Hampshire Schools perform at theRoyal Albert Hall

Contributor: Hampshire Music Service (HMS)

Event: BBC Ten Pieces Proms

Year: Primary sch ages

Piece: Zadok the Priest, Handel

Media: Photo Saturday 18 July from within the Royal Albert Hall, London.
Link to BBC iPlayer of the Sunday performance (FFWD to 20:10)

Over 400 Hampshire school children enjoyed a once in a lifetime opportunity to sing on the national stage at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday (18 July).

Singing a specially arranged version of Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’, 400 Hampshire primary school pupils schools joined hundreds of other children from all over the UK to perform in BBC Music’s ‘Ten Pieces’ concert

As one of the BBC’s 240 Ten Pieces Champions, Hampshire County Council’s Music Service has been working with 13 junior and primary schools on this piece of work since the autumn, culminating in Saturday’s performance on the national stage.

BBC Ten Pieces is a new, national initiative involving 21,000 schools, led by BBC Learning and BBC performing groups. The aim is to introduce a generation of children to a range of classical music, inspiring them to use the music as a stimulus for their own creativity.

Children were able to respond to a choice of one of ten pieces of classical music and develop their own interpretation of the selected piece through music composition, dance, digital art and other art forms, as well as taking part in performances of the pieces.

The piece that the BBC Singers chose and invited specially selected champions, such as Hampshire Music Service, to participate in was written by George Frideric Handel for the coronation of George II in 1727, and is performed at every coronation since then.

BBC Ten Pieces has also had the involvement of the five BBC Orchestras and the BBC Singers as well as celebrities such as Barney Harwood from Blue Peter and childrens’ presenters Dick and Dom.

Have a look at some of the Twitter activity on HCC's Storify...

List of the schools from the Hampshire County Council area that participated:

Sunday:

• ·All Saints Junior School, Fleet

Saturday:

• ·Alverstoke CE Junior School
• ·Bartley CE Junior School
• ·Berrywood Primary School (Hedge End)
• ·Hale Primary School (Fordingbridge)
• ·Kings Copse Primary School (Hedge End)
• ·Knightwood Primary School (Knightwood,Valley Park, Chandler’s Ford area)
• ·Orchard Junior School (Dibden Purlieu)
• ·Otterbourne Primary School
• ·Romsey Abbey Primary School
• ·Scantabout Primary School (Chandler’s Ford)
• ·St Mary Bourne Primary School (Andover)
• ·St Mary's CE Junior School (Old Basing)
• ·The Crescent Primary School (Eastleigh)

It would be lovely to hear more from music professionals, get in contact or visit our homepage to download the blog form (right hand column)!

Just a bit of fun before the holidays...

It seems Rowan Atkinson had his own engagement with one of the BBC Ten Pieces!

Have a lovely summer before the project hits secondary schools...!

It would be lovely to hear more from music professionals, get in contact or visit our homepage to download the blog form (right hand column)!

HMS staff become trolls...



Contributor: Hampshire Music Service (HMS)
Event: Primary Proms 2015

Year: Primary sch ages

Piece: In the Hall of the Mountain King, Grieg

Media: Photo Primary Music Consultants, Nicky Watling and Liz Davies  

Primary Proms

 The Primary Proms is an annual event currently held at The Anvil, Basingstoke every June. It is a free event for Hampshire primary schools and as you can imagine, very much oversubscribed each year, so best to get in quick for the 2000 tickets! The 2015 Schedule included Hampshire youth ensembles including a wind band and a percussion group, as well as a primary school orchestra, BBC Ten Pieces singalong and other pre-learned audience participation songs!

Our two Primary Music Consultants hosted the event...they certainly get in character with props! This year there was a performance from the '10 Pieces Plus' resource produced in response to the project by Northampton Music and Performing Arts Trust. HMS have a copy for all Hampshire schools.

It would be lovely to hear more from music professionals, get in contact or visit our homepage to download the blog form (right hand column)!

Playing with the 'Minimalist' style...



The class's 'Short Ride' notations

Contributor: Nicky Watling,
Primary Music Consultant and Kate Warland

School: A school in Hampshire

Year:5

Piece: Short Ride in a Fast Machine, John Adams

Media: video of pupils performing their 'minimalist' composition

CLICK HERE to watch!

This piece was used because the current classroom topic was 'Fairgrounds'.



Introducing a 'Minimalist' style:

• We listened to the music, responded to the steady beat and identified the instruments being played.
• We found out about minimalist music and experimented with creating our own minimalist style music using Garage Band on iPads and acoustically as a class.
• We then composed and rehearsed our own piece of minimalist “short ride” music – we notated this on big paper and rehearsed it before recording our performance.  

Outcomes:

• We learnt about minimalist music and how to layer rhythmic patterns
• We found out how to change from one section in the music to the next accurately and smoothly.
• We learnt how to rehearse and improve our performance until it was “the best it could be”.

Challenges:

• Concentrating all the time and ensuring that all the different parts were performed at the same speed

    

It would be lovely to hear more from music professionals, get in contact or visit our homepage to download the blog form (right hand column)!

Bringing together different abilities...



