BBC Ten Pieces at Hale Primary School

  

Troll from the 'Hall of the Mountain King' chapter

Back in October all the KS2 pupils at Hale Primary School
enjoyed a screening of the BBC Ten Pieces.

The room was darkened, the white board screen and DVD ready to go, the chairs set out like a cinema. The children were excited but didn’t know what to expect!

Barney Harwood introduced the film and we were off on a magical musical journey. We travelled through space and time, down in to a dark cave, up over a mountain, sped off in a really fast car, bobbed across the sea, went through a maze and into a forest and more. Phew!

The clear favourite was Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King. One person said “I can’t get the tune out of my head!” Others said “It was dramatic, exciting, tense and nerve racking. It started quietly and slowly and it got louder and louder and faster and faster - we were being chased but we just managed to escape at the end!

We listened to the piece a lot and enjoyed matching our body percussion to the music getting faster and louder all the way through. The ending was great fun as we had to remember when to stop and then start again with a really fast bit.

Next we worked out the rhythm of the first phrase and notated it using apples and pears. We later turned these into quavers and crotchets.


We ended up singing this pattern along to the music at the start:

Apple, apple, apple, pear, apple, pear, apple, pear.

Apple, apple, apple, apple, apple, apple, pear. all x 2

You should try it. It’s great fun!

 Through listening again we discovered that Grieg repeats the same rhythms, does something a bit different and then repeats the first rhythm pattern again and we worked out the structure of the first section of the piece.

We then composed our own rhythm patterns of apples and pears and worked with a partner to create longer patterns. We had a go at playing the patterns in our pairs starting quietly and slowly and getting louder and faster. This is not easy!

Eventually we worked in groups and created our own longer pieces of music based on “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Some of us wrote new rhythm patterns but some of us liked the original rhythms so much we used them.

Each group carefully chose a set of instruments for their piece. Some used four similar sounding instruments others combined four completely different sounding instruments.

We planned how we were going to achieve our crescendo (gradually getting louder) and most groups decided to do this by players joining in one by one (like Grieg). We discovered that is really tricky to get faster and faster and stay together. 

After some more rehearsal we were ready to perform our new pieces to an audience.

Author: Sian Buckley (HMS Project Lead)