KSKS35 Programme music: music and space

Jane Werry is a by Jane Werry specialist leader in education, and director of music at Hayes School in Bromley. She is an A level moderator for INTRODUCTION OCR, and a regular contributor to Music This is a series of lessons investigating the ways in which rhythm, melody and harmony can be used to Teacher online create particular effects relating to a topic – in this case, space. Three pieces of music are approached in resources. a workshopping style: ‘Mars’ from Holst’s The Planets suite, ‘Darth Vader’s Theme’ from John Williams’s Star Wars soundtrack, and the Doctor Who theme music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Once these pieces have been thoroughly explored, students will then compose their own pieces of space-themed music using the ideas they have encountered. Although the three pieces are essentially classical in style, students’ own compositions may not be – there is potential for great flexibility in this respect.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES „„ To make links between specific features of music and the meanings we construct from it. „„ To explore how metre and rhythm affect the feeling of the music, particularly the differences between 4/4 and 5/4 metres, and the use of rhythmic ostinato including triplets. „„ To learn to use notation to help organise rhythmic ideas. „„ To explore how distinctive intervals can help shape an effective melody, particularly tritones and minor 9ths. „„ To explore how minor and major tonality can be used to manipulate the feeling of a piece of music. „„ To explore how juxtaposition of chords a tritone apart has a specific, space-like feeling.

TIMESCALE Between six and ten hours of teaching time, depending on whether all three pieces are workshopped, and the level of detail that teachers choose to go into.

PRIOR KNOWLEDGE Students should already be aware that a beat is the unit of musical time, and that these are grouped together in bars. However, it does not matter if this concept is relatively new. Likewise, this could be students’ first encounter with rhythm notation, or could fit in where they have already done some work on this.

They will need to be clear on the differences between melodies, rhythms and chords. It would be possible to simplify the project and leave out the work on chords, and stick to focusing on rhythm and melody, if this would suit.

RESOURCES The project is not instrument-specific, but it will help to have a mixture of pitches available, especially with some low instruments. You will need some percussion for rhythmic ostinatos, although this could be anything at all, or could even be done using body percussion and beatboxing.

It will be helpful to create a set of rhythm cards for the notation activities – these have multiple uses so are a Classroom good investment of time and effort. workshopping is a method for whole- class musical exploration and creation. If you WORKSHOPPING ‘MARS’ FROM THE PLANETS would like more background on SUITE how to use this technique in your To workshop a piece of music, it is necessary to break it down into its fundamental features, and then use these classroom, there are in a practical and creative way, incorporating students’ ideas as you go. The fundamentals of ‘Mars’ that I have great resources on the Musical Futures chosen to use here are its 5/4 metre, its rhythmic ostinato, and its distinctive melodic pattern that outlines a website here. rising tritone.

1 Music Teacher November 2015 DIPPITY DOPPITY DOODAH DAY „„ In a circle, keep a pulse going, first of all with a lap-pat or foot-tap – maybe later without any audible sound, just feeling the pulse. „„ The teacher says either ‘dippity’, ‘doppity’, ‘doodah’ or ‘day’ and this travels round the circle, with each student repeating in turn on the beat. Be careful to keep the ‘dippity’ and ‘doppity’ as even triplets, like this:

„„ The teacher can drop in the words in any order. Once established, they can send the words round in both directions. The aim is not to miss a beat, and keep in time, saying the right thing at the right time, and watching out for what’s approaching from each side. A student can take the role of leader if appropriate. „„ Have a set of cards with the following on them (at least A5 size):

„„ You will need several of each: enough for one card per student, but with more ‘days’ than ‘doppitys’ and ‘doodahs’. Hand out the cards, randomly, one to each student. Keeping a pulse, each student says their card in turn. „„ Ask how we can divide the pulse into groups, and how we can make the first beat of each group stand out. This might be through accenting the first of each group, adding a stamp, standing up, or anything else students come up with. Try 4s, then 3s, and finally 5s. Discuss how the 5s feel in comparison to the 4s and 3s – they will probably be more difficult to keep going, and feel rather unsettled.

