We began by warming up our voices using our ‘pitch pencils’. Pitch pencils draw magical noisy pictures in the air. When the pitch pencils move up and down, your voice does too! We copied Miss McGlone’s picture before having a go at creating our own.
We were then introduced to our new focus piece of music – ‘Dawn’ by Benjamin Britten. We discussed that Benjamin was an English composer and he lived in a small seaside town called Aldeburgh. He liked to walk by the sea every morning and lots of the music he wrote was inspired by the sea, just like the piece we are working on!
We listened to a performance of the piece by the London Symphony Orchestra and discussed how the piece made us feel. We then talked about how different instruments were used to create different representations of different musical ideas – the sound of sea birds, ocean spray and big crashing waves. We decided on actions that we could use to show each of these musical ideas and when listening to the piece again, we changed our actions depending on what we could hear being represented. We then noticed that at times, the ideas were performed at the same time so we had to make the decision which one we wanted to represent using our actions. We looked at a listening map to see the structure of the music.
