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):