I did a little creative exercise and listened to a couple Joanna Newsom tracks from her latest album (the amazing Have One on Me) while drawing some shapes that flowed along with the music. They seem very appropriately Joanna Newsom-y to me, don't you think? But they also reminded me that I once did the same kind of thing in a music class in fourth grade! I hadn't thought about it in years. We used to have a fun listening skills exercise that the teacher would play something on the piano and we would draw shapes that sounded like what we were hearing. I think she even played a recording of Beethoven 5 once, and I had big orange circles for tympani, and little pencil lines for the violins. I think this would be a good exercise even for adults in a music appreciation class or an intro music course. Now that I 'get' what it does, it still amuses me to play around. It gets you thinking about the form of a piece, what ideas repeat, the shape of the sound, orchestration, so many things...and you don't even have to know much about music- you just have to like to color.
(Screen shot from Disney's 'Fantasia 2000', which, with its older 'Fantasia' counterpart, basically lets adults do the same exercise, but then get paid for it, and we watch it as entertainment.)
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