Lesson video

Hello, everyone, it's great to see you again for another lesson with me, Miss Kilpatrick.

Let's get on.

In this lesson, you will need paper and pencil, your voices or a melodic instrument if you have one and some headphones.

If you don't have headphones, find a quiet place where you can work undisturbed and try and turn off any conversations or apps that you have running.

You can pause the video now if you need to get any of those things or do any of those things.

So today, we're going to start as always, with our warmup.

Then, there's a listening activity on the worksheet provided.

If you don't have access to the worksheet, ask a parent or carer if they will help you to search for any gamelan performance.

And you can answer the listening questions to that performance that you can find.

We're going to be learning an interlocking melody, and you are going to be composing an interlocking melody for two sarons.

And if you played the inflammation activity game last week then you will know what a saron is.

Finally, we'll have a look at what we've learned today about the gamelan so far.

Our warm up today is called sevens.

Going to learn them, now, we start patting on our knees, my turn, your turn.

One, two, three, five, six, seven.

My turn, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Your turn.

My turn, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Your turn.

My turn, your turn.

That's it, four patterns.

Let's learn them from the beginning.

So the first one, nice and easy.

Seven pats on our knees, let's do it.

Off we go, together, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Next one, we add the clap, let's do it.

Off we go together, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Next one, a little bit more tricky, we add the clicking.

If you can't click your fingers just pull your hands apart and you can just do the actions of the sound.

So we go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

So adding that third element in, let's do it.

Off we go together, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

last one, pat, clap, click, clap, pat, cross, pat.

So, let's go through that one more time.

pat, clap, click clap and knee.

Pat, clap, click clap, pat, cross, pat.

Pat, cross, click, and again.

And again.

One more time.

Let's see if we can put all four patterns together starting with our knees, one, two, off we go.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

One more time, up to speed.

One two, off we go.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

How did you get on? You can go back, rewind and have another go of that if you'd really like to get good at it.

Let's get on with our lesson today.

So you can pause the video now to complete your listening activity.

Go to the worksheet provided and watch the video clip of a gamelan ensemble performing.

Have a go at answering these questions as you listen and watch.

Number one, what instruments can you identify from the marketplace game in lesson two? Number two, at the start of the performance what is happening to the tempo? Number three, what are the metallophone players doing with the hand that is not holding the mallet? You have to look quite carefully for that one.

See what they're doing with that other hand.

And number four, what sort of event could the performance be for.

It's quite a long video at about eight minutes long.

You don't have to listen to the whole thing.

Now we're going to have a look at the two important tunings, the two scales that gamelan use.

the first one is the slendro and that's actually the one we are going to be using today in our composition.

And that's five notes, a little bit like our pentatonic scale.

The Western pentatonic scale.

the slendro scale creates light and cheerful sounds, and so in gamelan performances, it's used for pieces portraying scenes of soldiers marching or love, sometimes homesickness and longing.

The Pelog scale is seven notes and that's used for more regal or royal occasions or religious events.

A full gamelan orchestra will have a set of instruments with both tunings.

And the really important gamelan orchestra instruments are given titles, they're given names, they're regarded as hugely important and given a lot of respect.

Gamelan players don't wear shoes, they sit next to the instrument.

They never walk over an instrument.

They always walk around because the players believe that the instruments need space from the top of the instrument up to heaven, and that that space should never be cut.

And so you shouldn't ever walk across the gamelan instrument.

It's the sound of a real gamelan metallophone, one of the different metallophones.

Sounds quite interesting doesn't it? It's got a really interesting tonality.

Gamelan sets are tuned individually.

So one gamelan set in one village may be a completely different tuning to a gamelan set in a different village and they wouldn't be able to play together.

That's very different from our Western orchestras, where we have a tuning that all instruments tune to and any instrument can play any piece and play in any orchestra.

Gamelan are very different in that way.

If you would like to have a go at some interactive gamelan instruments, if you ask your parent or carer to help you, you can search for the interactive gamelan on the University of new South Wales.

And they've got some examples of all of the instruments in a banalese gamelan.

And you could have a go at playing around with them on your screen.

I'm going to play some of those notes again.

You'll notice that the sound rings on for a really long time.

And as you play more notes, and certainly if you were playing as fast as some gamelan performances, the sound would get really muddy very quickly.

A real noise that you don't want to listen to.

If you took part in the listening exercise at the beginning, one of my questions was, did you notice what the players were doing on the metallophones, with the hand that was not holding the mallet? Did you notice what they were doing? They were holding every note that they just played to dampen the sound in order to play the following sound.

So every time they played a note, their other hand followed where they had just been to dampen that sound.

It's a really hard thing to do and takes a huge amount of practise to get good at it.

Have a go at doing it at home, try playing a pattern with your finger and get your other hand to follow that pattern everywhere you go, try moving up and down.

Can you get your fingers to cross at the right place so you've dampened in those sounds? That's a game for you to have a go at.

We're going to learn two interlocking melodies for saron, that's one of the metallophones, using that slendro scale, which as I said, is a bit like our pentatonic scale.

Now in gamelan, they don't use letter names for the notes, like a we do.

They use the numbers of that pentatonic scale.

Note one, note two, note three, note five, and note six.

They're the notes that we're going to be thinking about today.

Seron players will learn melodies through speaking the numbers, rather than thinking about the notes.

And that's actually what we're going to do as well.

I've written on the score below, the letter names of the notes as well as the numbers, in case you want to play it on a melodic instrument that you have at home.

