One of a series of workshops for home-educators.
Try them as a family or form a group with friends on-line and share your ideas and creations as they unfold.
12 – music for One Tree And Many
This challenge is for you to make a musical instrument be it stringed, wind-blown or percussive to aid in a retelling of the Rainforest story One Tree And Many.
You will need… all your creative juices flowing and every ounce of your brainpower to reimagine waste items from around your home into amazing musical instruments you can blow, pluck or rhythmically beat or artistically wobble and shake. You need to create a soundscape to accompany your well chosen words to enhance this ancient South American story.
So what is the story?
Here’s Ali’s version just using spoken words…
And for some inspiration here is a “Soundscape” by Rick Wilson telling the story using almost entirely musical instruments. Even he couldn’t get away without a few phrases of spoken words so we don’t imagine your piece will be only music.
Rick was helped in his task by reception children from Whitchurch Infants School who added the voices and screams, tramped around on newspapers to simulate leaves crunching underfoot and energetically slurped on mangoes until the juice dripped down their chins.
Rick’s Soundscape also included sampled highlights of his own recordings made in the South American rainforest and of the rhythms he and the children created using some of his collection of percussion instruments. You probably won’t have any of these in your homes, but you might have something similar to these instruments we have at Mythstories.
But, yes we want you to make your own instruments rather than use ones you may already have in your home.
So how do you make your own?
As luck would have it also at Mythstories we have a collection of ‘junk’ instruments, kindly donated by Mal Brown of Whack-It, Smack-it – the Svengali of rhythmic rubbish which make great examples…
And for inspiration here are some videos of Mal playing and talking about his creations.
So, it’s over to you to Create At Home.
with thanks to…
