Game 2 of Music is Easy is The Word Game, and of all the Games in the Method is the one I use the most. The most basic outcome of The Word Game is developing intuitive mastery of where the notes are on your instrument, and how to play them nicely - meaning that you can think 'E', and a beautiful E note will come out of your instrument without you having to think anything else - what key it is (Piano), how many keys you have to hold down (Wind / brass), which fret on which string (Guitar) etcetera. Every instrument group has a different way of approaching the creation of a note and the support of good tone, but every instrument in Western Music traditions use the same basic framework of notes. In order to play multiple notes at the same time, or one after another, and to play them nicely, we must be able to listen to the sounds we are playing - which means we cannot be thinking about how to play them (see 3. What's That Song? below).
At a first glance, The Word Game seems very simple. Make words from the letters A-G, then try to play them on your instrument. However, this basic Gameplay can be iterated and modified into a plethora of different sub-Games, with different outcomes and different cognitive processes emphasised in each. With more than 5 years of playing this Game, I am still finding new uses - and every Educator I share it with who uses it ends up creating their own ways to use it. It is powerful, flexible, and endlessly fun. Here are 4 ways to implement The Word Game to start you off - and make sure to snag your free download of Book 1 here!
Speed Words
Ideal as a warm-up or group activity, Speed Words is a quick-fire game that can be played with any number of Musicians and Learners.
One person calls words out, the rest try to play them as fast as they can. That's it! Keep them short, keep them simple, and get through as many as you can in as quick a time as possible. BAG, BED, CAB, GAB, DAB, DAD, FED, FGA. See me playing this with my student Jason while walking backwards down a Canal.
Variations :
Speed Word Face-off - a 1 vs 1 competition between two players, where the first to play the word gets a point. This can be a bit tricky to judge, as an Educator will have to be able to quickly identify who played it right first. It can also edge into competitiveness - so make sure to frame the game as a collaborative, rather than a competitive process. See Supplement C - Education and Delivery for techniques to pre-empt any negative competitiveness - in particular The Rules, Rule 1 : We are all in this together.
Word Patterns in a Scale
Using an initial Word as a template, the objective of this Game is to identify the interval pattern of a Word, and shift it up a major scale by one note. This effectively replicates exercise books such as Hanon, where patterns are iterated up a major scale.
This can range from simple patterns of adjacent keys - CDE, DEF, EFG - patterns of intervals - CE, DF, EG - or more complicated patterns such as CEFGAGFE, DFGABAGF, EGABCBAG - this pattern is lifted directly from Hanon. Using this framework, we can build the complexity of the exercise to tertiary education levels without needing any further theoretical background. For example, in my second year of Jazz College, I had to play 7th arpeggios ascending, descending, and reversed, through all major keys. I was only introduced to this concept after over 15 years of playing the saxophone, but with The Word Game it is possible to access this within hours of starting the instrument - in the case of Piano, for example - or as soon as all the notes of the C major scale can be played on other instruments.
What's That Song?
The most requested Game by my students, What's That Song? involves the Teacher writing down a Word that is a well-known melody for a tune and challenging the student to figure out what song it is. For example, Happy Birthday starts with GGAGCB, GGAGDC (NB: this game is best played with Vertical Words - Book 2, rather than the horizontal alignment to which I am restricted in this blog post).
This is the Game that led me to the conclusion that we are unable to think and listen at the same time. Without exception, as long as a learner is having to think about how to play the notes they will not recognise the song no matter how familiar it is. This was a consistent pattern in my group music lesson delivery in the first year of having Book 1, in a room full of young people - when one thought they were able to play it, I would insist that nobody but the player was allowed to say what the song was.
They would play Happy Birthday from the Words GGAGCB, GGAGDC, and would have no idea what song it was, while every other student in the room was in fits trying not to give it away, and incredulous that the player could not tell what song it was - "No, come on, of course you know! How could you not know that song!". As soon as a player is able to play the Word without having to think about finding the notes, or as soon as they hear someone else play it, they are immediately able to identify the song.
As an additional outcome, students are then able to make their own notes and start compiling a repertoire of simple melodies in Vertical Words of songs they want to learn - and are then able to use their eyes (sight) to read the Music they want to play accurately. This is called 'sight reading', even though it does not use the Stave. In this way, I have had students accurately play nursery rhymes on the Piano by the end of a first lesson - which is far more engaging than 'Beetle Crunch' - a song I saw in a Piano method book involving the note D, played 4 times, then repeated after a bar of rest.
Supporting Sight-Reading
Music that looks complicated on paper can be intimidating to learners, even if it is actually not hard to play on their instrument. When supporting a Learner to develop intuitive mastery of a piece, it can be very effective to take the Notes out of the stave and re-write them as Vertical Words (Book 2, Game 1).
By stripping away all elements of symbolic representation of codification, all requirements of which octave to play in, all rhythm reading, a learner can much more easily and directly connect with the sound, phrasing and emotion of a melodic line. They can vary the rhythm, change the octave they are playing in, slow it down, speed it up, all without being 'incorrect' according to the written music. Just taking away these systems can have a transformational effect on the relationship between the learner, the instrument, and the piece, allowing them to build intuitive mastery of playing the line, which will then feed back into their sight-reading when they move back into the Stave.
Emergent Codification As a further outcome, this approach can strongly reinforce the value of codified music. Learners will initially and inevitably want to write the entire piece out as Vertical Words, thinking that this will make the piece easier to play - and end up with pages and pages of handwritten letters, without any frame of reference. This principle can be seen clearly in this video I published on YouTube - and I even got a comment on Instagram that said 'To be honest, it would probably just be easier to write it out on the stave!' - which is exactly the point.
Codified conventions exist for a reason, they make it easier to play complex pieces - but this reality is often lost on Learners who cannot see past the complexity of the system. By engaging with the music through Vertical Words, Learners will reach a point where The Word Game is just not helpful and will self-discover the need for the stave.
When presented in this way, codification becomes a tool that a learner needs and wants, and Agency in learning is achieved - thereby creating the conditions necessary for the creation of solid neural architecture to accomplish this task.
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