LISTENING TO ‘MARS’ AND CREATING RHYTHMIC OSTINATOS „„ Ask students to listen in silence to the first couple of minutes of ‘Mars’. You can direct them to listen for specific things, but I like to leave it completely open, and then just invite them to start a conversation afterwards, making whatever comments or asking whatever questions occur to them. It is quite common for

Music Teacher November 2015 2 students to ask whether the music is from Star Wars, to which of course the answer is no, but the reasons why they thought that are worth pursuing further, with a promise that later in the project we will be exploring the similarities between ‘Mars’ and some music from the Star Wars soundtrack. Talk about The Planets suite, and the characters assigned to each planet by Holst, based on astrology, Mars being the Bringer of War. What is there in the music that makes it sound warlike? „„ See if students can identify the metre of ‘Mars’, listening to the opening again if necessary. Introduce the idea of an ostinato if they have not encountered it before. Play the rhythmic ostinato from ‘Mars’ over and over while students use their cards to work out the correct notation: this could be done in groups or as a whole class. Groups could either use Holst’s ostinato, or create their own using the cards, but should keep the 5/4 metre. You may want „„ At this point you can make a decision as a class as to whether to keep Holst’s ostinato or create a new to introduce the one by mixing and matching the rhythm cards. It would be good to keep with a 5/4 metre if possible, but if term ‘tritone’ as an interval made up of maintaining this is too difficult you could use 4/4. If sticking with 5/4 it will be necessary to have a confident three tones. You may player on a prominent instrument to lead the way. also wish to add in some background about its historical ADDING MELODIES BASED ON A TRITONE association with evil: „„ Listen again to the opening of ‘Mars’ and identify the melody that goes over the top of the rhythmic ostinato. ‘diabolus in musica’ Either get students to work out the first three pitches (G-D-C sharp), or tell them that these are the notes. (‘the devil in music’) Depending on the instruments you are using, you may wish to transpose this motif down a tone to F-C-B: or even ‘the devil’s doorbell’. this might be useful if you are using diatonic xylophones. „„ Divide the class into ostinato players and melody players, and experiment with ways of using the motif over the rhythmic ostinato. If you want to keep the roles flexible, you could have the rhythmic ostinato played as a pedal note, as Holst does: either on G or F, depending on which transposition of the motif you are using. This gives you the flexibility for students to swap periodically between being ostinato players and melody players. As a class, decide on ways to use dynamics, texture, the different timbres available, and ways of playing the notes. For example, could xylophone players, string players or guitarists use tremolo to create long notes with some added drama? What happens if all the notes are heard at once (as a chord)? Create a structure for your piece. You could even give it a title, and make an audio/video recording.

ADDING CHORDS A TRITONE APART If you wish to add a harmonic element to the piece, you could experiment with chords a tritone apart. If you are using Holst’s original key, this will involve G major to C sharp major, and if you are transposing to F-C-B, the chords will be F major to B major.

To make the chords easier to play, you could assign individual notes to students as follows:

Original key Transposed G-D-C# F-C-B G major C# major F major B major G G# F F# B C# A B D E# C D#

This could even be done as a vocal exercise, which could add an effective contrast of timbres to the overall piece. Experiment with changing vowel sounds on the chord change, such as aah-ooh. Otherwise the individual notes could be played on any pitched instruments, with students starting off playing single notes and then building up to two or three at a time when they feel confident. Whatever happens, have a strong bass part on G-C sharp or F-B.

SETTING HOMEWORK FOR THIS PROJECT: A ‘TAKEAWAY’ HOMEWORK

You may want – or be required – to set homework for each project that you do. It can be extremely effective to introduce an element of choice into homework tasks: this can increase engagement (and completion) significantly. It is, of course, highly desirable to make the homework tasks things that require some musical

3 Music Teacher November 2015 thought, and not just of the ‘go away and research X’ variety. If you include some performing or composing options into homework, it is often surprising what students come up with when they are working under their own steam away from the classroom. The availability of audio and video recording capabilities via smartphones and tablets is also a good tool if enough of your students have access to them.

