At higher grades you must be able to discuss with the examiner musical features such as texture, form, style, and period of a piece of music. My own web pages to help with these parts of the test at Grade 5+ and at GCSE are available here!
To date we have run four workshops
Workshop 1: Incidental music and film scores
Workshop 2: Jungle book (Prep test to Grade 2)
Workshop 3: Goldfinger (Grade 3 and above)
Workshop 4: A Dance through time
Workshop 1: Incidental music and film scores
Plan of the day
Three sessions roughly equal in length with a break for lunch:
Session 1: From beat to rhythm (allow one hour)
Session 2: Incidental music and film scores (allow one hour)
Session 3: Rehearsal and concert (allow 40 minutes)
Allow three and a half hours for the whole workshop.
Session 1: From beat to rhythm (allow one hour)
Materials
Charles Beale: Jazz Piano from Scratch Nina Simone: Sinner Man
James Froseth: Do it Improvise in all the modes Evelyn Glennie: Triplets
As they arrive: Any jazz track or Evelyn Glennie’s Triplets
a) Listen to Beale[1] Track 1. Clap and tap to the beat. Some will naturally feel the crotchet beat, but others may feel minims or even quavers. Give students the feedback that this is perfectly fine and that everyone is right. Practise tapping and clapping a different beat, feeling crotchets, minims and quavers. Practise changing from one beat to another every 2 or 4 bars. Add singing at this stage to break down resistance to singing. Repeat as necessary while counting (one an two an three an four an) to practise co-ordinating clapping and vocalizing. Extend with questioning - what was the time signature? Can you feel the phrases? How many bars in each phrase?
b) Listen to Beale track 2. Find a repeated rhythm. Try to tap, clap or vocalise the repeated rhythm. Try to find another rhythm and copy that one too. Identify two repeated rhythms and split the group to ‘play’ each one together. Help students identify different instruments (double bass, piano and drum set) and identify the genre (blues) to challenge their listening skills.
c) Establish a beat in the group (a metronome is difficult to hear in a big group). While the leader maintains this beat one half of the group starts to tap or clap beats 1 and 3 and the other half beats 2 and 4. Repeat with a backing track (eg Beale Track 1 or Froseth[2] Track 6). Expect to get faster! Elicit this judgment from the group – work hard to get it corrected - rather than just telling them it is happening. Try to achieve a shared feel for the beat!
d) Do the same, adding pitched instruments and voices (using notes from D minor scale or Dorian mode). Use notation!
e) Do the Activity in Beale p. 11, working up to using track 13. Clap on successive crotchet beats changing after each 4-bar phrase. If this is easily achievable clap on successive quaver beats, changing after each phrase. Not an easy exercise, and make sure the track is slow enough to work with quaver beats. Since the idea is to count the beats you don’t clap, a fun warm up might be a performance of the nursery song “Heads and shoulders knees and toes”.
f) Create a repeated rhythm, this time using beats and off beats from anywhere in the bar. Leaders can demonstrate a few and should stress that silence has an important part to play in any rhythm (for example a strong chord on the last quaver beat of every bar is very effective). This can be turned into an action game - provided the actions create sounds! - with the group copying the moves/ rhythm of the leader. If successful this can be done in pairs, taking turns to lead. Glennie’s Triplets[3] track works well with this.
g) Do the same, adding pitched instruments and voices (using notes from D minor scale or Dorian mode). Capture any of the more complex rhythmic and melodic patterns in notation!
Session 2: Incidental music and film scores (allow one hour)
Materials
Grieg: Hall of the Mountain King or Holst: Mars the Bringer of War
Atmospheric or dramatic photographs or film posters
a) Present the importance of rhythm to all music not just jazz
b) Introduce Peer Gynt Suite, Hall of the Mountain King as incidental music
c) What and How? Listen to the track and ask what it makes them feel. Discuss how that is achieved. Draw out comments about rhythm, instrumentation, texture, structure and repetition, and reinforce terms such as accelerando, crescendo, modulation. Discuss what elements they may use themselves if creating music for a similarly scary play or a film. Capture the musical terminology on a flip chart or similar.
d) Present one of the pictures/ posters and have the group imagine it is a poster for a film and they are commissioned to write the film score. What instrumentation and texture might they use? What structure would work?
e) Start work on improvising a film score. Most participants will be really engaged by this stage and generating a lot of ideas (and volume!). Quieter members of the group will need nurturing. Some of them may like to record - in words, in notation or as a graphic score - what is being created. Try to foster a sense of key by discussing the different character of different keys (on the first instance of this workshop we ended up in D minor for everything!). Try to get four (or more) hands at piano and keyboard every time. Encourage students to use their imaginations in the types of sounds they achieve from their instruments – for example making a violin ‘scream’ and using the guitar as a percussion instrument....
Session 3: Rehearsal and concert (allow 40 minutes)
Materials
Certificates, feedback sheets and worksheets
a) Revise and rehearse the pieces
b) Introduce, perform and record the pieces to parents
c) Give out certificates, feedback sheets and fun worksheets to reinforce the learning on the day
20 mins Listening
Monkey song
Discuss scat and jazz bands, syncopation
Elephant song
Discuss instrumentation, style, march music, marching band instruments eg. fife and bugle
15 mins Elephant rhythms
Matching steps to note time values
Show musical signs.
40 mins Learning and playing Elephant march
Teach the parts
15 mins Comfort break
10 mins Listening
Python song
Discuss instrumentation, style, characterisation
Tones and semitones
Matching actions to the semitones (Stretching and crouching to rise and fall of pitches?)
40 mins Learning and playing Python song
Teach the parts
10 mins If time, scat!
Workshop 3 : Goldfinger
Session plan
5 mins Welcome and ground rules
15 mins Piano "pilates"
25 mins Free listening
Discuss instrumentation, mood, period and style…
Present leitmotifs (Hand out postcards showing different instruments)
Play leitmotifs (tambourine, xylophone, own instruments)
5 mins Listening for structure
Music is not a jumble – it always has form.
Present pop song structure
20 mins Acting the structure
30 mins Acting the leitmotifs
Playing the motifs, working the structure, and playing the song
15 mins Comfort break
10 mins Present ‘variation’ in music
Rhythmic
Instrumental
Fragmentation and extension
Texture and accompaniment
Pitches
Combination
45 mins Playing variations
Prepare Improvisations
15 mins Performances and Wrap up
[1] Jazz Piano from Scratch accompanying CD
[2] Do It Improvise II in all the modes CD
[3] Reflected in Brass, Evelyn Glennie and the Black Dyke Band