And we're back with SSME!
It's been while since my last blog post, but I'm back to tell you all about the biggest subject I'm doing this semester, Senior Secondary Music Education, which is all about preparing music ed students to teach year 11 and 12.
The major assignment involved preparing a unit of work for HSC Music 2 students, and the first part of the assignment relied on selecting five pieces of repertoire that would be the core works that your class studies over the years. As well as the works all having to represent the mandatory topic, Music of the Last 25 Years (Australian focus), there was an additional requirement that at least one composer had to be from outside Australia, one had to be female, and one work had to be from a non-classical style*.
Getting to Work
Once I had these parameters, I went about trying to find a bunch of works that would form the core repertoire for an HSC Music 2 class. As well as the requirements specified above, the works had to have a score and recording available, because this is the way that music is studied in the HSC Music 2 course. There were a few important resources that I drew upon, particularly in trying to find scores. The first is the Australian Music Centre, which is a website devoted mostly to Australian classical music, although there is a bit of jazz on there as well. This website has a huge repository of scores and recordings, which was very helpful when deciding what works to choose. I also made full use of the recordings on YouTube and Spotify, and I also found scores on the Alexander Street, an online database, though I relied upon the Con having a subscription to the website.
So... to summarise my search parameters:
I was looking for five works composed in the last 25 years
These works needed to have a score and recording readily available
There needed to be an Australian classical music focus
I also needed to choose:
One work by a non-Australian composer
One work by a female composer
One work that was not classical music
I figured that I could combine some of the above categories
I also wanted to have a range of works that covered different instrumentation, structure, tempo, tonality and stylistic features
Good Work Hunting
Despite the wealth of resources on the Australian Music Centre, scores were the most difficult thing to access because of the exorbitant pricing on many of the works. I found a number of really interesting works that satisfied the above criteria, including Stuart Greenbaum's "800 Million Heartbeats", Paul Stanhope's "Agnus Dei", and "On Further Reflection" by David John Lang.
In the end, I chose five works that would require students to learn a wide variety of skills, that would expose them to a range of instruments, forms, techniques and concepts, and that would stretch their concept of what music of the last 25 years actually sounds like.
The Final Five
I've listed the works below in the form: composer // work // year // instruments // compositional style
Arvo Pärt // Da Pacem Domine // Choir (SATB) // Sacred
Nigel Westlake // Ready to Launch (Paper Planes) // Orchestra // Film score
Matthew Hindson // Movt. III from "Pulse Magnet" // 2 pianos, 2 perc. // Standalone
Sandy Evans // Big Swell from "Cosmic Waves" // Sop. sax, others // World
J. Humberstone // "Gun Bay" from Noise Husbndry // Found sounds // Standalone
In terms of filling the requirements, Arvo Pärt is an Estonian composer, Sandy Evans is a female composer and her work "Big Swell" could be called jazz, jazz fusion, world music or something else, but certainly not Western classical music.
* I'm ideologically opposed to referring to classical music as "art music", because it implies that other styles are not art, thereby explicitly devaluing and misrepresenting them. Everyone outside of the world of music education knows what you mean when you say "classical music", so I'm going to continue to refer to it that way, fully aware of the potential issues with this label.