UNITED IN MUSIC
Start date: Oct 1, 2015,
End date: Sep 30, 2017
PROJECT
FINISHED
Our project titled „UNITED IN MUSIC“ will involve 60 creative and talented students and 20 Music, IT and foreign language teachers from four different cultural and geographical regions of Europe, i.e. French school from the West, Romanian school from the East, Lithuanian school from the North and Italian school from the South.
During a two-year period, 13-17-year-old students will familiarize themselves with the heritage of local and their partners’ folk music, through a project website they will create, rehearse and perform in concerts authentic and arranged folk music internationally in two learning activities in France and Lithuania, and will release a final product, a CD, with at least 12 authentic and 4 arranged pieces of music.
To achieve project results, over the first year, students will work in groups on the chosen 4 types of folk songs, discuss them, analyze, write articles and scores with the help of musical software, make audio and video records, and will upload their materials on the created project website. Then students will learn at least 12 authentic national and 4 partners’ folk songs. Students’ profiles, the glossary of musical terms as well as video clips will complement the website. At the end of this first year, France will welcome their partners and together they will perform live concert of their authentic folk songs.
The second year’s work will be more creative and sophisticated as the participants will have to deal with an innovation, i.e. to learn to arrange the familiar folk songs turning them into modern ones. Thus, the workshop will be held in the Italian partners’ school, where international team of teachers of music and English will deliver lessons for the participants on music arrangement. CLIL, music software like Finale and Sibelius will be used in the process. Europass documents will be used to recognize its outcomes. The second year local activities will involve similar work to the first year’s activities, only work will be based on modern arrangements, and, for some partners, on rewriting the lyrics of one or two songs on the theme of friendship, brotherhood and unity. It is estimated that students will make at least 2 arrangements of their own folk songs and will learn to play 1 each partner’s arranged piece of music. These arranged songs will be performed by the participants during a last mobility in Lithuania.
We, the teachers of the project, believe that trans-nationally carried out work will have a great many impacts on all its participants, locally as well as internationally, especially on students and teachers, stimulating their creativity, self-confidence, teaching tolerance, encouraging openness to the world by discovering different European countries through a common theme of music. And finally, the most important, love for music expressed through common work of children from four different European countries will establish sustainable traditions of enjoying making music together.