One way of structuring all this is to create a ‘takeaway homework’, where students choose tasks from a menu. This might involve them doing one longer, more complex task, or a series of shorter, simpler ones. Assigning points to tasks makes it easy to ensure that each student does enough, and has an idea in advance about the difficulty and challenge involved in each of the tasks.

You could lay out the homework sheet as though it was a menu from a familiar chain such as Pizza Hut or Nando’s. This example uses the Nando’s peri-ometer to structure the points system:

This sheet could be made available to students via your VLE to save on printing. Because many of these options involve submitting audio or even video files, it would be good if students can submit their work online too.

Because this is quite a meaty piece of homework, give students long enough to complete it well. You may wish to allow them to collaborate with others if they choose one of the ‘hotter’ options.

The question of why so much film music is in a classical style is an interesting one, and rooted in the history of cinema. In the early days of silent film, musicians – an organist or pianist, or sometimes an orchestra – were hired to play live in the cinema to drown out the noise of the projector, and add some drama to the visuals on-screen. So, by the time ‘talkies’ came about in the late 1920s and early 1930s, music and film were inextricably linked.

The timing of this technological development was crucial in the style of the music that became the norm for film soundtracks. With Hitler’s regime gathering momentum, Hollywood was a safe and lucrative place for European composers of Jewish origin to work, and composers such as Max Steiner and Erich Korngold found much success as house composers for the big film companies. These composers were from the post-Romantic European classical tradition, and found that leitmotifs and lush orchestration were extremely effective in the context of film.

Although from the 1960s onwards films have experimented with using different styles of music in their soundtracks, many do still carry on the tradition of using orchestral music. This has recently extended into the classical-style music written for computer games.

Music Teacher November 2015 4 WORKSHOPPING THE DOCTOR WHO THEME

The Doctor Who theme music was composed in 1963 by Australian composer Ron Grainer, and arranged/ produced by Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop using techniques that were at the forefront of musical technology at the time: oscillators, white noise and tape techniques derived from the musique concrète style of composers such as Stockhausen and Varèse.

Since then it has been rearranged many times, to reflect the changing faces of the Doctor himself, and the musical tastes of the times. Orchestrations and keys have changed, countermelodies added and taken away, and the inclusion of the major-key middle eight drifted in and out of the many different versions. An excellent whistle-stop tour of the first 50 years of the Doctor Who music can be foundhere , and the current incarnation of the music is different again. A great discussion could be had if students watched these videos as an extra homework task, and came to the subsequent lesson prepared to vote for their favourite version of the theme, and explain their choices.

It is a great tune for workshopping because it is ultimately very simple, and since there have been so many versions of it over time, we can take a few liberties in picking the features that are simplest to reproduce. Like ‘Mars’, it has an ostinato that uses triplets and a melody with a very distinctive shape. It is good to include the middle eight so that you can teach about the effect of a change from minor to major. You can also have a lot of fun playing around with octave displacement.

GETTING THE OSTINATO GOING „„ Using the cards as a visual prompt, get the following rhythm going:

„„ Now add pitch. To keep things simple, we will do the theme in A minor/C major. There are two variants of the bass riff that could be used for the minor-key section: you could use both, or just the second one:

„„ In most versions of the Doctor Who music, the first is used in the introduction, and the second in the main minor-key section, but you could mix and match in discussion with your class. There is also a variant of the second with passing notes, which you could introduce if you like:

„„ You could get these going vocally first, before playing on instruments. A perk of using this key is that it is easy to play these riffs on the bass guitar, or the lowest two strings of a regular guitar.

ADDING THE MELODY You might have found that your students have already spontaneously added this in, vocally! This can be a great way to reproduce the swoopy sound of Delia Derbyshire’s original oscillators. It’s worth stopping to think about the way that octave displacement is used in the melody to make it really distinctive. This is the basic shape of the opening:

5 Music Teacher November 2015 This is a very simple tune, and it works well enough like that, but it is actually played in three different octaves, to give it its characteristic swoop:

Not all of the versions of the theme have the second displacement. It might be really fun at this point to challenge your class to play the full melody of this section with as much octave displacement as they can muster on whichever instruments they have. To facilitate this you may wish to supply them with note names rather than notation, to take away the shape of the melody (here the boxes are equivalent to the bars):

