Bravo to everyone for a wonderful and calm start to a new Term; it feels great to be back and busy. All across the school there is impressive music learning happening and there are exciting events ahead for our two choirs The Red Capped Robins and our Italian Choir. Thank you to everyone for your beautiful and moving singing at the NAIDOC Week Assembly, and for such positive engagement in Neighbourhood music. Please read on for more music news 🙂
This year’s NAIDOC Week theme, ‘Keep the Fire Burning! Blak, Loud and Proud’, inspired Neighbourhood Assembly responses that reflected students’ understanding of how Indigenous culture and perspectives can enrich our ways of knowing and understanding. The students’ shared their research of inspiring Indigenous ‘trailblazers’, sang of Reconciliation, told yarning stories and added their voices to ‘Keep the Fire Burning’ so that we may all continue to be enriched by Indigenous culture. Inspired by the Choir Spinifex Gum’s performance ‘Dream Baby Dream’, our Yr 1 students would copy the choirs’ choreography and sing through their ‘ruler microphones’ when ever we rehearsed. Across the school the students connected the message of this song to their NAIDOC Week Inquiry: ‘Dream baby, dream. C’mon, we gotta keep the light burning, dream baby, dream. Voice, treaty, truth now.’ Thank you to our Yr 56 students Hattie, Kiko, Elena, Ada, Elodie, Niamh, David and Tucker for giving up their recess times to prepare the instrumental accompaniment for our whole school singing, you played beautifully, and the school’s singing was truely moving and heart-felt.
In 56 music we have been learning that in improvisation, a structural rhythmic foundation can allow for freedom of expression. We have some great drum kit players in the Ngh, and also many students who wish that they could learn, or at least ‘have a go’ at playing one. Thinking back to their drumming routines with Kofi Kunkpe, the students were able to remember 5 or more drumming patterns using the 2 djembe tones they had learnt. One pattern looped on the djembe provided the foundation for who ever was at the drum kit to explore any kind of sound making; rhythmic or free. Students ‘having a go’ for the first time helped others to understand that there is a world of free sound exploration possible on a drum kit, in addition to the drumming role of ‘keeping the beat’ that we expect. Some students created flowing and restless textures of sound as their drum sticks lightly scampered over the kit. Other students etched the djembe beat by adding cymbal, bass drum or snare drum colour. We reversed the roles with more experienced kit players giving us a Calypso style beat, for example, that the djembe players could respond to. It’s also been fun to layer up patterns of djembe rhythms over a steady drum-kit rock beat. Great work 56s!
The 34 students are mastering their fourth uke chord. Trying to learn G major for the first time is like playing ‘Twister’ with three fingers. There is some sighing, and frustration, but even if you are fed up with trying, and not a taylor Swift fan, by the end of ‘Shake it Off’ everyone has ‘nailed it’ (at least at .75 speed), as about a third of the song is strumming G major!
The junior school have been playing a rhythm game ‘Categories’ introduced to us by our Red-capped Robins Choir leader, Emily Hayes. The objective is to say the name of something, eg Unicorn, from a category chosen by the students, in this case, animals (which included mythical and extinct), over beats five and six of an 8 beat pattern. Sport was a popular category, the Olympics are nigh, and the Yr 2s decided that their category would be sporting animals which raised the challenge bar of placing multiple syllables over two beats; ‘swimming sausage dogs, fencing frogs’, or simply ‘shrugging tortoises’, if you couldn’t think of a sport! Lots of alliteration was popping up! We have also practised playing this game using rhythm sticks, with impressive team work being achieved all round.
The inspiration behind reestablishing a school Italian Choir was inspired by the possibility that our students might perform for the Italian Festival in October. Isabella and I are thrilled to be collaborating together to make this an opportunity to develop Italian language and singing skills. We were delighted to welcome Ms Gisella Cozzo, visiting from Milan, to rehearse with our choir as they prepare to audition for the Italian Festa producers. The students were absolutely ‘fantastico’ in their ability and we are so proud of them!
The singing continues… our Red-capped Robins are just two weeks away from their exciting performance for the combined La Boite schools concert at the Melbourne Town Hall. They have learnt a monumental program of ten songs programmed to highlight the urgent need for sustainability practices no matter where in the world you live. The songs summarise what we can do to raise climate change awareness. In eight different languages the students sing songs about the importance of trees, the consequences of land, sea and air pollution and rising temperatures, and the impacts that these have on communities across the globe. It has been a massive commitment from our students who have been outstanding in their dedication of learning. This singing project has deepened students’ understanding of the global impacts of climate change and sustainability and build on Ngh Inquiry projects around these issues. Learning songs in the languages of other communities and telling their story through song heightens our awareness of how precious our world is. We thank Emily Hayes for leading us in our preparation, and Emily Burke, Wendy, Naomi and Lauren for supporting us to be ready for this concert, part of which we look forward to sharing with our school community at 2:50pm on Wednesday 7th August. We hope you can join us.
Thank you to everyone for a great start to this term, all the best, Deb.