.
I started taking piano lessons in 1st grade, so by the time I got my recorder in the 4th grade I already knew how to read music and I was already starting to teach myself how to play the guitar. I hated our elementary music classes. I found the recorder to be extremely limited with what you could do with it and I thought it sounded horrible. I also hated singing and I have never had a good voice.
When I got a bit older the school offered band and chorus. Both were optional. Again, I hated to sing, so I had no interest in chorus, but I did play in band. If I had a choice I would have played the drums, but my mother refused, and so I went with the trombone instead. I was always first chair trombone and I always knew my parts very quickly. Typical of a school band, you had a lot of kids who never learned their parts and the teacher spent most of the classes just trying to get everyone up to speed. I was bored since I already knew my parts, and since trombones were in the back, I would trade instruments with the tuba player next to me. The teacher either never noticed or he never cared since we both knew our parts, but either way he never said anything. I switched instruments with one of the trumpet players a couple of times too. I could play the tuba, but I never got good enough with the trumpet to play their parts.
Music actually got me into engineering. I had tinkered around a bit with electronics stuff as a younger kid, but I started getting serious with electronics when I started building small amplifiers and guitar effects boxes. I started out just cloning existing designs (because I was poor and couldn’t afford to buy professional equipment, so I made cheap clones) then got more sophisticated as my skills grew.
I almost went into music, but decided almost at the last minute to go into engineering instead.
Not me. I hated sing-along time.
I hated our generic 4th grade music class. I hated the recorder. I hated singing more.
I liked band. I liked piano lessons. I liked teaching myself how to play other instruments. I play the guitar (acoustic and electric), bass, keyboards, and I can keep a beat on a drum set but I definitely do not call myself a drummer.
I grew up in a small town with one elementary school, operated by the town. I went from roughly 1958 to 1964. The town was all white. There was one Jewish family. The teachers were a bunch of old (to us) biddies. We would sing in class at various times, but all the grades got together on Friday afternoon for assembly, where we sang the same songs week after week. The third grade teacher (whom I loathed at the time) played piano. She loved the songs of Stephen Foster, who was a native Pennsylvanian, and we were made to sing much of his repertoire, including “Camptown Races,” “Swanee River,” “Old Black Joe,” “My Old Kentucky Home.” “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair” and the like. The music books had the words to some of these songs in dialect. The one I distinctly remember was “Massa’s In De Cold Cold Ground.” The chorus was as follows:
Down in de cornfield
Hear dat mournful sound
All de darkeys am a-weeping
Massa’s in de cold, cold ground
Can you imagine making elementary school kids sing songs like that? This was in the midst of the civil rights movement. I shudder as I think back on the utter cluelessness. About a year after I went on to Junior High, all the small-town elementary schools were taken over by the school district and this kind of thing was gone. Not surprisingly, all the old biddies took retirement.
I got that in junior high and it still comes in handy for trivia games.
I was in elementary school from 1954-1957 in California and from 1957-1962 in Massachusetts. In both places music was part of the standard curriculum. That’s where I learned basic music theory-- names of the lines and spaces, key/time signatures, different clefs. I told this to a friend of mine who is about 20 years younger and she said she didn’t believe me. (WTF? I was lying??) By the time she was in school all music education was elective.
I still have my tonette from 1958.
This was at the elementary school on base at Otis AFB, Cape Cod. All of the fourth and fifth graders learned to play all four songs of the military services (Anchors Aweigh, Caissons Go Rolling Along, From the Halls of Montezuma, Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder) and we gave several recitals with something like 100 kids playing this in unison. Wheee!
Private music lessons were also available, but basic music was still taught to everyone.
I went to a Catholic elementary school from Sept 1960 to June 1968. Our music education consisted of going over to the church where the choir leader/organist would teach us the hymns of the season. No harmonies, just words and melody.
My only clear memory of elementary school music class is a traumatic incident in 7th grade that haunts me to this day.
It was the first day of music class, and the teacher was testing each student to determine their vocal range. Each student would come up to the front of the class and stand next to the piano. The teacher would play a note and then the student would sing it. This went well for most of the students, even though some of the boys’ voices were changing. When it was my turn, I went up there, the teacher played a note, and I sang it. The teacher frowned and said, “no, sing this note”. She played it again and I again attempted to reproduce the note. The teacher again said I was singing the wrong note. She tried a different note. This went on for a few minutes, with the teacher getting more and more frustrated with me. She seemed to think I was deliberately singing the wrong note. I was getting more and more embarrassed. No one else in the class seemed to have a similar inability to reproduce a note.
At this point, a messenger came into the class with a note for the teacher, and she said she needed to leave the room for a couple of minutes. She left, with me still standing at the front of the room. As the door closed, the whole class burst out in laughter, jeering at me. My “friend” yelled, “Mark, what the hell are you doing? You’re not singing anything close to the right note!” After what seemed like a couple of hours of standing there while the whole class laughed and mocked me, the teacher returned, finished testing me as best she could, and I slunk back to my seat.
For the rest of that semester, when the class sang together, I just mouthed the words and pretended that I was singing. For the rest of my life to the present day, I have never again sung out loud when I thought anyone else could hear me.
I do not have fond feelings about elementary school music classes.