Introduction
Why You're Here
Learning to play a musical instrument or learning to sing is just one part of being a terrific musician. It's also important that you learn about as many kinds of music and the people who create that music as you can.
Quite often, composers Jean Sibelius, Edvard Grieg and Carl Neilsen are never discovered by music students until they are in college, because honestly, these guys wrote music that although it is beautiful, IT'S TOUGH TO PLAY!!!
The Task
Put Your Ears On
So even though we probably can't play much of their music (yet!!!), we should listen to this hauntingly beautiful music and learn about these composers.
The best way to learn about music is to listen to the music! This curriculum web helps you do that by helping you set up an account on Pandora Radio. If you already have an account, go there now, start listening, come back here and start surfing each of these composers WHILE YOU HAVE THEIR MUSIC IN YOUR EARS!
You should create three "stations"; one for Sibelius, one for Grieg and one for Nielsen. Refine the stations by doing a "thumbs-down" on any composers that aren't either Sibelius, Grieg or Nielsen.
If you don't have an account, go learn to create one here!
Listen to these stations while you are reading and surfing through the rest of the web, searching for information about these composers.
Surf, surf, surf...
Now go to each of these composer's pages in the Navigation Pane on the left.
Use the links you find there to go to websites to read about their lives and then, while you're at it, open up the worksheets you'll find, save 'em in Word and start making notes about their lives. (You will eventually save them to your "student save" folder for evaluation)
Make notes for a presentation to give
These worksheets will be great places for you to save text info to weave into a PowerPoint presentation that you will give to the class sometime this year. (Check out the rubrics here)
Most of all...
Enjoy this music and let the sounds that roll over you help you to play your instrument better and better as you become more and more familiar with this majestic, heartbreaking music...
HAVE FUN!!!!