Arrangements and Compositions
This piece accompanied our Folk Dance Club’s Tinikling performance of the Spring of 2025. We needed a simple triple to go along with the traditional tinikling step technique. My 4th graders came up with the ostinato and bordun “air, air, chomp” describing how the bamboo poles were like a crocodile going to eat you up. The whole performance then snowballed into a crocodile themed extravaganza. Students requested a “weird and silly but scary” melody to go along with our dance, indulging me in my desire for tri-tones in the elementary room! We performed this along with our dance at our yearly district Evening of the Arts.
This arrangement I used for teaching “Old Joe Clark” in the classroom to have live music accompany the dance. Unlike most of my teaching, I allow students to see the score after I teach them the first 8 bars by rote. They are then able to decode the notation by help of the note/number naming that is used for dulcimer tab and recorder note names underneath the score.
