Symphony No. 1 "Eight Universes" by Slosberg & Rodriguez, Part 1

Children in the upper elementary (9 to 12) love to take on gigantic work. In my forthcoming book, Making Music in Montessori, I developed a follow up activity that shows you how to get children writing multi-movement compositions. Well, last week, Christopher and Sully, a fourth-grader and a fifth-grader, respectively, (these are not their real names), got inspired to write their own symphony! Let me tell you how I guided them through the process.

SOME BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Just to give you some background, it’s important to know that the word “symphony” refers to the structure of the piece, NOT the instrumentation. One can write a symphony for any combination of instruments. Sully and Christopher chose to write their symphony for piano, tone bars, and percussion instruments.

Also, a typical symphony unfolds in four movements. (Although, composers through time have written symphonies containing between 3 and 7 movements.)

The symphony structure goes roughly like this:

Movement I: sonata-allegro form with optional introduction.
Movement II: slow and soft movement. This movement can be in any form the child likes.
Movement III: up tempo, quick and light dance movement. Again, this can be in any form.
Movement IV: sonata-allegro form with big dramatic ending.

SONATA-ALLEGRO FORM

After an overview of this overall structure, I set about telling the children about sonata-allegro form.

To begin, I simply told the children a story that went something like this: Once there lived a distinguished court gentleman and a graceful court lady. The two were in love. They both lived quite far from each other on opposite sides of a great river. Fortunately for both of them, a stone bridge stretched across the river and made it possible for the two to meet. One evening they met at a ball. They danced, talked about their lives, and generally had a nice time together. Eventually, the gentleman asked the lady to marry him. She agreed, and the two walked across the bridge and spent the rest of their lives together.

Now, this story could easily have been about swashbuckling pirates or superheroes, or any two characters (the two main themes) going on an adventure and returning with one of them slightly changed. But it makes a bit more sense when you know the reasoning behind it.

Classical composers of old used sonata-allegro for the first and fourth movements of their symphonies (see above). It’s the musical equivalent of the classic “Hero’s Journey”. The form comprises three sections, an Exposition, a Development, and a Recapitulation.

It begins with the Exposition, wherein a main theme, which we’ll call (a), comes on the scene. The distinguished court gentleman in our story stands for this theme. After we hear (a), some music called a bridge brings the music to a second theme (b) - our graceful maiden. Once we’ve heard both themes, everything up to that point repeats. (Sometimes composers begin with an introduction.) Next comes the Development section. Here, the two themes (a) and (b) appear in variation. The composer spins them around, and generally plays around with them. In my little story, the Development occurs when the courtly gentleman and the graceful maiden dance at the ball. Finally, we have the Recapitulation section. Here, both themes return, except that theme (b), the secondary theme, appears slightly different from how we heard it in the Exposition. Clear, simple examples of sonata-allegro from in Classical music include:

First movements of symphonies by Haydn.
Barber of Seville Overture, by Rossini.
Symphony No. 40, Eine Kliene Nachtmusik, and Piano Sonata KV 283 by Mozart
Symphony No. 5 and Piano Sonata Op. 10, No. 2 by Beethoven.

Continuing on: To demonstrate sonata-allegro form, I brought out a recording of the first movement of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, one of many clear examples of sonata-allegro form in authentic Classical music. While we listened to the piece, I (frantically) drew some cards and laid them out in the following pattern:

Please forgive the crudeness of the cards depicted here. I didn’t have the material for this activity finished, so I drew these on the fly. Having got the children riled up about doing the activity, I didn’t have a lot of time. I had to strike while the iron was hot!

At any rate, you can see the first theme of the Exposition depicted as a courtly gentleman in a coat of red. The maiden in blue represents the second theme, and the purple bridge between them is, well, the bridge. The card for the Development section should have probably been a ballroom, but I think in the version of the story that I told Christopher and Sully, the couple went on lots of travels and adventures instead of attending a ball. At any rate, when the two themes come back for the the Recapitulation, the maiden’s dress becomes red, as she’s changed a little bit.

COMPOSING THE TWO PRINCIPAL THEMES

After the children had a concept of the overall Sonata-allegro structure, they went on to the next step: composing their two themes. So, I sent Sully off to the piano to compose. He had some experience writing music on a staff, so he notated his themes on musical staff paper.

Sully composing his themes at the piano (wearing optional bicycle gloves).

As a side, erm, note, it’s worth mentioning here that although Sully had some experience writing music on a staff, Christopher didn’t. That wasn’t a problem. Sully notated his themes on staff paper, and Christopher notated his ideas using stick notation. We should never let a lack of knowledge of traditional musical notation stop children from expressing their musical ideas. They can combine different types of notation, such as graphic notation, staff notation, and stick notation, to write down their musical thoughts. In fact, when their symphony is finished, Christopher and Sully will likely just combine their two notation styles onto the finished score. (Unfortunately, I don’t have an example of Christopher’s music to show you at the moment.)

Anyway, below you can see Sully’s two main themes.

It’s important that the themes contrast in some way. Here, Sully wrote Theme A using a quick tempo, triplets, thirds, and triadic leaps. Theme B, however, uses a slower tempo, longer notes subdivided in twos, and stepwise motion. He also gave his themes names, "Morning Wake Up” and “Titanic Ice Bridge,” which I find exceedingly cute.

COMPOSING VARIATIONS

Next, Sully and Christopher took their themes and wrote 3 variations on each theme. The variations will prove useful for helping the boys to analyze their themes, create unity in their piece, and develop material for both the bridge and the Development section.

To write their variations, the boys analyzed their themes and came up with just a few key characteristics to exploit. I helped them with their analysis by marking the characteristics in red ink and pink highlighter pen, as you see on the picture of Sully’s theme above.

As you can see below, Sully made use of the characteristics from his theme in writing his three variations. Just to give you a specific example, as I mentioned in the caption above, in his Theme A, Sully used triplets, triadic leaps, and arpeggiated chords. Look how Variation #1 makes use of those characteristics.

Sully’s variations on Theme A. Each variation uses the characteristics of Theme A, but also differs from the original theme and from each other. Again, the boys gave their variations the titles “Nature Knows All”, “Kingdom of Summer” and “See the World”. They will use these variations, or ideas from them, in subsequent parts of their symphony.

Here, Sully got a little adventurous with his titles, giving his first variation on Theme B the title “Monkey Temple”. Notice the stepwise motion in this variation. In “Haunted Piano” Sully uses long notes and chromatic movement. He goes back to using chords and thirds for “Seven Seas”. All of these characteristics he took from his original Theme B.

BEGINNING TO WRITE THE SYMPHONY

Now that the boys had written two themes and three variations for each theme, they began to write their symphony. First, we wrote a “road map” of the first two movements, which you can see below on the table next to where Sully is writing.

Sully begins writing his symphony. You can see the plan for Movements I and II on the right. Notice on the road map the boys already planned out Movement II.

At this point, the boys had already given their symphony a title: Symphony No. 1, “Eight Universes”

Incidentally, I encouraged the boys at this stage to write their music away from a musical instrument. It’s much easier to let the ideas flow when you aren’t sitting at an instrument and futzing around. Plus, at the instrument, you are limited by your technical skill. Away from an instrument, you can let your imagination wander. If you have a musical idea in your head that you don’t know how to write, scribble it down in graphic or rhythm notation first, and then go to the instrument and figure out what notes you want.

And that’s where we left off! Just getting this far in the process took about a week. Expect a long-form composition to keep the children engaged for a long time.

I’ll keep you posted as the symphony progresses. Until then, I hope this provided you some inspiration. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Until next time!