This week, we have been working in small groups to compose music about a calm sea at Mousehole. Our musical composition will accompany the playscript scene that we have written for our class’s part of our 'The Mousehole Cat’ Fabulous Finish where Tom and Mowzer return to the safety of Mousehole harbour as the seastorm fades. |
We know that people who write music are known as ‘composers’. Where writers use words to build up pictures in readers’ imaginations, composers compose music to build up images in listeners’ imaginations. As we have been doing a lot of writing work/artwork linked to the sea which is an integral part of ‘The Mousehole Cat’ story, today we listened to a classical piece of music which is about the sea – ‘The Hebrides Overture (Fingal’s Cave)’ by Felix Mendelssohn. He composed the piece of music after a boat trip to the Hebrides’ islands where he was impressed by the sight of a sea cave known as Fingal’s cave. |
We listened to Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. We wrote ‘Calm Sea’, ‘Rough Sea’, ‘Stormy Sea’ and ‘Cave’ on our mini-whiteboards. When we thought the music suggested one of these, we circled the appropriate words and held up our boards. Whilst listening to the music, we jotted down words to describe the music. Some of the words we came up with were calm, soothing, loud, aggressive, violent……We noticed that the mood of the music changed. We also drew what we imagined whilst listening to the music. |
Whilst listening to the music, our teacher paused the overture at different points and encouraged us to discuss /think about:
- the tempo of the overture – Is it fast or slow? Where does the music slow down / speed up?
- the pitch – Is the music high or low? Which instruments play the high /low parts of the overture?
- the dynamics – Is the music loud or soft? Very loud or very soft? Why? What do the children imagine is happening at these louder / softer parts of the music?
- the different orchestral instruments being played. Did we recognize any of the instruments? Which instruments play the main melody at different parts of the music? Did we know which family of instruments specific instruments belong to? e.g. strings, brass, woodwind, percussion.
After listening to the music, we discussed it with our friends. Did we like it? Why? Why not? What did we imagine in our heads as we listened to it? Did it conjur up images of the sea/cave or did we imagine something completely different? Our teacher then played us four short excerpts from the overture that we had to match to the appropriate descriptions - building up to a rough sea, a calm sea, a storm at sea, and the appearance of Fingal’s Cave. |
In small groups, we composed music inspired by the sea to accompany the playscript scene that we have written for J3's part of ‘The Mousehole Cat’ story. We looked at an illustration from this part of the story and discussed the different aspects we could see - the Storm Kitten, a calmer sea, Tom and Mowzer’s boat returning through the mousehole, villagers with their lights. We thought about what the mood of the picture is - gentle, calm, relaxed... | |
| We worked well in our small groups to compose music to be played at the point of our playscript depicted in the picture. We discussed ways to create the mood of the picture/this point of the playscript with music e.g. the music might be quiet overall to suggest the calmness of the sea. There might be a steady beat to represent the lapping waves. Each group had to compose music to represent a different layer of the picture - the Storm Kitten, calmer sea, Tom and Mowzer’s boat, villagers with their lights. |
We looked at the selection of musical instruments available to us. We suggested suitable instruments for each layer of sound e.g. Sky (wind/rain) group: rainmakers, cymbal, tambourines….. Storm Kitten group: a guiro scraped very slowly and gently, metallophones with soft beaters sliding up and down…. We talked about the difference between tuned and untuned percussion - how tuned percussion might be used to compose a melody. | |
| Each group was given time to practise their layer of music in different areas of the classroom and our Year 3 learning area. One member of the group was chosen to be the ‘conductor’ who clapped a steady beat of 4 over and over (8 times). This would be the duration of the piece of music. The conductor had to signal to the instrumentalists when to begin/when to stop. They could also devise their own hand signals e.g. for getting louder/getting softer. |
We hope you enjoy listening to our musical compositions about a calm Mousehole sea.
Our final task was to create a graphic score to notate our music where drawings or symbols are used to represent the parts played by each instrument on a grid marked out to show a steady beat of 4.Our teacher modelled how to graphically notate a simple piece of music, using our ideas to complete a line on the grid for each instrument. We suggested different ways in which sounds could be represented e.g. a continuous soft sound may be a thin wavy line, whereas a continuous louder sound may be a thicker wavy line. |
We sat in our composing groups and worked together on a blank grid to devise a graphic score for our piece of music. We discussed one instrumental part at a time and devised a notation for this part to represent the music it plays. We hope you enjoy looking at some of our graphic scores. Do you think you would be able to play our compositions using the graphic scores to help you? |