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Journey Into Space 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.  This unit has cross-curricular links with the popular primary topics of The Solar System, The Planets, Space Exploration and Space Travel.

​This unit takes, as its starting point, Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” as a basis for creative composition tasks leading to a class musical performance of a “Journey Into Space”.  It’s based on the Musical Contexts Key Stage 3 Secondary unit “Music and Space”, with various modifications for Key Stage 2 and Primary pupils.  Pupils listen to different extracts from Holst’s “The Planets” at various points throughout the unit, beginning with “Mars, The Bringer of War”, exploring how Holst basis this movement on an ostinato pattern.  After performing and creating their own ostinato patterns and adding dynamic contrasts in the form of crescendos and diminuendos, pupils create their own descriptive “Mars” pieces incorporating an ostinato and other musical features which Holst uses in his movement.  Central to the unit are the concepts of mood, tempo, dynamics and instrumentation (or timbre) and these are explored through Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” which pupils explore in terms of a piece of descriptive music used to describe a “Rocket Launch”.  Finally, pupils create musical soundscapes for the other planets, structuring these with the opening “Rocket Launch” theme for a class musical performance of their Journey Into Space.  There’s an optional improvisation task which can be used in the final performance where selected pupils create a spontaneous soundscape to describe the final planet in their journey – Pluto.

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