Grade 7 Students Explore Program Music

Grade 7s have been studying famous composers like Antonio Vivaldi, Sergei Prokofiev and Camille Saint-Saëns and their work, and are now in the throes of creating music stories through collaborative composition.

For this first music unit, students have been exploring program music (a.k.a. music that “tells a story”, evokes images or conveys the impression of events), music composition devices, and their own personal artistic process, through the concepts of form, role and play (performance).

The Grade 7s are now, in groups, choosing their own themes and settings in which to create their own program music.

During the unit’s learning experiences, students were first exposed to 3 exemplars (good examples) in the program music genre, from the composers studied: “Carnival of the Animals” (Saint-Saëns), “Peter and the Wolf” (Prokofiev) and “The Four Seasons” (Vivaldi). They then explored compositional devices and techniques and chose one to experiment with.

Below are 2 samples from the student groups’ exploration. The device explored… Imitation.

Still to come… their collaborative music creations. Stay tuned!

Kendra Sylvester-Flores
ksylvester@ispse.du.tt
Grade: 7 
Class: Music
Unit: Program Music