Composers & Conductors

This week we learned about music jobs - Conductors (who lead a group of musicians in playing a piece of music) and Composers - (who write down the music so musicians can play it).

We looked at a piece of music and noticed all the  lines and dots.  We talked about how the dots are the notes.  Solid notes are different from hollow notes and tell the musician how long to play the note.  We also learned that where the note is on the line tells the musician to play high (or low).

We learned about a famous composer: Chopin.  Chopin was 6 years old when he started composing, so you don't have to be a big person to compose music.  We played pretend pianos to Chopin's "Minute Waltz".

Then we "composed" our own music by coloring in notes on a piece of music.

Then we each got to conduct our music, first by calling out the colored notes on our music score, while the musicians played xylophones, chimes and bells.  Finally we waved the baton to lead all our friends in an all-out chime/bell choir!