Page 2 - SN February - Grade 4

Music

MS. LJUDMILA JANICIJEVIC

Dear Parents,

After great winter concert experience and winter holiday coming afterwards, students got back to
January classes in an excellent mood for further exploring and performing music.

We recognized Mozart’s birthday, sharing our prior knowledge with the new classmates, with spe-
cial interest shown in BBC’s animated version of the “Magic Flute.” That led us to passionate dis-
cussions while learning about opera. Comparing Milos Forman’s movie “Amadeus” with Ingmar
Bergman’s “Magic Flute,” students enjoyed both artists’ creativity. They also showed keen interest
and appreciation for Mozart’s work in general. Different stages of Mozart’s life were successfully
analyzed. His most famous music pieces, such as “Little Night Music,” “Turkish Rondo,”
“Concerto No.21 for Piano and Orchestra,” “Twinkle Twinkle” and “Requiem” were also inspiring
opportunities for students to re-read music scores and review symbols for dynamics, tempo, length
and rests. We will however work more on those next month.

Our guest musician, famous percussionist Papa Nick, motivated us to further continue discovering
our passion while playing classroom instruments. With focus on the percussion family of instru-
ments, we started our session of six weeks workshop of playing rhythm together. Split in groups, we
blended different rhythmic patterns and sharpened our listening skills. Some of our goals are to con-
tinue refining our rhythmic composition and using musical scores to understand the way a musical
story is told through the use of notation.

Mr. Natzel’s group created a very special farewell song for our dear friend Bastian. We all sang,
danced and played percussions together. Bastian, we will miss you very much!