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THE ALLEYNIAN 710
A LIBERAL DOSE OF LISTENING
Being granted curriculum time to appreciate music in performance has been a delight, says Brooke Storey (Year 12)
I was one of the small group of Year 12 students who attended the ‘Fine-tuning your ear’ Liberal Studies course during the Michaelmas term. It was an interesting, entertaining course, allowing us to learn about and discuss music that we had never heard before, while also opening up new discussions about music to which we had been listening for years without truly thinking of the meaning behind it. The course was run with three main focuses in mind: the musical aspects of the piece, the cultural context and the meaning behind the music. It was the last of these that we particularly focused on when we listened to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the ‘Pastoral’, and discussed the fact that he was composing it with the idea of the Austrian countryside in mind. We then explored the musical features and techniques he used to paint what he saw in his mind, using his musical imagination. There was also a hands-on side to the course, with the students given the musical score to follow while listening, and then having an opportunity to play a piano arrangement of the piece, so that we could fully understand the music through different activities. Another activity to help us understand how pieces were structured was the performance of a ‘Geographical Fugue’ by Ernst Toch, which is a spoken piece, in which the performers engage in rhythmical utterances of a number of geographical locations with interesting names, such as Trinidad, Honolulu and Titikaka. While the entire course was thoroughly enjoyed by all the students who took part, the highlight was the trip to the Southbank Centre, where we listened to the Philharmonia play Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony and the
Sibelius Violin Concerto, two of the pieces that we had been studying throughout the term. In the Lent term, I attended a second Liberal Studies course, this one entitled ‘Understanding Opera: It’s not over until the fat lady sings’. It was open to all Year 12 students, regardless of previous knowledge or experience, and covered a range of topics: the basic elements of opera and what makes it so appealing; the complicated politics of opera writing and performing; the issue of what themes still apply to today’s world; and the ways in which we can adapt the stories told in opera to fit the 21st century. I learned about the writing of some of the world’s most popular operas, discovering that there is so much more to their creation than simple storytelling, and that they often reflected contemporary tension and political unrest. Many of them helped to open people’s minds to revolutionary ideas, which were often portrayed symbolically in the storylines. Activities in the lessons varied from listening to opera and talking about the hidden meanings, to discussing the relevance of set design in adapting the stories to suit a modern audience. Outside of the lessons, we took a trip to the Royal Opera House to see a new interpretation of Handel’s Theodora , a piece last performed in the Opera House in 1750. This modern production touched on issues of sexual violence and female empowerment, showing how possible it is to update opera to reflect the ideas and concerns of each generation of opera-goers.
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