Today, a group of Year 5 children were treated to an afternoon of music. We heard several different youth orchestras perform allowing us to be exposed from a variety of types of music drawn from different traditions from folk to jazz. We even had a pupil starring in one of the groups. Lola (6A) played in the Leeds Silver Steel Sparrow band – which was as the title suggests a steel pan group. Here is a sound clip from their performance.

This half term, Year 3 studied the music and life of Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. They listened carefully to his piece ‘Peter and the Wolf’ and used it as a jumping off point to identify different instruments. They then placed these instruments into the different orchestral families as well as looking at the composer’s life.

On Monday, 6A took part in a workshop led by The Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre. We discussed different artefacts and why they might be precious to someone. We looked at the story of Trude, who was a Jewish refugee, we learnt that she had been forced to move from Czechoslovakia during the war and now lives in Leeds.

6K joined us to watch a matinee performance of the opera Brundibar performed predominately by children. The opera focused on two children Aninka and Pepicek who needed milk to help their sick mother. It was written by the Czech composer Hans Krasa and was intended to be enjoyed by children. Krasa was Jewish and premiered the piece secretly at a Jewish orphanage in 1942 during German-occupied Prague.

Björk has become famous for trying out and experimenting with pop music, orchestras, technology, instruments, fashion and spectacular videos. She has challenged what people think a musician should do and has become an ‘artist’ in her own right.

Björk’s work is linked to her Icelandic upbringing. Her album Homogenic was packed full of songs inspired by the country. She stated that she looked at the rough nature of Iceland and its love of technology, and that she wanted to combine strings with electronic music to show this.

Over this half term, we have been looking at Tony Johnston’s picture book ‘The Harmonica’ during our reading sessions. We have also used the book as a stimulus for our music lessons. First, we listened to the music of Franz Schubert and discussed the difference between major and minor chords. Following this we created a 4 chord progression on bandlab using a combination of major and minor chords adding complementary notes over the top. Finally, we added a voice clip of us reading the text to create an audibook.

We wanted a cinematic start to the year with our Musician of the Month. As we drummed our fingers on the table we noticed the coffee in our cups start to ripple. Was a dinosaur walking down the school corridor?

NO – of course not; it was the vibrations from our table drumming, but it did turn our attention to the composer of countless hummable scores, John Williams.

Watch Steven Spielberg praise John Williams’ accompaniments:

Topic for discussion: what difference does it make when a film is backed up with music?

This half term, Year 4 have been learning all about samba music. They learnt the names of the different instruments (ganzas, surdos, agogos and tambourims) and where samba music is widely played. They then used the instruments to perform call and response rhythms and even took on the Queen anthem ‘We Will Rock You.’

Some of our children across the school were invited to represent Allerton CE Primary School at the Around the World Festive Singalong at Pudsey Civic Centre.

They enjoyed dancing, singing, playing instruments, pass the parcel and even a visit from Father Christmas! We are pleased to report that the children, of course, behaved as beautifully as always and had a lovely time.

This month’s Musician of the Month is the British singer-songwriter David Bowie whose career began in the 1960s and seems to be still going 5 years after his death. What a surprise!

With all Bowie’s artistic twists and turns the children have been enjoying exploring how appearance is linked to performance and how performance can help to enhance (or perhaps detract from) a song. Very useful reminders to have when December brings with it our fantastic Christmas performances throughout the school.

We were incredibly lucky to take part in a musical project on Monday. Lieder is a type of classical music where poetry is interspersed with music to create fantastic stories. The session started with Rachel and Phil singing piece of music in German. Even though we didn’t understand the lyrics, we were still able to construct the story through their mannerisms and voice.

We then spoke about different musical aspects that can vary music such as tempo, dynamics and pitch. As a group, we then created our own verse that will appear as part of a much larger piece. We composed our lines to fit the music of German composer Franz Scubert.