‘Congratulations to all our performers for your outstanding development and commitment to learning your instruments. Thank you for what you bring to our community.’ Esmé.

The Instrumental Music Assembly and Concert on Friday of Wk6, topped off a fantastic week of activities which included the Junior Tabloid Sports and the Year 3/4 camp, yet we still had energy to delight and inspire. Thank you to everyone for coming to these IM events, for celebrating what our young musicians have achieved, and for your continued support and appreciation of the IM program and its wonderful teachers Mark, Marcos, Jen, Sasha and Mitchell. Bravo to all our performers from years 3 – 6, and bravissimo for your orchestral finale! Please read on via the link for a music reflection and photos.

During their first few years of learning an instrument, students are exposed to simple melodies that are drawn from a kaleidoscope of music traditions from across the world. Every new piece of music comes with its social and cultural history, and with incremental technical challenges which inspire a deeper connection to instrumental learning. But the process of learning other people’s music and being taught how to interpret it is only a part of what instrumental learning can be. It’s a little bit like baking a cake. The recipe tells what ingredients we need, and how to combine and cook them, but the really inspired cooks soon start tweaking and creating, and that’s when the flow of inspiration really takes off.

All our beautiful IM students, including our Year 2 beginners, have established enough technique to begin this wondrous journey of ‘tweaking and creating’. Within their first weeks of learning an instrument, they can play their first three or five notes any way they like, long or short, in any order and volume. They can stamp their feet and add voices to their first notes and start creating their own musical expression. Just as we can take a ‘line for a walk’ in visual art, so too with a simple melody. Improvisation: it’s as simple as closing your eyes and letting your instrument connect to your imagination. Your instrument can become an extension of your self: the energy that you give, comes back to you as creative joy. These are the seeds we are sowing in our IM program.

In our IM Assembly and Concert, our MCs Molly and Tristan, did a fabulous job of sharing information about the music we were hearing. Music that is so familiar to us suddenly becomes vibrant again when we hear a ‘fun fact’ or two. For example, the Nursery Rhyme Old MacDonald was originally an aria from a 1706 French opera, and the American Civil War tune Yankee Doodle originated in the Medieval era.

Mark’s students opened the performances with fabulous arrangements of dance music from Spain and Latin America. The students played the melodies while Mark accompanied with the dance’s signature rhythm and harmonic progression. We enjoyed a range of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century tunes from Mitchell’s woodwinds. Lulu and Astrid performed the attractive 1880’s Jolly Old St Nicholas tune which sounded warm and mellow on their clarinets. This contrasted with an energetic and jaunty rendition of This is it, written by the epic Animation film composer Carl Stalling in the 1940s, which was performed with flare by Tucker and Huey.

A selection of Traditional American tunes, and the much loved Ode to Joy by Beethoven, were performed by Marco’s students. Once again, the students played the melody, while Marcos accompanied with a Latin upbeat feel, which was quite a groove for Beethoven’s, now two hundred year old, Classical Ode.

Jen’s flute students played solos and duets including traditional folk tunes from Great Britain, and melodies from European composers all beautifully performed by Bessie, Claudia, and Eva. Scarlett and Olivia formed a brilliant duo for Mendelssohn’s Intermezzo.

Sasha’s students always perform a selection of melodies from traditional and contemporary songs. Her older students often tell Sasha what their favourite song is from the Pop charts, and she will arrange it for them. Suddenly they really want to practise… even the tricky bits! Being able to play ‘the coolest song’ with your friends is another big motivator for learning an instrument as the music is relevant to their experience which is shared in a social context. When all of Sasha’s students stand amassed on the stage and play from memory Mrs Jamison’s Favourite, we are gifted a warm strident melody from confident young players.

To top off our concert, all our performing students came together to perform as an orchestra. Mark Vigianni shared a tip that his students love playing ‘Russian Girl’, a simple melody which gets faster every time you play it. BINGO! Arrange the piece for all the IM instruments, add a snare drum (thanks Tucker) and cymbals on the off beat (thanks Emily), commence at the pace of a funeral procession and you have somewhere to go! I think we rolled out 5 repetitions, each time building in anticipation and wondering if we had reached our fastest tempo. We did achieve a cracking pace with out derailing! Bravo to everyone…

‘We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams’ wrote the English poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy in 1874. Music drifts in and out of the sound fabric of our every day, sometimes energising us, at other times refreshing our thoughts, or annoyingly, driving us bonkers. There is so much music that we hear that is not by our own choice. I wonder, how often do we choose to do nothing else but sit, and listen to music that we have selected? And… if we can play an instrument, how often do we play a melody for pleasure: to weave a melodic journey that is an extension of our creative mind, or to make music of our dreams? Can we ever imagine the impact of O’Shaughnessy’s words which were written at a time when one could only hear music when performed live?

Thank you to all the students for your wonderful performances, for the inspiration you give to our younger students and joy you bring to our community. And, as ever, a massive thanks to everyone who supports the IM program and assisted with the performances: families, IM teachers, Esmé, Julie, Mandy, Emily, Richard, and all who are working ‘in the wings’. Thank you for a great couple of weeks, and we look forward to the next whole school sing with our community very soon in the Father’s and Special Carer’s Day Assembly. Take care everyone, Deb.