Then you've got real notes to use but we're going to use the notes of a pentatonic scale.

So, let's get that pentatonic scale into our voices.

If that's number one.

♪ One, two, three ♪ Let's try that.

♪ one, two, three ♪ ♪ One, two, three, five.

♪ Let's try that.

♪ One, two, three, five, six ♪ And again.

♪ One, two, three, five, six, five ♪ ♪ One, two, three, five, six, five, three, two, one ♪ ♪ One, two, three, five, six, five, three, two, one ♪ ♪ One, two, three, five, six, five, three, two, one ♪ ♪ One, two, three, five, six, five, three, two, one ♪ Excellent, now we've got those notes in our heads, have a look at melody one.

It's two notes, the five and the three.

So let's get those into our heads.

♪ One, two, three, five, five, three ♪ So I'm going to count the beats, the pulse of eight like this.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

First of all, we're just going to say the numbers to our pulse.

I'll show you what I mean, here we go.

Five, three, three, five, three, five.

Five, three, three, five, three, five.

Five, three, three, five, three, last time, five.

Five, three, three, five, three, five and stop.

Just to get those numbers into our head and the pattern of the notes.

Let's put the tones in now.

So let's get them back into our head, ♪ One two, three, and five ♪ ♪ So five, three, three ♪ So I'll get the pulse going.

Ready, off we go.

♪ Five, three, three, ♪ ♪ five, three, ♪ ♪ Five, five, three, three ♪ ♪ Five, three, five, five, three, three ♪ ♪ Five three, five, five, three, three ♪ ♪ Five three, five ♪ And we'll stop there.

That should have got that pattern into your head.

Let's try melody two.

This melody also uses note five.

So we've got that already.

Instead of going down to the three this one goes up to number six.

♪ So it's using five and six ♪ Let's start by just saying numbers, just like we do with melody one.

So let's get our pulse.

If you can join in with the pulse too, so you really get that and then spell or say the numbers over the top, off we go.

Five, five, six, five, six, five, five, five, six, five, six, five, five, five, six, five, six, five, five, five, six, five, six, five.

Let's try singing that through, so.

♪ Five and six ♪ Are our tones, off we go.

♪ Five, five, six, five, six, five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six, five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six, five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six, five ♪ Now if you need to go back and practise either of those two patterns, then you can do that now because what we're going to do next, is we're going to perform the two interlocking melodies together.

And the reason that they're called interlocking melodies is because you look at the grey squares where there are no sounds, those gaps, those rests are filled by sound from the other melody.

So if we look at beat three, melody one is playing, while melody two has a rest, In beat four, melody one has rest but melody two is playing.

So you can see where the parts interlink together.

And we call those interlocking melodies.

And the whole thing, the eight beats together, creates two melodic ostinatos that would keep going until the sound of the gong would tell us we were going to go to a new pattern or a new part of our gamelan orchestra ensemble.

We're going to have a go at both together now.

Choose which melody you'd like to have a go at and we'll sing it through together.

One, two, three, four.

♪ Five, five, six, five, six, five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six, five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six, five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six, five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six, five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six, five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six, five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six, five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six, five ♪ ♪ Five, five, six, five, six five ♪ Great singing everybody, now to your task.

I would like you to compose interlocking melodies that could be played by two sounds just like the one that we've performed today.

So you use the grid score on your worksheet or if you don't have access to the worksheet, just copy a blank example of the one we did just before and compose two interlocking melodies.

Now remember, we want to use the Slendro scale.

So that's one, two, three, five, six.

Just those five notes, you want to miss out number four and miss out number seven of a normal eight note scale.

Have one or two unison notes between the two melodies, that becomes quite important.

The unison note in the two melodies that we learned just now was that number five, wasn't it, both melodies use the five.

And at certain points in the melodies, both melody players were playing that G, that note five together.

And that's what we want, a couple of moments within your melodies where that unison sound comes in.

That becomes important next week.

Leave a few beats rest in each melody.

So just like the two we just learned, colour in some of the squares on your score grey or leave them blank as rests in your melody.

Pause the video now and I'll see you once you're done.

What have you learned about gamelan so far? It's been a lot of information over these last two lessons.

The first thing I want you to see if you can name is the set of seven notes that are usually used to portray royal or sacred occasions.

That's not the scale that we've just composed in, that's the other seven note scale.

Can you remember what that was called? The pelog scale, well done if you got that correct.

So then, what was the set of five notes that we used to compose with today? They're usually use to portray cheerful scenes.

What's that set of notes called? Can you remember, the Slendro, great.

Next, two or more different rhythms played together.

That's what we did last week.

What is that called when two or more rhythms are played together? A polyrhythm, well done if you've got them all right so far.

So then the very last one, fitting pitches or notes into the spaces of other parts.

What did we compose today? Interlocking melody, well done if you've got all four of those correct, that's really important musical vocabulary that we're going to be using next week when we talk about the whole gamelan ensemble.

That's the end of our lesson today.

I have really enjoyed playing and singing with you in our gamelan ensemble work.

We've got one more lesson on the gamelan next week and I'm really looking forward to seeing you for that too.

But for now, I'll say goodbye.

And if you would like to ask a parent or a carer to share any of the work that you've been doing with Oak National on Twitter, hashtag learn with Oak.

I would love to see some of the amazing stuff that you've been getting on with.

See you next week for another lesson, bye everyone.