Welcome to the Biddulph High School Music Department blog. I hope to keep you posted about all musical activity in school and possibly entertain you with news and reviews. Use the labels to navigate to specific materials
The 2014 Talent Show was held on the 24th September. It was another memorable evening and very difficult to choose just 3 winners.
Eventually we decided to award 3rd prize to Emily Lockett (Y9), who sang and played the guitar with great skill and personality. 2nd prize went to Daisy Mitchell (10), who bravely and beautifully sang an aria in Italian. The 1st prize was awarded to William Davenport (Y11) who played his own composition "Ice" on the piano.
Special mention should also be given to Luke Imber, Millicent James, Alex Webb, Kieran and Jordan Picken for their great performances.
Sound and lighting were provided by Dominic Axford and Christopher Davis, with help from former student Daniel Jones.
Tickets and refreshments were organised by Caitlin Duncan and Rosie Bould
Mahler's work is at the end of the Romantic era and greatly influenced what happened in music in the rest of the 20th Century. His pieces are mainly written for huge orchestras, sometimes with singers added. They are highly dramatic works with a huge variety of material: Mahler thought that the symphony should "contain the whole world", so you will find funeral marches, military music, Jewish klezmer, Viennese waltzes.
What Mahler adds to this is:
a sense of irony - sometimes he seems to be making fun
predictions about the future - as a Jew frequently suffering from antisemitism he seems to portray both the death of millions of Jews in the Holocaust and the Nazi marching boots
music which shows the full passion of love, builds to a climax and then suddenly stops (he was a friend of Freud and seems to understand his ideas of psychoanalysis
Try this for his irony and Jewish music. The double bass is playing a minor version of Frère Jacques and then Jewish music, sounding like the much later Fiddler on the Roof, takes over
And try this for those Nazi boots marching:
And this because it just might change your life!
Something to read while you listen?
Mahler's favourite novel, religion, morals and murder:
A great book about the suffering of the Jews at Auschwitz:
And a romance with Freudian overtones:
You can avoid recording in class by recording your work at home and bringing it in to school on a memory stick or emailing it to me here
It's often difficult to send large files so it's best to upload it to services such as YouTube, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud etc and then sending me the link
Want to record your piece away from the rest of your class? Book a practice room at lunchtime
I am currently reading: Boyhood Island by Karl Ove Knausguaard
I have produced playlists which will help with your revision in two places:
YouTube
and Spotify. Here are some sample playlists:
You can use this music as a sort of passive revision - to listen to while doing something else, or you can use it in a more active way - try listening to 1 minute extracts 3 times and then writing what you can about the different Areas of Study. They are: rhythm and metre, harmony and tonality, texture and melody, timbre and dynamics and structure and form. Good luck!
It’s quite possible that Beethoven is the greatest composer
ever. His symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas are amongst the best
(probably the best) examples of each genre. His music divides into three
periods:
·Early – where his music shows the influence of
Classical composers like Haydn and Mozart
·Middle – where, perhaps because of his
sympathies with revolutionary politics, his music becomes more powerful and
full of extreme emotions, signalling the beginning of the Romantic period
·Late – where, perhaps as his deafness became
worse, his music becomes more inward-looking and spiritual and looks forward to
a world of sound many years ahead of its time
Beethoven’s music is full of rhythmic vitality and often
uses short ideas (motivic development) to bind his structures and give them a
logical inevitability. Many works seem to have a sense of struggle being
overcome by a united humanity. His only opera, Fidelio, tells of people,
unjustly imprisoned, being released into light and freedom.
Want to read something while you listen? Try these:
Victor Hugo: Les Misérables – this is a long book but it
really captures the spirit of Beethoven in its story of struggles against
poverty, revolutionaries and love
Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther – a coming of age novel
from 1774, one which began the Romantic period
Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities – an exciting story about the
French Revolution
Wednesday, 5 February 2014
If you like Twitter, you're welcome to follow the official music department account "BHS Music" for the latest news: @tdwindsor
