Two Neat Arrangements of Flight of the Bumblebee

A couple students told me today that they heard Flight of the Bumblebee while watching Full House last night. How awesome is that that they're finding music from class in real life?!

Here's a neat brass quintet arrangement of Flight of the Bumblebee, performed by Canadian Brass. A brass quintet consists of two trumpets, a horn, a trombone, and a tuba. In this case, they've got a regular trumpet and a piccolo trumpet (the smaller one that the man second from the left is playing). The word "piccolo" means "small" in Italian, so it's basically just a smaller (therefore higher) trumpet.

Here's another Canadian Brass version of this piece - this one is called Flight of the Tuba Bee...and you'll find out why! This is a very skilled tuba player.

About the Performers: Canadian Brass
Canadian Brass is perhaps the world's most famous brass group. This brass quintet (two trumpets, a horn, a trombone, and a tuba) was formed in 1970. Different players have come and gone, but the group has maintained a characteristic sound in the more than 40 years that it has existed. During that time, they've recorded over 100 albums, have sold well over 2 million albums worldwide, and have toured the world multiple times. If you want more information about this world-famous group, check out their website.

Rhythm Review...with Legos!

Today we worked on reviewing rhythms in 4/4 time with grades 3, 4, and 5. There are so many neat resources out there for SMART Boards, including these Lego rhythms! Each bump on top represents one beat, so it's a great tool for visual learners. We also verbally reviewed for auditory learning, and tapped each student-written rhythm out using rhythm sticks (while speaking the rhythms) for kinesthetic learning.

These were some of the rhythms students created:
(from top to bottom, 5C, 5NW, 4G, 4W, 3K, and 3B)

SQUILT #1: Flight of the Bumblebee

SQwhat?

SQUILT stands for Super Quiet Uninterrupted Listening Time. I created worksheets that ask the students about musical elements such as dynamics, tempo, instrumentation, and mood. This follows the state standards for musical analysis.

The piece I chose for our first listening activity was a short one: Flight of the Bumblebee by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. This piece is from the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan. In class, we discussed the word "tsar," and that it's the Russian equivalent of a king. We also learned that the bumblebee in the piece isn't just a bumblebee, but a prince that was turned into a bumblebee by a magic swan!

Before we explored the background of the piece, we watched this video to get an idea of what we would be getting into:

As for the musical elements on the SQUILT sheet, we decided that it's both forte (loud) and piano (soft), it's fast, it uses instruments and not voices (lots of woodwinds and strings!), and it evoked a variety of moods in the students, including happy, energetic, mad, upset, and relaxed.

Ahoy, mateys!

Today was International Talk Like a Pirate Day, so we celebrated in K-2 by exploring our pirate voices and playing the pirate version of the singing game "Doggy, Doggy."

The new lyrics:
Pirate, pirate, where's your gold?
Someone stole it from your trove.
(Pirate:) Who stole my gold?
(Thief:) I stole your gold.

While we sang this in a seated circle, a student designated as the pirate stood outside the circle, facing away from us. As we sang, we passed around a small piece of "gold" on the steady beat. The last person to get it within one round was the "thief." Once the thief sang, the pirate got three guesses to figure out who the thief was. I was impressed at how well the students knew their classmates' voices!

Welcome!

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Lannoye Music Blog!

The third week of school is almost done, and it's been a whirlwind so far! Lots of name games, pitch exploration, solfege review in the older grades, and fun... One name game that was particularly well-received had a "We Will Rock You" beat underneath it.

Another big hit in the music room has been Smoulder, our resident dragon musician. Smoulder has quite the background story: Due to a genetic disorder, he can't produce fire from his mouth...only a bit of ash...but as one of the third graders put it, he breathes music instead! Smoulder loves to sing and fly at the same time - when he flies up high, he sings high, and when he flies down low, he sings low. He's a great prop for our pitch exploration exercises! (I thought the younger students would like him more than the older students, but the 4th and 5th graders are quite enamored with him!) Go Dragons!