E E G E E C G F E E F D E D

THE MIDDLE EIGHT Often used only in the longer, closing credits of Doctor Who episodes, the middle eight is a really good example of a dramatic change to the relative major. Together with the fanfare-like quality of the melody, this lends the music a heroic feel, which contrasts very effectively with the menacing quality of the first section. „„ The notes of the ostinato will need to change to fit the new key. If you feel it is appropriate, you may wish to introduce the concept of tonic and dominant at this point. It is a good way to start thinking about the concept of key: namely, that a key is a collection of (usually) seven notes, and the tonic and dominant are the two most important of these. Bass riffs are often made from the tonic and dominant notes: refer back to ‘Mars’ where the ostinato is on a tonic pedal. To change the key, we need to change the notes of the ostinato. So, where before we were using A and E, we now need to change this to C and G:

„„ It would be possible to improvise a melody using notes of a C major chord over this. However, if you want to reproduce the middle eight faithfully, the movement of the bass is a little more complex, and requires the subdominant as well. Depending on how confident your students are about using notation, you could present it to them using note-names only, with boxes to represent bars as follows:

„„ Then return to the first section to complete the whole piece in ternary form.

MASHING UP ‘MARS’ AND DOCTOR WHO Ask your students to suggest ways that ideas from ‘Mars’ could be incorporated into their version of Doctor Who. These might include using ‘Mars’ as an alternative middle eight. Could Doctor Who be played in 5/4? This will be difficult, but worth a try: it will need someone very confident to keep the 5/4 rhythm going to keep everyone together. Could ‘Mars’ be played in 4/4 over the Doctor Who bass riff? Anything is worth a go: try out all suggestions and agree on your own distinctive way of playing it. Consider dynamics, texture and timbre, depending on the effect that you want to create.

Music Teacher November 2015 6 Now is a good point in the project to think about the way in which musical devices affect the feeling of the music. There are the obvious happy and sad qualities of major and minor (although in both pieces explored so far, the minor key music is more menacing than sad). But there are other questions to get your students to think about at this point. See what questions they come up with themselves, but if prompting is needed, throw out the following:

„„ How does the 5/4 music of ‘Mars’ feel different to the 4/4 of Doctor Who? If you tried Doctor Who in 5/4, how did it change the feeling?

„„ How does having a rhythmic ostinato add to the drama of these two pieces?

„„ What is the effect of the triplets in the ostinatos in both pieces?

„„ Both pieces start with a rising leap, followed by a descending step. Is this significant? Why is this a good shape for a melody?

WORKSHOPPING ‘THE IMPERIAL MARCH’ FROM STAR WARS

The ‘Imperial March’ (sometimes known as ‘Darth Vader’s Theme’) was composed by John Williams for The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. It is a good example of a leitmotif – a theme connected to a character. Versions of the leitmotif can be heard in the Star Wars prequel trilogy as indications of young Anakin Skywalker’s future as Darth Vader.

It features triplets in a striking and dramatic ostinato, and is based around two minor chords, a 3rd apart. Over this, there is a fanfare-like melody based around notes of a triad. Comparisons can be made with ‘Mars’, and, once students have played ‘The Imperial March’, a good discussion could be had about the extent to which John Williams may or may not have been influenced by Holst. Another piece that is ripe for comparison is Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’, which revolves around two chords a 3rd apart in a similar way, although one of Chopin’s chords is major.

GETTING THE BASS AND RHYTHM GOING It may be helpful to add a crotchet rest to your rhythm cards at this point, and check that you have enough ‘doppity’ cards to create the rhythm from the ‘Imperial March’ bassline:

This is transposed up a tone from the original (which uses G minor and E flat minor chords) in order to use fewer black notes. Play the introduction over and over while students use the cards to work out the rhythm: warn them that it is rather fast!

