Arts Directory

About

Artist Bio

Thad Beach is an entertainer, musician, teaching artist and songwriter. He enjoys giving energetic performances, sharing his humorous songs and historical ballads, demonstrating how to play a variety of instruments, and conducting music and songwriting workshops.

Thad is inspired by musical styles ranging from traditional, folk, mountain ballads, old-time and country blues to Tin Pan Alley. He plays ukulele, harmonica, guitar, washboard, bucket bass, jaw harp, limberjack and homemade folk instruments.

Thad performs for fairs and festivals, schools, library summer reading programs, museums, historical societies, community events and celebrations. His programming appeals to a wide range of audiences.

Thad’s career and involvement as a teaching artist has focused on music and songwriting. He presents over 300 curriculum-related programs every year to individual classrooms for preschool through high school. He has also conducted over 400 week-long songwriting residencies throughout his career as a full time performer and Arts in Education professional.

Artist Statement

My Residency Program involves students creating a song about the history, heritage and culture of their community.

This can be explained by 3 general components.

Language arts and music skills related to creating songs.

Learning about their community history, heritage and environment.

Being a team member involved in a collaborative creative process.

All 3 components have specific skills and tasks necessary to complete our project.

Language arts skills addressed include the use of rhyme and alliteration, using descriptive language with adjectives and verbs, brainstorming, creating outlines, writing and revising.

Musical skills addressed include the structure of songs, verses, choruses, rhyme patterns, creating musical moods and melodies for the lyrics, playing homemade instruments, singing, performing and documenting our musical creation.

Exploring community history and heritage involves discussions related to background knowledge of the students, researching print, online information and community resources to learn more about potential song topics. We also develop a process to reach a consensus on the song topic we will pursue.

The Creative Process: Being a team member in a collaborative creative process combines individual skill development and working together as a group. Students collaborate, listen to others’ ideas, make group decisions, brainstorm, outline and plan the path ahead of us. Students experience parts of the process that come together easily and when we reach challenging points we learn to problem solve, refocus, keep a positive attitude and work together to reach our goals.

My Residency Approach is as follows. I establish a welcome and friendly environment to explore the creative process, by setting expectations concerning appropriate behavior, using humor and musical interludes to build rapport and refocusing our attention when necessary. I discuss the importance of respecting individual ideas and understanding that each idea we get is a valuable part of our creative process.

I implement strategies to effectively engage students with diverse learning strengths and challenges, aspiring to bring out the best in each student. These include individual writing and creative activities, visualizing, verbalizing, refocusing transitions, movement and creative dramatizations, sketching out ideas, and working in small groups on different tasks.

I have experience working in special education settings and this awareness and sensitivity to different needs allows me to be flexible, modify and adapt tasks as I strive to bring out the best in everyone.

I look forward to working with students and teachers to help them explore music, their community and the creative process.