Last week, the students in the groups that meet every day had sectionals on Wednesday. I worked with the different sections of the orchestra (1st violins, 2nd violins, violas, cellos and basses) of the pieces that they will be playing for the concert. When the students were not in a sectional, they spent time brainstorming ideas for the classroom blog and then took turns typing in their contributions.
Mrs. Buehl
Four Royal Dances
4 sections/dances called The Knight, The Lady, The Jester, and The Lord.
There are different dynamics and speed.
Activities
We do a lot of scales.
One person tunes and everyone follows.
Word Wall words we have been learning:
Solo – in all of the songs
Fugue – In Fairly Fugal
Sforzando – In The Knight
Erica, Juliana, Danielle, and Caroline did it yeah!
“The Four Royal Dances”
“The Four Royal Dances” is a beautiful four part piece that throughout, paints images of dancing nobles from the renaissance times. The four included nobles are the loyal lord, the weeping lady, the jubilant jester, and lastly the heroic knight.
Word Wall
We have learned many musical terms like suspension. Suspension is where there is a clashing or tense sound that is usually resolved within the next note or so with a major chord or sound. Another word that we learned is subito. Subito is the musical term meaning when a dynamic is immediately changes to the next dynamic or temporarily to a new way of playing.
Activities in Class
Some of the different activities that we do during class is the warm up using different keys and rhythms going up and down, sometimes in a round or canon. During some days we come together in smaller learning groups called our learning communities. In those groups we talk about terms or words on the world wall or do different activities. Finally we rehearse together as an orchestra different pieces in sometimes breaking off for a minute or two so one section can practice a section more one-on-one with the teacher.
By: Taylor, Katie, Gloria, Marlee, Bradlee
One Song we have been practicing is “Four Royal Dances”. It has 4 movements, The Lord, The Jester, The Knight and The Lady. This song is only being played by the kids that are in orchestra every day.
Warm ups consist of a scale (f,g,a,b,c,d,e,f,g,a) and we sometimes switch accidentals on the notes. Sometimes we play a tune from one of the songs we are learning.
In small groups we are first starting up with practicing vibrato and ending with practicing measures in all the songs we are playing for the November concert.
By: Lauren .W, Courtney .W, Kaitlyn .W and Tori .S.
The four royal dances is what we play on everyday orchestra. We practice each movement carefully, especially the knight because it's the hardest. We learn even more from the clues we see on the board when we guess the song we are going to practice. Sometimes they are word wall works, which are musical terms that we may not know, but we’ll learn. Before every class we tune our own instruments and do a warm up. The worm up helps teach us hard rhythms and gets us ready to play.
By: Daniel, Gabby, Tori, and Ada
By: Dani S, Anne M, Finnley R, Isaac J, David S, Carissa G
Ellis Island is one of the pieces we are playing this fall that has a long story to the whole piece. Ellis Island shows immigration and hardships that immigrants had to face while leaving their country and settling in the new world. To others in our group it told a story about the immigrant’s struggle of getting to and out of Ellis Island and surviving in the new world. This piece has a very fast speed with lots of triplet notes, making it difficult to count. Many problems we personally have are counting after a certain spot that was especially hard to read. But we learn from our mistakes and make new ones to fix until we have the piece perfect sounding. We are working hard to stride high with this piece and hope our parents will enjoy it!
By: Allie, Abby, Becca, Corey
By the way…VIOLINS RULE!!!
We are learning a lot of pieces right now, but one challenging piece is called Ellis Island. It sounds like it is about a family immigrating to America. The high violin part sounds like the family is amazed at what they see, and the low cello/bass part sounds like the guards who either let immigrants in or send them home. Some challenging parts in this piece include measures 73-79, where the violin 1 part has to play in 3rd position! We all are getting better and better at our playing, so the concerts this year will be great!
