collaborate, communicate, create
Posts tagged Student Composition
Sharing school stories for 2011
Dec 13th
Global2 is highlighting your stories over the last weeks of this school year. Let us know if you have a story to share.
This post features the work of http://mlubps.global2.vic.edu.au/
Take a look into Bellaire Primary School and the wonderful world of Prep H.
A team of Middle students visited Prep H on Friday afternoon to record that week’s episode of ‘What’s News’. We had a great time and the Prep students did a fantastic job in front of the camera.
Thanks to Mr Holloway for letting us visit.
The film crew were Will R and Kyle S.
What do you remember about being in Prep?
Garageband The Perfect Tool For Student Composition
Nov 28th
Every year I write at least one blog post lauding the brilliance of Garageband as a creative tool for students. Again, I cannot speak highly enough of the power of GB especially when it is used as a tool for student composition. The underpinning philosophy that Kynan Robinson and I have is that we believe in empowering the student as the composer and creator. One of the many things I have learnt from working closely with Kynan is the concept of ‘demystifying the role of the composer’. It is expected in an art classroom that students will practice their creativity. The same should apply to the music classroom. Students should be given the freedom to compose and test out their musical ideas. Garageband is one of those tools that empowers the students to achieve this.
After two terms of learning to compose on Orff and untuned percussion instruments. Grade 5 and 6 students have been given the task to demonstrate the skills and creative ideas that they have developed to compose a piece of music using GB. Similar to last terms composition task, Kynan and I set some parameters. The students had to compose a piece that consisted of a Bass, main melody and accompanying harmonic melodies. The piece had to be in either binary (AB) or ternary (ABA) form. Â Existing Loops inside GB were to be used to create the bass and accompanying parts. However, they had to use a Midi Keyboard to play and record their main melodic ideas. This provided a great opportunity to discuss the concepts of Midi and dive deeper into some of the interesting features of GB. For instance creating your own midi sounds, manipulating their melodic ideas, using the editing tools and notating tools.
These Grade 5 students are putting the finishing touches to their compositions. Will post some examples soon. If your students are creating music we would love to hear some examples. Please reply with a URL and I will endeavour to share them on Globalteacher.
Student Composition
Jul 4th
After many end of term/semester interruptions we managed to get our student compositions back on track and record them on video. Kynan Robinson and myself embarked on a student composition unit at the beginning of term 2 with all grade 5 and 6 students. We began the unit by focusing on whole class ensemble performance and composition using the contrasting nature of consonance and dissonance as stimulus. As read and heard in previous posts Dissonance and Consonance, Moving Towards Dissonance, and Diabolical, the students composed some fabulous and interesting melodic ideas.
The second phase of the whole class modeling process was to emphasis the role that each part of the large ensemble played. At North Fitzroy Primary School we are extremely fortunate to be able to run an Ensemble Program during timetabled allotted time. It’s considered to be part of the Extend Your Talents program and students who show a aptitude for music are invited to join. There are 4 ensembles 3, 4, 5, and 6. A lot of the music they learn and perform is written in 4 part ostinatos. Best described as Bass, two harmony parts and main melody and at times we also have untuned percussion. Kynan and I believe that along with starting student composition from an early age, couple this with the ensemble program, our students are completely comfortable with the roles of bass, harmony and melody.
After the whole class modeling process had finished the students were split into small groups no larger the 5. Each group was required to compose a short ostinato based piece that had an A section and a B section (Originally it was planned that a C section would be included but lack of time prevented this from happening). They needed to be mindful of the role of the Bass: Support the harmony and melody rhythmically and ground the piece by maintaining the pulse. Harmony: support and emphasis the main melody but not dominate. Melody: To be the main tune that captured the characteristics of the composition. They could use the concepts of Consonance and Dissonance to contrast the A and B sections but weren’t restricted to this. Untunded percussion could also be included.
I am extremely happy with what has been created considering that each piece was composed over a two one hour session. Clearly had there been more time each piece would have benefited from some finessing. For example; Ending, dynamics and extended rehearsal time for some groups.
Each performance was recorded on three flip cameras and the footage was edited in Final Cut Express. This presented a whole variety of issues which I will dedicate entirely to a separate post.
Group 1 Grade 5 Student Composition
All videos were uploaded to fliggo. This is a great and at the moment  free video hosting site. It allows you to set up your own site with logo. Once your video has been uploaded it generates code that you then can embed into your blog.