Contributor: Caro Leitzell
School: Sparsholt Primary school

Year: 5 - 6

Piece: In the Hall of the Mountain King, Grieg
 

Media: Photo of the band playing 



Quotes from pupils:

"This is our favourite piece we have played in Oak Band – it’s fantastic!"

"We are really excited to perform this in our Spring Concert!"

 

 

Background

We have a class band which meets weekly and performs in our Christmas concert, Spring concert and Summer Production each year. We usually take a piece of music related to the theme in class (eg. we played the Good, the Bad and the Ugly when they studied Arizona earlier this year).

 

Why this piece?

We decided to try The Hall of the Mountain King from the BBC Ten Pieces as it inspired the most  lively feedback when the pupils listened to several of those on offer! They recognised it from adverts on TV (currently the Alton Towers ad).

 

Bringing different abilities together!

We have adapted the parts given by the BBC site to suit our players’ levels (those provided were a really good starting point). The result was that we had 14 pupils playing without a backing track and really producing a great sound!  They were all so excited and it was a very all-encompassing experience (we have some pupils at grade 4 standard and others who know 5 notes). The outcome was to perform in our Spring concert just before Easter and we have sent it to the BBC (!)– the band really had the sense of working hard to achieve a result and were rightly proud of their achievements.

It would be lovely to hear more from music professionals, get in contact or visit our homepage to download the blog form (right hand column)!

Capturing the imagination...


Contributor: Hannah King

School: Wallisdean Junior school

Age: 7-11yrs old

Piece: Mars from ‘The Planets’, Short Ride on a Fast Machine, Symphony No.5 and Connect It.

 

 

"I have been working with every class in Music and have found the resources a fantastic inspiration to move our children on in their musical learning."

 

Providing Inspiration:

 

We have been linking our Ten Pieces work in Music into the topic work that is being done in school.  All our pupils have watched the whole DVD and given their initial responses to the music through a listening framework including imagery, instruments and particular sounds.  One class listened to a piece from the Ten Pieces every day and then voted for their favourite which was A Night on the Bare Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky.  As the Music Teacher it has given me the inspiration to provide a challenge for our children through work on minimalism, motifs and ostinatos and developing more complex harmonies. 

Lower school:

We chose Anna Meredith’s Connect It to look at rhythm and how movement can be added to the creative process.  Lower School really enjoyed this composition process because it was so active and fun to do.  They also made huge progress in coming together as an ensemble both in groups and as a class through our work on Beethoven’s Symphony No.5.  They loved the catchy motif within the piece and enjoyed performing sections of the piece together. The lesson plans were a really helpful resource for this and we used the ideas as a starting point for a performance leading on to our own compositions.

Upper school:

Upper school have had the biggest challenge with the introduction of Minimalism.  Short Ride in a Fast Machine helped to make this accessible and interesting through the great extra episodes that are on the BBC website.  They worked incredibly hard looking at how the short rhythmic and melodic phrases repeat and slowly develop.  Each group came up with their own phrase and were able to use minimalist principles in their composition.

Mars from ‘The Planets’ fitted in beautifully with our Upper School topic on Space. Pupils produced amazing art work for their corridor.  They were also inspired by Holst’s experimentation with instruments and his use of contrasting dynamics and specific imagery to create their own compositions.  They were given the challenge of outlining a structure to their composition to include dissonant and consonant harmonies, playing the ostinato in a variety of ways and playing around with pitch.  They came together in their groups with both melody and rhythm and created very impressive results.

 

It would be lovely to hear more from music professionals, get in contact or visit our homepage to download the blog form (right hand column)!

 

 

Norwegian storytellers...



source: http://www.cmuse.org/7-fun-facts-about-edward-grieg/

Contributor: Nicky Watling,
Primary Music Consultant

School: Kings Copse Primary school

Year: 3

Piece: In the Hall of the Mountain King, Grieg

 

Media: video of pupils performing their claves composition

CLICK HERE to watch!

The pupils saw the Ten Pieces film at one of the county cinema viewings and there was a real mix of favourites across the pieces. We decided to work on In the Hall of the Mountain King  because it’s an exciting piece of music that tells a story and the children really engaged with it.

Theme of creativity to engage the children:

·         We listened to the music and thought about the Peer Gynt story (five-part play written by Norwegian dramatist - Henrik Ibsen). 

·         We discussed how Grieg created the impression that Peer was being chased by the trolls (the music gets faster and louder) we then started to think about how we could compose something similar. 

·         We decided that the music has a clear and repeated rhythmic pattern – we worked this out using the words “apple” and “pear” and wrote them down on a 4 x 4 grid.  We identified, worked out then notated both of the main patterns and then played along with the music keeping in time and getting faster and louder. 

·         We then split into small groups, composed our own apple/ pear patterns and notated them on a 4 x 4 grid.  Finally we rehearsed playing our patterns getting faster and louder.

 We learnt to compose 4 beat rhythm patterns and notate them using grid notation.  We thought carefully about how musical devises can be used to convey a musical message and…we had loads of fun! Our biggest challenge was keeping together when we were performing in small groups.

It would be lovely to hear more from music professionals, get in contact or visit our homepage to download the blog form (right hand column)!