Table of Contents

New Music Alive Book II: Composition Resources in the Classroom

Chill-Out Set

Listening

On the following page is a list of fairly gentle pieces composed by today's Irish composers, which you can hear on the free CD series Contemporary Music from Ireland.

Playing a track from this 'Chill-Out Set' can provide a little time out for quiet listening and reflection, and allow the children to familiarise themselves with new kinds of music.

Discussions and Opinions

The children can also develop their skills of 'Listening and Responding' by simply describing their experience of hearing these pieces. If the students need prompting, these questions might help:

  • What did you like about that piece of music? A mood? A particular sound?
  • What did you dislike? Any section of the music in particular?
  • What did it make you think of? A person or a place perhaps? A certain mood?
    Maybe it made you think of a film, a book or another piece of music?
  • How did you feel when you started listening to it?
    How did you feel half-way through? And when it ended?
  • How do you think the composer felt when they wrote it?
    Is s/he trying to tell you anything?

  • Integration: SPHE; developing self-confidence; making decisions

Contemporary Music from Ireland CD Series
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CD 02 Track 04
Ian Wilson Timelessly This [fade out around 03:00]
  • What does the music make you think of?
  • What does the title make you think of?

Wilson wrote this piece after visiting a 4000-year-old stone circle in Northern Ireland. He says, "It provoked me to consider the events that these stones and others like them had witnessed during their long existence. I imagined celebrations and rituals, and always the presence of the stones... seemingly unaffected by a halo of passing time."

  • Integration:
    History; feasts and festivals in the past; myths and legends; stone age peoples
    Geography; natural environmental features and people; settlement

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CD 02 Track 07
Fergus Johnston Kaleidophone [fade out around 03:00]
  • What does the music make you think of?
  • What does the title make you think of?

The word "phone" means 'voice', and if you already know what a kaleidoscope is, perhaps you can guess what the composer is describing with the title of this piece. Maybe he was trying to combine sounds in the same way that a kaleidoscope combines shapes and colours.

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CD 06 Track 04
Ian Wilson Atlantica [fade out around 02:20]
  • Does this music conjure up any images in your imagination?
  • Why do you think the composer gave it this name?

Wilson says, "Atlantica was inspired by the idea of water. When I was writing this piece I lived near a stream and its constant babbling working its way into the piece."

  • Integration: Geography; the local natural environment; land, rivers and seas of Ireland

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CD 07 Track 12
Roger Doyle The Ninth Set [fade out around 03:00]
  • What does the music make you think of?
  • Read below what the composer has to say about the title of this piece.
    Do you like having to "imagine what it is yourself"
    or do you prefer being given a descriptive title?

Doyle calls this 'The Ninth Set' simply because he wrote eight other sets of pieces before this one. But there is another reason he gave it such a plain title. He says "To me the music has a supernatural feeling to it, but I have kept the title neutral so that you can imagine what it is yourself."

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CD 08 Track 05
Deirdre McKay Dieppe
  • What does the music make you think of?

The piece is named after a poem by Irish poet Samuel Beckett. Dieppe is a French seaside town and the poem describes the last pulse of the tide ebbing away through the pebble beach.

  • Integration: English; emotional and imaginative development through language

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CD 09 Track 02
Jonathan Nangle our headlights blew softly into the black, illuminating very little
  • What does the music make you think of?
  • What does the title make you think of?

When the composer was writing this piece he imagined a car "driven along twisting country lanes in the dead of night" where the headlights can only light up a little bit of a road or a field at a time, but can never reveal the whole picture.

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CD 09 Track 06
Judith Ring ...within an egg of space... [fade out around 04:00]
  • What does the music make you think of?
  • What does the title make you think of?
  • Think back to Lesson One. Do you remember anything unusual
    about how Judith Ring composes electronic music?
    How do you think she created the sounds she uses in this piece?

She almost never uses special effects in her music! As in PanoVal, all the sounds she uses in ...within an egg of space... are recorded straight from the instruments and then combined in different ways.

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CD 10 Track 05
Garrett Sholdice Sonate

To write this beautiful music, Sholdice borrowed a few notes from the famous Baroque composer J.S. Bach and simply re-used them in his own way. For Sholdice, combining Bach's music with his own techniques was 'like dropping a stone into a lake and watching the ripples'.

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CD 09 Track 10
Neil O'Connor Radio Aurora
  • Can you guess how this music was made? With some unusual
    instruments perhaps? Or with special computer effects?

Amazingly, this haunting music is actually made from the Earth's own electromagnetic radio signals. These are the sounds made by natural events like lightning storms and the Aurora Borealis (the Northern Lights). Our ears cannot hear these sounds when they occur naturally, so O'Connor has converted them into soundwaves that we can hear and then mixed them together in this composition.

  • Integration: Science; magnetism and electricity

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