Summer '21 - Roebke / Gonzales

Big Idea: Learning about music by designing an instrument

Inquiry Question: What can building an instrument teach us about how music works?

The biggest part of our class time was spent learning about and constructing a Brazilian instrument called the Berimbau. The Berimbau is an ancient instrument based on the "bow" part of the bow and arrow. We divided the study into three parts.

1. Research

2. Construction

3. Reflection

Before we gathered materials to build the Berimbau, we needed to indentify all of the parts of the instrument. We watched a detailed YouTube video of a Brazilian man making an instrument. First, the students were introduced to the Portuguese language. We asked why do people in Brazil speak Portuguese instead of Spanish? That led us on a research path that led from Portugal to Angola and finally to Brazil. We talked about colonialism, slavery, and how ideas travel from one place to another. We saw in another video about how people in Angola play a very similar instrument and do movements similar to Capoeira but play and move differently. Once we identified all of the parts that we needed, we concluded that not all of the traditional parts necessary to make a Berimbau were not practical to obtain in Chicago. We then thought of other solutions. We ended up deciding that a long PVC tube and plastic paint bucket would be the main substitutes for native Brazilian plant-based materials.

I then distributed Berimbau kits to the student's homes and spent the next few class times constructing the Berimbau. This was a lot more difficult than it looked on our research videos! It was a challenge for students to bend the PVC tube and stretch the wire to make the main resonating part of the instrument. 

Our main reflection was that even simple instruments are difficult to make but also that simple instruments are still kind of hard to play. The students were able to use the Berimbau to explore many aspects of music making.

Through this activity, we were also able to learn about Capoeira (movement/dance/martial art).

I thought about the manifesto through teaching the class. Mrs. Eliza and I had some basic ideas about what to cover in the class before we started but we asked the students what they were curious about and what they wanted to learn in the class. Student agency was something we always came back to. The idea of using the Berimbau as a base to explore a lot of areas of inquiry was helpful in expanding their awareness of other cultures and it gave them skills to bring forward in the future.