Hello to everyone, and a Bravo to the students who performed in the Instrumental Assembly, you were inspiring and performed wonderfully: thank you! Since the last Talking Point edition, music in the Nghs has focussed on preparing songs for this week’s Harmony Day Assembly and next week’s Teddy Bear’s Picnic. Please read on…
As I mentioned in the last TP edition, the choir has been preparing I Am the Earth for the Harmony Day Assembly. ’We share the future. Stand side by side. One Earth, one people, we’ll turn the tide.’ The final verse is so much about everyone, that the Choir has invited the whole school to sing with them for the end of the song. With confirmation in the news this week that 2023 was the warmest year in one hundred and seventy years, the singing of this song is all the more poignant: our children will sing with hope, for they have a deep understanding of how the way we live our lives impacts our planet, and we are all learning that we can respond to this at a community level. As we reflect on this year’s Harmony Day theme ‘Everyone belongs’, we will celebrate families, communities and cultures, and why it is that we need to care for, and acknowledge, the importance of how these reflect our humanity. In the same way, as a people, we belong to our Earth: our struggling yet still awesome and magnificent home. May Harmony Day inspire love, peace and care for those around us and for the places we inhabit.
At the end of our Harmony Day Assembly, we will all sing Asalam Aleikhum: the Arabic chant which means ‘Peace to You’. The chant is a beautiful meditation that builds up over six layers of harmony, three in the vocal parts and three in the instrumental accompaniment. Gradually, all the vocal parts move over to the main melody which expresses the petition that love/peace will fly across the Earth and sing its song to every soul that is alive. As all the voices combine in unison, the solo violin, harp and drone fall silent so that only our children’s voices sound the song of peace.
The Prep Stars are wonderful ‘wee troupe’ of singers and can sing with plenty of glee! They have memorised all the extra singing for the Assembly and their special Teddy Bear’s Picnic song, and I’ve heard that there are some special Teddy Bear Buddies from Yr 5 who may create a new tradition by joining in the fun at Wednesday’s TB Picnic. We look forward to sharing this celebration of a time honoured tradition, and the achievements of our youngest students who have completed their first Term of school, with our extended Prep community. Bravo Preps!
Our first Instrumental Music Assembly for this year was a tremendous credit to our performing students and teachers who presented a confidently performed program. As I have mentioned before, the IM performances offer us an opportunity to hear music from many styles and traditions, and invite us to contemplate that history is connected to the music we learn and share. Esther performed a song, which was written in the darkest moments of the American Civil War, whose melody emerged a hundred years later and gave Elvis the hit single ‘Love Me Tender’. The up-beat and catchy tune of an Afro-American Spiritual performed by Marcos’s students, has it roots in a tradition of singing that literally held body and soul together for the people of the American Slave Trade. We were reminded that before the era of electronic amplification and public address systems, the announcement of an important event, or the arrival of a dignitary, was sounded by performing musicians who would gather on a balcony, or raised platform. Playing instruments that were bright in timbre, like brass instruments, they would perform brief and stately melodies that could be heard acoustically across vast spaces. This gave rise to a particular genre of music, the Fanfare, and we will enjoy this ongoing tradition as the performance of ‘Fanfare’ by Sotir and Mitchell will become our new school bell, which, by the way and as many would remember, was a kind of ‘live performance’ given by a teacher or leading student as they strode around the school yard ringing a large and resonant hand bell.
As with all our learning, when we find our own relevant connections to learning, we enjoy a deeper and more rewarding experience. The early steps of learning an instrument can be slow going, and even dry, and it seems like forever before we can master enough ‘know how’ to make our own music. Only a couple of generations ago, a student violinist would have spent months perfecting the ‘bow hold’ by bowing over the back of a chair before they could be trusted to even hold a violin. Contrast this with the sheer joy and groove of our budding violinists who are just 6 weeks into their learning, already up on stage, confidently mastering rhythm and how to hold their instruments, as they play along to an infectious backing track. Making music in an ensemble from the earliest moment possible, and finding songs that are simple and well known, give beginners firm building blocks of confidence and progress, and before too long they realise that they can reach for the songs they dream about. This was the very thing that shone from Claudia as she performed Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’. The sheet music posed significant technical challenges, but Claudia had enough understanding to identify the parts she could play, and enough ‘Tay Tay’ passion to fuel her determination to learn the skills to conquer the tricky bits. To stride out and ‘nail’ this performance in-front of her ‘home crowd’ was a tremendous achievement, and the journey to this achievement can be experienced in any area of learning. Thank you to all our IM performers for sharing their learning, you help to lead the way along the adventure of ‘I can do this too’!
Thank you to everyone for a lovely couple of weeks of music making. Cheerio, Deb.