Choosing a Focus Work
The major assignment for Senior Secondary Music Education (SSME) involved writing a program of work based on one of the focus works that I chose to study over the course of the whole year. For more background about how I chose those works, you can take a look here, but to summarise, the five works I chose were:
Composer // Year // Work title // Instrumentation // Style
S. Evans // 2012 // Big Swell from "Cosmic Waves" // Sop. sax, others // Jazz fusion
M. Hindson // 2001 // Movt. III from "Pulse Magnet" // 2 pianos, 2 perc. // Stand alone
J. Humberstone // 2015 // Gun Bay from "Noise Husbandry" // Found sounds // Stand alone
A. Pärt // 2006 // Da Pacem Domine // Choir (SATB) // Sacred
N. Westlake // 2015 // Ready to Launch (Paper Planes) // Orchestra // Film score
Having chose these five works, I now needed to select one of them to be the focus of the unit of work I would write for a Year 12 Music 2 class. They were all great works, but for the purposes of this unit of work some were more useful than others.
Sandy Evans' work was very interesting, and I really liked that there was a link to Carnatic (South Indian classical) music that would stretch students into considering a classical musical tradition that was non-Western. I also really liked the focus on improvisation, and the use of a variety of instruments that wouldn't typically feature in a Western classical music piece (the full instrumentation was soprano saxophone, piano, electric mandolin, bamboo flute, mridangam and ghatam). On the other hand I felt that in order to base a whole term's worth of work around this work, it would require a depth of knowledge of Carnatic music that was beyond what I could research while completing an assignment on Hindustani music in another subject and trying to write my honours thesis. Both North and South Indian classical music fascinate me, and so I intend to keep listening to them and researching them so that in the future I will be able to teach them more effectively.
Arvo Pärt's work was one that I thought was really beautiful, and is a reminder that "music of the last 25 years" isn't necessarily a euphemism for pots and pans clanging together in someone's basement and then being notated onto a score. De Pacem Domine would actually be quite singable by a Music 2 class (providing it was a co-ed school), which would add an additional element of hands on engagement with the work.
Hindson Comes Up On Top
In the end, I decided to choose the third movement of Matthew Hindson's "Pulse Magnet" as my focus work. I had already decided I wanted to choose one of the fast movements (as the work is structured fast-slow-fast) in order to give contrast to the program, but the third movement stuck out to me because of the interesting rhythmic and harmonic devices that I could hear when I listened through. I also thought that the concept of the "super-piano", which Hindson describes on his website, would be an excellent starting point for compositional activities, in that it would free students from the mental prison of instrumentation that is confined to the arrangements that they were familiar with. If you could make a "super-piano", why not a double bass or a super-flute?
In addition to these considerations, I really liked the popular music influences that were evident in the work, and thought that the creative use of percussion within the third movement would provide for rich conversations and activities based on timbre and texture. Above all though, this piece was rhythmically exciting, and I was eager to incorporate some duration-based activities into my unit of work.