Music in Y6
Digital music
Throughout our time in Year 6, we will be spending weekly sessions with Mr Barber from Music services.
During the sessions we will be developing our digital music skills by using an Ableton Move board. This portable music making device allows us to layer and sequence lots of different sounds to make music.
During this half term, we have focussed on using the move boards to layer and loop strings and keys to reproduce a well known hip-hop song. Not only have we had to learn how to use the boards, but we have also had to work on securing our understanding of a number of musical terms:
- beat - the pulse of the music
- Tempo - how fast/slow the music is
- Pitch - How high or low the notes are
- Melody - the tune
- Harmony - Notes played together
- Dynamics - how loud or quiet the music is
- Pulse - the beat of the music
- Layering - adding sounds to build music
Those of us that secured the basic melody were then able to add some free-style elements to our tune!
Elements of music
During our music session today, we were introduced to the different elements of music.
We initially used our knowledge from previous year groups to try and match each element of music to the correct definition. Some of us found it very tricky to match the two, whilst others could use the definitions and their musical inference skills to make some correct matches!
1 elements of music support sheet .pdf
Once we had tried to use our memory, we dug deeper into the definitions of each musical term and listened to a range of music we are super familiar with (including one of the songs from our end of Year 6 show!) We used the language associated with elements of music to describe key parts of each song.
We then dug deeper into the word 'pulse'. We listened back to the songs we had studied above and worked as a class to try and tap the pulse. Initially we found this task to be quite tricky - it was hard keeping in time and not speeding up, however as we moved through we were much more confident.
Topic related music - World War Two
We listened to and appraised a range of music linked to World War Two this term including:
- We'll meet again - Vera Lynn
- Over there - George M Cohen
- Run Rabbit - Flanagan and Allen
- Keep the home fires burning - John McCormack
- White Cliffs of Dover - Vera Lynn
We also spent the whole of the Autumn 2 half term exploring the song 'Love and Understanding' by Cher as our year group Peace concert song. We listened to the lyrics and explored the meaning behind them before learning to sing them to the backing track alone - our performance in the peace concert was amazing!
Values - Our values focus for Autumn 2 was John Lennon and his song 'imagine'. We learnt about John Lennon's life and his contribution to the anti-war effort in connection to our value for the half term - PEACE. We also listened to, and appraised, the song imagine, as well as 'let it be'.
Topic related music - Ancient Greece
During this half term, we will be studying elements of ancient Greece through a range of different musical pieces which cover a range of genres.
We started the half term by listening to what actual ancient Greek music may have sounded like! We also used the iPads to research music during the ancient Greek times.
During our first lesson, we learnt about life in ancient Greece through the song 'Busy ancient city, Athens'. We listened to the song and looked at ancient Greek instruments - guessing which ones could have been used. We also discussed any new vocabulary we learnt from the lyrics.
We finally explored ancient Greek instruments and made connections to the modern instruments we see today.