Then you can add in notes of the chords, in whichever way suits the students and the instruments they are using. This might be with students dividing up the notes between them, or playing all the notes in the chords as appropriate. The most efficient way to space the chords in terms of minimising movement is as follows:

ADDING A MELODY At this point you could choose whether to play Williams’s original melody, or improvise your own using notes of an F major/minor chord. The only difficulty with playing the original version is that the chords do not move in a predictable pattern, so you would either need to show students a prompt or teach them how the chords move by rote. Here is a prompt that you could use:

7 Music Teacher November 2015 Alternatively, you could stick to the chord pattern and rhythmic ostinato from the introduction, and add your own melodies over the top, using the notes F, A, A flat, C and E. This is good for pointing out to your class the fact that when the chord is A minor, the melody will fit better with A naturals and Es, and when the chord is F minor, A flats and Fs will sound better.

PLAYING AROUND WITH THE STYLE In preparation for the creative work students will undertake in groups, this might be a good time to explore changing the style of the music. The epic nature of ‘The Imperial March’ lends itself very well to adaptation into a range of styles: YouTube has many excellent cover versions that could inspire, including a rock cover and an a cappella cover. Add a rock beat, change the instruments, change the tempo: it’s all up for grabs. Could ‘The Imperial March’ be made to sound like a lullaby? A folk song?

COMPOSING

By this point in the project, students have had plenty of guidance on how to put together and manipulate their music, together with a good number of actual musical ideas from the pieces that have been workshopped. Together, these can be seen as a palette that students can now draw on to create their own pieces.

You could summarise the contents of the palette like this: „„ Rhythmic ostinato including triplets „„ The unsettling nature of a 5/4 metre „„ Making a rhythmic ostinato into a tonic pedal „„ Using upward leaps to create a distinctive melodic shape, particularly tritones and minor 9ths „„ Using chords a tritone or a 3rd apart „„ Octave displacement „„ The juxtaposition of minor and major for dramatic effect „„ Using changes of timbre, texture, tempo and dynamics for dramatic effect „„ Using notes of a chord to create a fanfare-like melody

How you structure the composing part of the project depends on a number of variables: how much time you want to spend on it, the level of prescription you feel that your students need, and the resources available. It would be entirely possible to make this part of the project technology-based, and use a sequencing program, looper, or anything else you have available. Students might work individually or in groups. You may give students more or less choice about how they work.

Setting a brief is a good way to give a framework within which to work, without necessarily being too prescriptive about what needs to be included. This could be as loose as ‘create a piece of music about space’, or as tight as creating a soundtrack for a specific piece of film about space.

Being open to unexpected outcomes is a good approach to take here, as there are so many possibilities, particularly if your students have been encouraged to be adventurous with style, that it is good not to put a limit on these.

Music Teacher November 2015 8 Assessment

You will need a method for assessment that creates a record of progress over time and feedback given, while remaining easy to administer. One way of doing this is to use radar diagrams. A radar diagram for this project might look something like this:

Each of the 12 things around the edge is a category, for which marks out of five will be awarded periodically throughout the creative stage of the project. Each student will need their own radar diagram, but it can ease the administration of the assessment hugely to have these organised so that students working as a group have all their diagrams on the same sheet.

The procedure for using the radars is as follows: „„ Each lesson, the sheets are handed out to the individuals or groups to whom they belong. „„ The teacher uses a different coloured pen each time, and writes the date at the top of the sheet in the colour they are using that day. This way, marks awarded and feedback given is linked to a specific lesson, and so records progress over time. „„ As you move around the class during a lesson, you can award marks by putting a coloured blob in the relevant place on the radar diagram. You will not be marking all the categories all of the time, just the ones that are relevant at that particular moment. You can add any written comments or guidance to the sheet as well, as long as there is a space left between the radars. These comments may pertain to the whole group, or to individuals, as appropriate. „„ If you award, say, 2/5 for any particular category today, you may then give a higher mark in the future: it provides a stimulus for discussion, and highlights for the student the areas where they need to focus their improvements. „„ Likewise, you may not write on every group’s sheet every lesson. However, it will be easy to see who you need to prioritise for a feedback visit next time.

At the end of the project, each student will have a bank of feedback and a total out of 60. This can then be converted to a grade if that is what your school’s system requires.

9 Music Teacher November 2015