Teacher guide: Area of study 3(Traditional music) Supernatural by Santana The main analytical content of this guide is much the same as the student guide. The teacher guide offers suggestions for approaches to teaching. Whilst these suggestions are not compulsory, they may help you to structure the delivery of this aspect of Component 1, Understanding music. This study piece is one of the optional questions (11) for section B of the paper, Contextual Understanding. All students must answer question 9, Area of study 1 - Haydn – Symphony no. 101, 2nd Movement, The Clock. They are then free to choose either question 10, 11 or 12. You may wish to teach this study piece to all the students in your class, or you may wish to teach it to those for whom you think it would have the most appeal, selecting another study piece for other students. You may wish to teach all the study pieces thereby giving your students the opportunity to look at all the questions on the paper before deciding which question to answer. However, this would be a big undertaking and would require a lot of time. Remember that in section B students are required to demonstrate knowledge of their contextual understanding of the music in the study pieces. The format of the questions will be the same for each study piece. The first three questions will require relatively short responses and are worth two marks each. The fourth question is worth 8 marks and in this question students will be required to explain their thinking by formulating a coherent and logically structured response. In doing so they should be strongly encouraged to write in continuous prose and structure their response accordingly. There are two specimen papers and Mark Schemes (SAMS) that will help you to understand the types of questions that might be asked. It would certainly be beneficial if students could be given the opportunity to practise writing extended responses prior to the examination. You could use the SAMS papers, write your own questions using a similar format or even formulate similar questions for another closely related piece of music that you might have studied with the students. In considering the contextual aspects of Supernatural, it would certainly be worthwhile looking at some of the Santana’s earlier work before embarking on the study of the three songs from Supernatural. Having the opportunity to listen to earlier works, comparing and contrasting them with the work in Supernatural will certainly help students to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of the music. Guided listening would certainly be helpful here so you might wish to develop some listening exercises for some of Santana’s songs along the lines of the example that was provided in the Preparing to Teach meetings (Led Zeppelin – When the Levee Breaks). Having the opportunity to be able to perform the music will also help students to develop a greater understanding. To assist in this, you may wish to use the classroom performance editions that are also available on the AQA website. Please note that in relation to this study piece, for copyright reasons it has not been possible to produce complete versions of the songs. The performance editions are therefore made up of significant sections in the music, all of which are referenced and explained in the study guide. However, they are all in the original keys and provide opportunity for improvisation. If you have a number of electric guitarists in your group this study piece would be a good choice. Once again, you may wish to perform some of Santana’s earlier work with the students. Black Magic Woman would be a good starting point and would help students to begin to understand the idea of ‘fusion’. This approach might be integrated into the teaching programme by, for example, setting different groups of students the task of learning different songs to perform to the rest of the class. Any integrated approach that attempts to combine the musical activities of listening and appraising, performing and composing will help students to develop their understanding of the music and engage with it enthusiastically. The three songs selected for study on Supernatural are: Love of My Life Smooth Migra There were certainly other strong candidates that could have been selected but these three demonstrate tremendous variety, each with its own individual contextual bias. These elements should be considered strongly throughout the study. Love of My Life Style/Genre – Pop/Rock with Latin elements In this song Santana borrows the theme from the third movement of Brahms’ Symphony No.3 in F major, changes the metre, tempo and dynamic, adds a vocal part and develops the music through improvisation. Study of this piece would also be an excellent starting point for students wanting to look at arranging in composition. Smooth Style/Genre – Merengue/Cha Cha rhythms One of the biggest hit dance records of all time. A real fusion of styles and genres with ‘signature’ elements in the horn playing and percussion parts. Migra Style/Genre – Clave/Bo Diddley /Beat Infectious rhythms combined with traditional Afro-Cuban elements in accordion/horns and typical virtuosic rock guitar improvisation makes this a great ‘protest song’, especially with the combination of Spanish and English lyrics. Finally, in all three songs, consideration should be given to: the impact of the contribution of different musicians from different cultures the variety of musical styles and the contributions of so many different musicians the impact of Santana’s unique and individual guitar style the importance of rhythm, particularly syncopation in Afro-Cuban music Santana’s background and the impact of multi-culturalism. Supernatural – Background Carlos Santana (born July 20 1947) is a Mexican/American musician who first rose to prominence in the late 1960s/early 1970s for his fusion of rock music with Latin American rhythms and instrumental groupings. His band, simply called Santana, had a very distinctive sound that fused together his effortless melodic blues based guitar playing with Latin and African based rhythms, largely captured by the use of percussion instruments such as congas and timbales not normally found in rock music at that time. Influenced by blues players such as B.B. King, John Lee-Hooker, Jimi Hendrix, Peter Green, Mike Bloomfield and Hank Marvin, Santana developed a highly distinctive sound characterised by virtuosic playing with soulful, extended improvised solos, coloured with pitch bends, ornamentation and sweeping runs. In common with many other similar musicians of the time, his music became less fashionable in the mid to late 70s when Punk rock dominated the scene, but he experienced an extraordinary revival in the late 1990s, particularly with his seventeenth album Supernatural which won nine Grammys, album of the year, went 15 times platinum and was a major hit across the world. Santana was born in Autlan de Navarro, Jalisco, Mexico and started his musical journey at a very young age, taking up violin at the age of five. His father who was a Mariachi musician and an accomplished professional orchestral violinist taught him. Mariachi is a form of traditional Mexican music that gradually evolved into what is often now referred to as Son music. At the age of eight the young Carlos emigrated from violin to guitar preferring the sound of the instrument. Santana’s father was frequently absent during his early years and eventually the family moved to Tijuana, a city right on the Mexican/Californian border before finally settling in San Francisco. This movement and exposure to different musical cultures was clearly instrumental in helping Santana forge his own unique and individual style in the 60s and 70s. This was not unusual in America. As one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse countries in the world, it was common for bands to form that contained musicians from different musical and cultural backgrounds, each bringing their own experience and stylistic qualities to create a new fusion of sound. Other examples from the same period include Steely Dan (rock/pop/jazz) and Little Feat (rock/jazz/funk/Latin). The album is one of the best-selling albums in the world, reaching no 1 in many countries and selling over 30 million copies. Unlike most of Santana’s previous albums, this one is a little more unusual in that it contains different artists, mainly vocal, on different tracks. This is certainly not a new concept, for example, the English blues/rock singer Paul Rodgers (Free/Bad Company/Queen) released Muddy Waters Blues in 1993, featuring a different lead guitarist on each track. However, unlike the Paul Rodgers recording, where the album has a unity in that all the tracks are blues based, in the case of Supernatural it could be argued that the album lacks unity and cohesion because the musical styles and artists, particularly the singers, are so diverse. Of course it could also be argued that this diversity is the album’s strength because there is great variety in the musical content. The three tracks that we have selected for study exemplify this diversity, Love of My Life, Smooth and Migra. Love of My Life Co-written with Dave Matthews, a South African/American singer/song- writer/guitarist. Guitar – Carlos Santana Vocal – Dave Matthews Keyboards – George Whitty Bass – Benny Rietveld Drums – Carter Beauford Congas and percussion – Karl Perazzo Structure Intro/Verse 1/Verse 2/Verse 3/Chorus/Instrumental verse x 2/Chorus/Bridge/ Latin instrumental section leading to fade-out. After the death of his father in 1997, Santana didn’t really feel up to playing or even listening to music for some time. When he did return to it, perhaps not surprisingly, given his father’s background, he started listening to radio channels playing classical music.