Musical Periods Lesson Plan (Authentic Instruction Activity)

Marriage of Figaro - Overture

 

Georgia Performance Standards

MMSMT.6 - Listening to, analyzing, and describing music

a)      Uses sequencing software to isolate individual elements for critical listening.

b)      Identify and describe compositional devices, tonalities, meters, chordal structures, and techniques.

c)       Uses sequencing software or digital audio workstation to compare and contrast musical styles, genres, and performance

MMSMT.8 - Understanding relationships between music, the other arts, and disciplines outside the arts

a)      Learns the relationship between music, the arts, and other disciplines using CAI and multimedia software.

b)      Demonstrates the relationships among music, the arts, and other disciplines by creating a multimedia presentation.

Grade level: 9^th-12^th, Advanced Music Theory

Authentic Instruction Method

The Inquiry/Discovery Method would be used to help students explore the different ways that musical styles have been influenced by history and culture.

Lesson Plan

The unit would begin with a video overview of the different musical eras from the medieval to the 20^th century. The lesson would also include listening and identifying certain musical aspects that indicate the musical style (instrumentation, chordal structures, polyphony, compositional style, etc) as a class and individually.

The students would then be placed in groups and assigned a specific piece of music that exemplified the western classical music era in which it was written. For example, one group might be assigned a portion of the opera, The Marriage of Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart written during the Classical period, (1750-1820). The students would be required to check out the appropriate CD and/or accompanying scores from the library (if available) and/or search the internet for recordings of their assigned works and others works of the same period. Students would be required to research their musical era on the internet, discovering the musical style components that typified the music of that period. The students would also need to research the lives and culture of the composer, drawing inferences between his or her life and their music. The groups would then present a power point presentation addressing the question, “Does art influence culture or does culture influence art?” based on the information they learned about their composer and his or her work. The presentation would need to include multimedia (pictures, musical examples, recordings, etc) from their assigned composer and musical era.

Technologies Used

Internet, power point, word and excel for timelines, CDs or electronic music files, music notation software to highlight certain unifying motifs from music