7.5m Flute, and a Saxophone you can hide behind!

Welcome back to school! It is lovely to be back, to see everyone, and to reconnect with our school community in person. Online learning has been a pleasure. It’s been a wonderful opportunity to listen to music and develop an awareness of our own engagement with music. I have really appreciated that students have shared how the different music activities have resonated with their own life experiences, and how their curiosities have inspired further inquiry. This week we have been finding out about the woodwind family of instruments and we have discovered that they can be awesome in size and sound.

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The students listened to 2 well known songs, The Ghostbusters Theme and Bohemian Rhapsody, which were arranged for woodwind ensembles. These arrangements highlighted the diverse range of instrumental colour across the woodwind family. Each instrument’s sound quality could influence our emotional connection to the music. The airy, wavy soft timbres of the bamboo Bansuri Flute from India gave a relaxing and calming sound to the melody of Bohemian Rhapsody, but when the oboe played the same melody, its plaintive sound really tugged at our hearts!

Students also chose to do some further research about a woodwind instrument which made them curious. Grover Yr5/6 shared that he had explored the history of the recorder because his Nanna plays it. Thanks to Grover, I now know that Henry VIII had 76 recorders! A number of students were interested to learn more about the flute. Nico Yr5/6 found out that the metal concert flute we are familiar with was invented in the 1840s by the German flautist Theobald Boehm. Until this time, flutes, known as Transverse Flutes, were made of Boxwood and had a beautiful, gentle airy quality. Unfortunately, as orchestras grew in size and sound colour, these transverse flute were difficult to hear, so composers were not favouring them in their orchestral works. Once Boehm designed the metal flute, which is silver plated brass, the brighter sound of this instrument, and the newly improved key designs, gave rise to many different sized flutes. The flutes now could play the highest orchestral sounds with the piccolo, and form their own orchestra with different sizes of flute covering every octave. “I think the piccolo size makes it so that it comes out with the highest pitched sound” Luke Yr5/6. We also discovered that the Alto Saxophone is the third largest saxophone, and that they can be bigger, and bigger, and too big to carry around with ease!

Double subcontrabass flute

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Since returning to school, we have been sharing our reactions and thoughts to the different listening experiences we had enjoyed with the online activities. The inventions of instrument machines, including the super over sized instruments, has captured our imaginations, and the idea that the technology of the carillion took 500 years to perfect is mind boggling.

With the Preps, music has been connecting with their Inquiry about Simple and Complex. Last week, we explored these concepts through body percussion and by comparing performances of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ in different arrangements and styles. The students were amazed that such a simple tune could have so many complex variations. This week we worked with a simple instrument: Boomwackers! Originally boomwacker like instruments were made from bamboo and there are wonderful and energetic performance traditions from African and Asian cultures. Our modern Boomwackers are colourful plastic tubes. The Preps identified that the shorter the tube was, the higher the pitch would be when you wacked it against your shoe to make it sound. We had a lot of fun finding melodies we knew, and making up sound patterns of pitch and rhythm.

It’s been a joy to be back at school, and we certainly look forward to being able to return to singing and to welcoming out Instrumental teachers back on site. In the meantime, I’m loving how the activities we have been sharing online are suddenly branching off in different directions across the neighbourhoods… leading to who knows where.

Many thanks everyone, and take care. Cheerio Deb