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.
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