Lesson One

Think... 5 min

Talking and Listening 25 min

Now some listening; ask the students to describe each of the following clips in their own words. Let's look at some of the ways composers use electronics:

1. To create music that might be extremely difficult for a human to perform.
   Listen to some of Conlon Nancarrow's 'Studies for Player Piano' here.
   Why do you think he used a mechanical piano instead of a real one?
2. To create particular sounds that an instrument can't make on its own.Listen to an excerpt from Ed Bennett's 'Monster' below.
   
   
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3. To provide a background to a performer.
   Listen to an excerpt from Linda Buckley's 'Do You Remember the Planets?' below.
   
   
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Can you hear the viola part stick out from the electronic sounds around it? It might help to listen to the electronic sounds on their own below.

4. To interact with the performer as an equal partner.

Listen to an excerpt from Donnacha Dennehy's 'BrAt' below. Quick Game: Listen again. Half the class raise your hand whenever you hear the recorder playing and the other half raise your hand whenever you hear the tape part.

5. To layer recordings of many human performers at once.
   Listen to an excerpt from Judith Ring's 'PanoVal' below. 
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How many instruments can you hear? What special effects are being used?
Sometimes you can find such great sounds around you that you don't need to use any computer effects at all!

There is one more important way that musicians work with electronics which you'll discover later...

Lesson One: Supplementary Notes

Warm Up

Warm-ups can always help to make students more energetic and less self-conscious before doing other activities. Whizz-Zoom-Boing is a useful game to play at anytime. It helps to break the ice and create some laughter while also focussing the children's attention on a group challenge.

Think...

These questions should help to get the children talking and thinking about music. "Com-Position" is literally about "putting" sounds "together". This is what a composer does. The word "electronic" of course refers to the electricity used to make the music. The opposite of this is "acoustic" music, which is made using instruments and voices. Electronic music can be played on a computer, a CD player or any device that uses electricity. It is generally heard through speakers or headphones. It is often referred to as "tape music" because it was originally made in the 1950s using reels of tape, like you would find inside a cassette.

Talking and Listening

During this exercise you can use a blackboard, or a large sheet of paper, to keep a list of the students' descriptions of the music. This list will be useful later on the in the course. It will also help the students as they develop their own vocabulary for communicating their thoughts and ideas about the music.

1. Conlon Nancarrow composed some fifty Studies for Player Piano, each one made up of many different lines of music all moving at different speeds! He programmed these 'Player Pianos' to play this music because no one human could ever play them!
2. The bass clarinet is a large, deep instrument that reaches nearly all the way down to the ground when you stand up to play it. It can make a very mellow and smooth sound or it can shriek and growl, like a beast, which is why Ed Bennett chose to call this piece Monster. You can hear the tape part five times in this excerpt, usually when the clarinet is already playing. It sounds a bit like the clarinet being played backwards!
3. 'Do You Remember the Planets?' is written for viola and tape. The viola player plays solo, but Linda Buckley has created such grand, full sounds in the tape part that it can seem like there are many musicians all playing together in some huge hall. One 5th class student thought this music sounded like one lone soldier returning home after a futuristic war had ended and all the landscape had been destroyed!
4. In 'BrAt', you might notice how sometimes you hear one part, then the other, or both. Neither one is more important in the music than the other. The computer is just another instrument!
5. There is only one instrument being used in this recording and there are no special effects. It is simply a violin that has been recorded several times, with the real violin playing along live!

Music Notes