Details of music courses available locally for Shropshire teachers can be found at this link.
Why not consider an away-from-it-all weekend of creativity in a gentle and relaxed atmosphere? Details here.
There is interesting discussion on the Eurovision Song Contest (which I managed to miss very easily as I was playing in a concert at the time) - It’s easy to mock this event … and why not!
Who takes the event seriously - what do your students think about it? Perhaps an interesting unit of work for your students would be to recreate the typical Euro-sound - all entries to my email address please!
If your students are interesting in games and composition, why not encourage them to combine the two and create music for Microsoft Xbox.
See the link to find out how you can record a soundtrack for forthcoming games.
Let us know if your students submit material …
Rock IT is a competition for school bands in the UK and Europe.
Registration is required via the rockit2007.org.uk website.
You can then submit a video of your band performing an original song.
If you get through the regional heats which will mostly be run via video conferencing you will be invited to the grand national final in Birmingham.
Please let us know of entries from your school by commenting on the blog.
I’ve recently been listening to music by Philip Glass, a composer who has often been described as ‘minimalist’ although he prefers to be thought of as a composer who works with patterns of sound. A recent (2006) recording by Naxos of the Symphony ‘Heroes’ is worthy of exploration in the classroom.
It uses as its inspiration the David Bowie album ‘Heroes’ - it does not try to give a simple orchestral rendering of the work but genuinely explores the themes in an orchestral texture. All the movements are based on tracks from the album, which was a collaboration between Brian Eno and Bowie.
Naxos is a superb label offering a massive range of material in a wide range of genre and at a low price.
For more information try the following links:
Send two musical scores with recordings and an entry form (available here) - entries should last no longer than 5 minutes - no restrictions on instrumentations - closing date May 11th 2007 - why not try some of your GCSE students course work?
See the above link for the full rules.
Notes for the first (yellow) level and the second (green) level of Music Explorer are available as pdf files as follows:
A few places left on the music and mathematics course on Tuesday 23rd January 2007 in Shrewsbury. The morning course will explore the use of patterns in music and mathematics through a wide range of practical activities, also looking at higher level thinking and will have direct application to the creative classroom. Contact the Shropshire Advisory Service for further details.
Post-course note: The course provided some good practical composition work which has been recorded onto CD and copied for course members. Materials used on the course are available on my Digitalbrain site at this link
The course will be repeated next year - watch this space for details.
I’ve placed some photos of Shrewsbury’s most recent flood this week in my area of Shropshire.Digitalbrain.com (keith.shropshire) - they might be useful as stimulus for musical composition. Feel free to use them.
link
Other photographs of mine which are available for school use are at my Flickr account
As a result of some work I’ve recently undertaken with a primary school, it reminds me that I placed some time ago on the website a series of ideas for getting started to support clarity of learning objective when teaching composition. While these starters are not fully formed lessons they may be none the less useful for teachers who are lesson clear about the direction to take to support composition. Although the National Curriculum (for music) has been around for nearly 10 years I think the area of composition is very much disregarded, while the national debate centres on vocal work.
Feel free to contact me for further help with composition.
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