Introduction
This material provides an opportunity to look closely at what happened when pupils in pairs engaged in composing music at the computer using the Dance eJay programme.
Context
The work on which this material draws arises from a Subject Design Initiative developed collaboratively by two primary teachers with support from two teacher educator/researchers. It was carried out with a Year 6 class.
Jo Heppinstall, the teacher we see in the video is the school's music co-ordinator. She collaborated with Natalie Butterworth, a Year 6 teacher, and her university colleagues in InterActive on designing this unit of work, Composing in Ternary Form with Dance eJay. The Dance eJay programme was new to both teachers; they were introduced to it as members of the Music Subject Design Team in InterActive.
About Dance eJay
Dance eJay provides the users with a variety of short musical samples which they can organise to create their own piece of music. Each sample is represented as a coloured box with its name on it; these boxes vary in length according to the length of the sample. Samples of similar sound quality have the same colour and are placed together in groups. Compositions are created by selecting sounds and dragging them into the 'Play Window' which consists of a number of audio tracks that can be filled or left empty, depending on the number of samples the composer wishes to play together. The 'Play Window' can be saved for future recall.
INSERT DANCE EJAY INTERFACE
Planning the work
The aim of the initiative was for pupils to be able to demonstrate the following skills, all of which relate to the National Curriculum Programmes of Study in Music at Key Stage 2. (DfEE 1999) Specific references are shown in brackets.
- composing skills of choosing, combining and organising musical ideas within a musical structure (2b)
- an understanding of structure trough creating a composition within ternary form. (4b)
- the ability to anlyse and compare sounds (3a)
- an awareness of how music is produced in different ways eg using a computer (4c)
- the ability to refine and improve their work (3c)
- sensitivity in combining the musical elements of timbre and texture to communicate an intended effect (4c)
The plan for the sequence of work included six weekly sessions in the computer suite.
It was decided that the structure of the piece would be ternary form preceded by an introduction and followed by a coda (ending), making the overall form: introduction, section A, section B, section A, coda.
The activity was carefully framed and broken into the following stages.
Week One: Experiment. The pupils were able to 'play' with the programme, become familiar with what it could do and how to work with it.
Week Two: Composing the introduction.
Week Three: Composing A section
Week Four: Composing B section
Week Five: Copy A section after the B section and add a coda (ending).
Week Six: Creating a vocal part to fit with the eJay music they had composed.
Most lessons were planned to begin with the whole class. Generally in this section the outcome was modelled by the teacher. The teacher produced her own composition and also used the pupils' compositions as examples. However, in Lesson Five from which we have taken some short video extracts the pupils were given musical models for endings which they accessed from their own computers and listened to before adding their own codas.
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