Practicing Tempo with Little Bird
The Topic of Today is Tempo!
Tempo (In addition to being the title of this K-Pop song with 160 million views) is the speed or pace of a song. Most musical terminology is Italian, and “Tempo” literally just means “time” in Italian. Pretty straightforward right?
Here’s something else straightforward and really fun; a way to practice tempo with your kids!
We took the song “Little Bird” from The Elephant Collection and slowed down the tempo, and sped up the tempo, and then mashed it all together in a crazy ever-changing mix of tempi! (Tempi is the plural of tempo) The idea here is to dance to each version of this song, concentrating on trying to match the speed of your movements to the beat. An interesting fact that may sound counter-intuitive is that slower movements are much more difficult for young children. Moving slowly requires patience and self-control… and we all know that those things come in larger doses as our kids get older haha! So, don’t discount dancing to the slow version – try all of them because they’re all really good learning tools!
Here’s some quick background info about the song:
“Little Bird” is based on a style of Romanian folk song and dance, “Ardeleana.” Ardeleana dances are done by partners facing each-other in column formation and moving with small quick steps and turns. It’s a super lively, duple meter dance. This means you can divide each macro-beat into 2 equal parts, and count the music “1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2.” Our Music Class recording features the accordion, tambourine, and clarinet. When you’re dancing to the different versions of the song, see if you can pick out the different instruments!