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)!