Blog

This week students have been working on their own compositions. We’ve had music about frogs, snowy nights and crackling fires. All utterly unique in their composition and totally brilliant in their performances.

Children are not constrained by rules when making music. They have no limits and their imaginations know no bounds. I love listening to their ideas, seeing their enthusiasm at the piano and applying their ideas and even getting them written down in some way.

Encouraging imagination, creativity and story-telling at the piano helps learners to understand the stories that other composers are telling through their music, and is a fantastic springboard for learning about and interpreting every aspect of music. 

Some great music to listen to that tells stories:

• Carnival of the Animals – Camille Saint-Saens
• Peter and the Wolf – Prokovief
• The Sorcerer’s Apprentice – Paul Dukas (or in fact anything from Disney’s Fantasia)

A 233 year old piano is returning to the UK for restoration after being taken to Australia on the First Fleet in 1788. It belonged to the ship’s surgeon of HMS Sirius, which carried almost 200 people, including sailors and their families. But why did the surgeon take his piano with him? Was it played on the ship as it made its 8 month journey to Australia? If so, what joy and comfort must its sound have brought to the passengers and crew of that ship as they journeyed to the unknown.

Music knows no boundaries and transports us across space and time to places we may (or may not) rather be, and the emotional response that music can stimulate in us is like nothing else on earth.

When I moved to Australia I took my piano with me too. A familiar piece of furniture in an unfamiliar place, playing music that’s reminiscent of people and places of home, and the reassurance of doing something with ease when your heart and body feels uneasy and homesick was a welcome break from navigating a new life in a new place, just as it must have been for the surgeon, with his piano, over 200 years ago.

We spend the baby and toddler years singing lullabies, winding the bobbin up, giving them saucepans to bang and tambourines to shake, and then suddenly it’s school time and the music-making grinds to a halt. Music always seems to be one of the first subjects to suffer when budgets are cut in education.

Giant floor stave! Love playing games on this with students and looking at music in an enormous and colourful way. The possibilities with it are endless and it’s great for student-led learning, getting us off the piano stool and moving around. We’ve danced on it, hopped and jumped on it, played rolling and throwing games on it, built “musical towers” with duplo on it and generally marvelled at it’s versatility and its ability to make a line of music look so exciting!