Happy Monday to you ALL! I hope this post finds you well!
In addition to working remotely from home on Mondays and Tuesdays, I am back teaching, in-person at Maywood on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays for the month of June. I teach a cohort of students whose parents are Essential Service Workers on Wednesdays and I am teaching a cohort of Grade 2/3 students on Thursdays and Fridays until the end of the school year.
Although I am not teaching my regularly scheduled music classes, I look forward to the day when I can do that again this Autumn when we will all, hopefully, be back at school on a more regular basis.
Take a look at the website of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra to explore what the instruments look like and sound like. Choose 1 instrument (or more) from each family (group) to look at and listen to their sounds. Click the link here to access the website: https://www.mydso.com/dso-kids/learn-and-listen/instruments
After reviewing different instruments from each family, watch and listen to the video below from the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of their former conductor, Maestro Bramwell Tovey. In the video, he not only conducts the musicians but he is also the narrator of the story.
In 1936, Sergei Prokofiev wrote Peter and the Wolf, a story and musical composition. It was written in two weeks for a children’s theatre in Moscow. He wrote the music as a child’s introduction to the orchestra with each character being represented by an instrument or group of instruments.
The Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev was one of the giants of 20th-century music. His works ranged from ballets – including Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet – to film music, such as Lieutenant Kije and Alexander Nevsky. Prokofiev lived from 1891 until 1953.
In “Peter and the Wolf,” Prokofiev uses instruments to represent animals:
The bird = flute
The duck = oboe
The cat = clarinet
The wolf = French horn
The grandfather = bassoon
The hunters = timpani
Peter = stringed instruments (e.g. violin, violas, cello, bass)
Playful Possibilities…
As always, please feel free to email me your response in writing, by drawing or painting a picture or by making a short video of you responding to the information that you explored in this post.
Choose a way that you would like to respond to these explorations and I will share it on our password-protected Student Gallery page on this blog. My email is:
- Draw, colour, and label a picture of an instrument that you enjoyed hearing the most.
- Draw, colour, and label a picture of a few of your favourite instruments.
- If you could play any of these instruments right now, choose your top three. Which ones would they be? Tell me why?
- Tell me about what you observed when you watched the Peter And The Wolf video? What did you notice about the musicians? How many were there on stage? How were they arranged?
- Could you actually imagine the animals in your mind when listening to the story? Did the music help you to visualize them? Yes or No? Please explain why or why not.
Leave a Reply