Much has been written on the subject of dyslexia, teaching dyslexics, and teaching strategies for dyslexia. The problem here seems to be simple. Is dyslexia a mental disorder, a disability, a learning disability, or is it that people with this condition simply process information differently than what we call “normal”? Or put another way: is the problem of the individual or is it rather the educational system that requires children to process information in a certain way?
First of all, I am a professional trumpet player and have been a trumpet teacher for over forty years. In this time, I have had many students with various learning challenges ranging from Down syndrome to dyslexia. In this article I present a strategy that has proven to be very helpful with students who display dyslexic tendencies. I would like to add that although my perspective is that of a trumpet teacher, this strategy can be applied to any musical instrument (and with a little imagination) to other subjects as well. This teaching method has also been used to good effect with both children and adults.
Over the years, I observed that some people experienced the same problem, that is, they would lose all orientation to what they were playing and clearly had no idea what note they were trying to play. I also observed that, for all these people, the problem arose with the same notes. To make this as clear as possible, I will divide the range of the trumpet in the low register from F # low below the staff to Bb on the staff, the midrange from C on the staff to G at the top of the staff and the high range of Ab and above. Now all these people would lose their orientation between E at the top of the staff and around Bb above the staff. It would go something like this: they were supposed to play, for example, a high A. They would lose, so I would say “A”, they did not respond, so I would say a stronger “A”, they did not. answer for me to yell “A” and so on. We were clearly getting nowhere. They would stop, start in the low register, and go up until they find A, and then we could go further. However, a few minutes later, they would lose orientation again and the whole process would be repeated. They couldn’t seem to remember the feeling of where these notes were.
My first idea was to assign different colors to different notes, but this didn’t work as well as I thought and it was also too limited in scope. Then I remembered an ancient Druid concept known as the Staircase of Lights, or more accurately, “the colored steps of rainbow light.” The ancient Druids were fascinated with the sequence of colors found in the rainbow and used this sequence in many of their mystical teachings and rites. The colors are: black, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. As these colors increase in vibration, I applied them to the harmonic series on the trumpet like this: C bass (below the staff) = purple, G (on the staff) = blue, C (on the staff) = green , E (top of the staff) = yellow, G (above the staff) = orange and Bb high and top = red.
If you didn’t know, any tube with a mouthpiece on one end and a bell on the other will produce the same sequence of notes. We call this the harmonic series. The notes C (low) G, C (middle) E, G (high) Bb and C (high) can be produced without using valves. When you push down a valve, you lengthen the tube for a lower starting note, but the sequence of overtone intervals is the same. Bottom line: the higher you climb, the closer the tones are to each other.
I would start by having the student close their eyes, take a deep breath, and imagine it was a blue wave. Then we would play a half sun together. I would stop playing and while they played, the GI guided them through the fantasy of becoming the blue wave, the sound is water. Then we would go down to low C and become the purple depth of the sea. The wave would reach an island where there was a rich green forest and then it would turn into the green leaves (the C in the pentagram). We would go up to E and a ray of sunshine. High G was a bright orange pumpkin in a field.
We did this at the beginning of the lesson and then I would leave it there and move on to the other parts of the lesson. However, after about a month, when they lost where they were, we would stop and I would move them up from the low range using the image (colors) to the point where they were lost. We would do this three times. The next time they got lost, I asked them to imagine the image (color) where they were lost and play that note in the image (color), and from there go up or down a bit to find the note where they lost orientation.