Water Music - Learning, Listening, Composing & Evaluating Activities

Water Music - Performing Activities - Songs & Scores

Water Music - Starter & Plenary Activities

Water Music from Musical Contexts provides a range of fun and exciting music activities and learning opportunities combining singing, performing, composing and listening and appraising with all of the resources you’ll need in one place!  Ideal for non-specialist music teachers (with a wealth of supporting media files to model tasks and a detailed scheme of work and lesson plans) and a wealth of fresh inspiration for music specialists.  Whether you’re exploring the topic of Rivers, Seas, The Water Cycle or Water in general, then there’s something within this unit that will hopefully inspire both you as a teacher and your pupils.

This unit provides pupils with the stimulus of water as a basis for singing, performing, composing, improvising and listening and appraising to a wide variety of water-inspired music.  Pupils begin by creatively composing in response to a variety of images of water in its various forms before exploring how the composer Smetana describes the course of a river in his tone poem “Vltava”.  Pupils explore the concept of melodic shape, identifying melodies which move by step and leap and compose their own “wandering river” melody using entirely stepwise motion which is used as part of a larger-scale composition describing the various stages of the water cycle.  Pupils move onto the sea and make connections between music and art learning about the impressionist music of Debussy’s “La Mer” and use Monet’s sea paintings as the basis of an improvisation.  Dynamics is a key concept throughout the using including gradations of dynamics and the crescendo.  Finally, pupils use their learning from the unit to add “water sound effects” to a traditional North American-Indian legend before listening to Handel’s “Water Music”.  

Element Focus - Pitch, Timbre & Dynamics, Melody & Harmony

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