Music

The goal of our classroom Music curriculum is to introduce and engage students in a wide variety of styles, instruments, methods of performing and notating and to develop skills in listening and analysis.

So far, this year, the Year 7 course has exposed students to the four instrument families of the orchestra, then given opportunity for students to compose their own group percussion composition. We are also lucky enough to have a set of keyboards, which we use in conjunction with xylophones and virtual keyboard apps, for students to learn the basics of piano playing using the modern and engaging method book series, ‘SuperSonics’. Once a piece has been learnt, we have been performing them to the provided backing tracks which makes the experience all the more fun!

Students who elected to continue studying Music in Year 8 have had the opportunity to incorporate their own instrument into our classroom learning. So far, we have been lucky enough to have a clarinet, several violas, guitar and a euphonium used in our practical classes. Students have excelled at class ensemble sessions and are now also composing their own blues song to given structures and parameters. The Year 8 curriculum will soon move onto looking at popular music through the decades and again work on small group performances for their assessment tasks.

Thank you to the Music staff for engaging students with interesting and hands-on learning experiences. We look forward to seeing more people choose to continue Music as an elective in their senior years.

Kara-Lee Rabbetts
Learning Leader: Performing Arts Leader – Music

Student Reflections

Music has been awesome the past few weeks in Year 7! We’ve gone from learning about percussion instruments and how the Orchestra works, to learning how to read music and playing the keyboards! In Year 7, as you can see, we’ve learnt a lot of cool things! We watched a percussion and orchestra video where the conductor showed everyone what the instruments sound like and played some well-known songs that our class knew! We now know which category each instrument is in!

Off to learning how to read music. We use these sentences to help us remember including ‘All Cows Eat Grass’ for the spaces and ‘Good Birds Don’t Fly Away’ for the lines, but that’s for the bass which is the bottom half when reading a sheet of music. For the treble which is the top half, when looking at a sheet of music, it’s different! These ones go like this – ‘FACE’ for the spaces and for the lines it’s ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit’. Now we may as well be called ‘pros’ because we are so good at naming them!

The other cool thing about Music are the instruments! We have played some including the keyboard and other little percussion instruments! We have also made our own sheet of music in a group. We got our own line needing eight beats in total! Then after a couple of weeks of practising, it was time to perform! We had so much fun making our own pieces of music!

Our next task is to try to play it on the keyboards as a group! I can’t wait to hear the other group’s music! Unfortunately that’s all for music so far, but plenty more to come soon! 

Sienna Turner
Year 7

I love how once you learn enough theory in Music you can make amazing sounds with others. It can evoke emotions just by bringing sounds together. This term in Music, we have been learning how to make rhythm sounds as an ensemble. I have gained an understanding about how many beats go into each note. I really liked improving my knowledge about how to read sheet music and the different positions in the orchestra. I can’t wait to hear the music we will create by the end of semester.

Grace Winthrop
Year 7

In Music this year, we have looked at a variety of topics such as blues music, songwriting, reading music, playing chords on the piano and group performances. We have studied the rhyme structures of blues songs and even started writing our own song! We have also used many different instruments such as guitars, pianos, keyboards, xylophones and violas in a group to perform sheet music to the class.

Amelia Molina
Year 8

So far in Music this year, we have been doing lots of practical and theory work. We have been learning about beats and rhythm and blues music. With the practical work, we have been creating our own blues music and performed a song with a group of girls from the class. It has been fun so far and I’m looking forward to the rest of the semester.
Sophie Donnelly
Year 8