Lessons in the Pereirão Favela

Posted byfavelabrassPosted inUncategorized

We are now giving lessons in the Pereirão favela, which is situated between the Santa Teresa and Laranjeiras districts, and has around 2,000 inhabitants. The lessons happen on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons at Tom’s house.

Yesterday we had a small group of 7 children between the ages of 7 and 13, who had a glockenspiel lesson and started to learn to read rhythms. In our Glockenspiel lessons, instead of of using traditional music notation, children learn with a system of coloured shapes which is easy for beginners to grasp, and which also lays the ground for learning to read traditional musical notation.

This system, called “Figurenotes”, was developed at the Resonaari school in Finland. As the following video shows, the good thing about using Figurenotes is that it takes much less time for children to get a musical result (the video was taken at the end of new student Vinicius’s first lesson):

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Bindu Mathur

Bindu Mathur was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada and worked for 10 years in London as a TV producer/director, making science and history documentaries for the BBC, Discovery and Channel 4. She also made videos for international NGOs and has filmed in Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and South America. Resident in Rio de Janeiro since 2007 she is the owner of the award-winning Casa Beleza B&B in Santa Teresa, where she lives with her husband and two children. She is a long-time collaborator with Favela Brass including making films for the project. Her children also studied at the project.