Welcome Back

Welcome back to school everyone. It is soooo good to be back, and to feel uplifted by how happy we feel being together again. There are plans afoot to make 2022 another year of wonderful ’Adventures in Music’ for whole school experiences. Although we patiently wait for the safest of COVID times before resuming singing, all the Neighbourhoods are discovering their own directions for integrating music into their Inquiries or ’getting in the swing’ with Boomwackers. This year we are delighted to welcome the Opera Australia back to perform their schools production of Mozart’s ’The Marriage of Figaro’, and we say a big thank you to Lisa for arranging this. We promise to launch our much awaited before school choir! Emily Hayes, the choir’s leader, has been patiently watching the Terms slip by as we journey through these COVID times. AND… our Fridays are even more fabulous as our Instrumental Music Program starts up this Friday Feb 11th.

Neighbourhood music:

I enjoyed a ’cracking’ time with this year’s ’Super Prep Stars’ in our first Music time together. It is a sheer delight to meet them all and I know we will love watching them grow! We performed the body percussion rhythm game ’Boom Chicka Boom’, shared a big secret about a ’Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ and learnt some bush animal grooves. Curiously, I feel like I’ve been teaching some Preps for a long time as their faces kept popping up in Seesaw responses during online learning these past 2 years! Welcome to music at PHPS everyone, we are going to sow the best music seeds together.

The Prep Stars of 2021 are now forming galaxies as Super Yr 1s. They are clicking right in as a co-operative group and their team skills, on show with the Boomwackers and the rhythm game ‘Categories’, were impressive. The Boomwackers are also sounding great in the more experienced hands of the Yr 3/4s. We quickly swept though some preliminary rhythm patterns and were exploring combinations of Boomwackers to build chords and play some simple tunes. It is really heartening to see last year’s Yr2 and 3 Nghs coming together and sharing their skills. There is no doubt that this year’s Yr4s will be awesome ukulele teachers for the Yr 3s. We are in for a super year.

The Year 2 Ngh has invited me to share in their ’Compare and Contrast World Tour’ as they explore how many cultures of the world make up Australia. During Projects and Provocations last week, a group of students and I looked at how different cultures have their own perspectives for how they relate to the land. We talked about how Aboriginal spirit and being are intertwined with the land they live on, and that this informs their culture and how they care for the land. ‘The Law About Singing Out’ is a poem by Gela Nga-Mirraitja. This poem includes verses which share with us that for Indigenous people, all the trees on Country where they live, all the birds and all nature, are their countrymen: their relations. We also looked at the poem ’My Country’ written by Australian born Dorothea Mackellar in 1908. The famous lines ’I love a sunburnt country. A land of sweeping plains…’ were written when Dorothea was 19 years old. She was visiting England at the time and feeling very homesick. Interestingly, it was first published under the title ’Core of My Heart’. With Simon and Lucy, we are understanding that story telling, dance, poetry, and art all comes from the heart, and that how we express ourselves helps us to understand our different perspectives. We will be listening to songs written and performed by Indigenous musicians as a way of understanding their culture and our shared history.

American composer Terry Riley b.1934, is the ’Grand Father’ of the compositional style known as Minimalism. The Year 5/6s are looking at how his simple approach to making music can, and has inspired, so many styles of music. We looked at his evocative hand written music notation, and listened to 2 influential pieces. Riley’s ’A Rainbow in Curved Air’ 1968 reminded students of the sounds in gaming arcades. We watched an inspiring multi videoed performance made during Lockdown last year which showed hundreds of contributing musicians across Sweden performing ’In C’ which Riley wrote in 1964. By examining the scores and listening to performances, we could hear how these pieces were constructed, and we feel quite confident that we can achieve a composition of our own by following Riley’s ideas. It was only a small side step to swerve in to the land of Graphic Score music notation, and from there we found ourselves enjoying Cathy Berberian’s composition ’Stripsody’ from 1976. This is a vocal showcase for extended techniques and the ’funnest’ of compositions built out of onomatopoeic comic-book sounds.

So, we are off to an amazing start to the year, and as ever, what makes the students curious enriches my life!! Many thanks everyone, keep safe and have a great couple of weeks. Cheerio, Deb