Lesson video

Hi, everyone.

You're going to be doing music today with me, Ms. Skikun.

This unit is all about melody.

So let's get started.

So in this lesson, you'll need some headphones.

Don't worry if you don't have headphones, just find somewhere that you can sit and focus without background noise.

And you'll also need a pen and paper to make notes.

And, of course, you're going to need your singing voice.

So lesson one, the first thing we're going to do is learn a tuneful song.

Then we're going to start looking at melody and asking what is a melody and how is it used in music? We're going to consider using melody with accompaniment.

We're going to learn a folk song called "Lowlands Away" to demonstrate this.

And then we will finish with music by Bizet, a very famous piece of music from "Carmen Suite No.

1." Okay So let's learn our song, which is called "A Tuneful Song".

I'm going to sing one line and then you repeat it back.

I sing line two, you repeat it back.

I sing line three, you repeat it back.

Sing the line four, you repeat it back.

I think that we might have another go.

♪ Off I go a melody is a tune ♪ ♪ Sometimes memorable for me and you ♪ ♪ Made by pitches and a rhythm too ♪ ♪ To satisfy your every mood ♪ Fantastic, okay.

Let's have another go, shall we? ♪ Off I go a melody is a tune ♪ ♪ Sometimes memorable for me and you ♪ ♪ Made by pitches and a rhythm too ♪ ♪ To satisfy your every mood ♪ Fantastic.

I'd like us now to sing "A Tuneful Song" together two times round.

♪ Off we go ♪ ♪ A melody is a tune ♪ ♪ Sometimes memorable for me and you ♪ ♪ Made by pitches and a rhythm too ♪ ♪ To satisfy your every mood ♪ ♪ A melody is a tune ♪ ♪ Sometimes memorable for me and you ♪ ♪ Made by pitches and a rhythm too ♪ ♪ To satisfy your every mood ♪ Great, can we now try and sing it again but can we tap along to something called.

What's this? The beat, well done if you knew that.

And there's another word as well.

That pulse.

Fantastic if you do that one as well.

Let's have a go.

♪ Off we go a melody is a tune ♪ ♪ Sometimes memorable for me and you ♪ ♪ Made by pitches and a rhythm too ♪ ♪ To satisfy your every mood ♪ Great, we're going to have another go, and this time, I want you to feel the beat in your body.

And while we sing the melody we're going to start really quietly and then we're going to build, get a bit louder and a bit louder still.

And then we will go back down to quiet.

And you can join in with me with your hands.

♪ Off we go a melody is a tune ♪ ♪ Sometimes memorable for me and you ♪ ♪ Made by pitches and a rhythm too ♪ ♪ To satisfy your every mood ♪ Brilliant so, we have learned what a melody is, and we know that it consists of, pitch and rhythm.

So pitch being different notes.

Maybe they're high, maybe they're in the middle, maybe that low notes.

Pat in an order to a rhythm to make a tune.

And very often our melodies are really singable and catchy and they get stuck in our head for days.

Sometimes melodies can help us feel emotions or maybe the composer, the person that wrote the music, wants us to feel a certain mood while listening.

So maybe they want us to feel scared or maybe they want us to feel joyful.

And melodies are also used, for example, to keep us working.

So imagine that you're working on a ship and you need to pull ropes and you need to move really heavy objects.

Then simple folk songs with simple melodies you could sing to keep you going.

And melodies can also sound like certain things like animals, for example, like birds.

And melodies have been used in music to tell stories.

So thinking about catching melodies, how many songs can you sing from memory? I would like you now to pause the video and think about all of these catchy songs you know and then if you can do sing them out loud to somebody in your household even, and then once you do know how to really good to go at it, you can resume the video.

I hope that you've managed to entertain everybody in your household and everybody on your whole street with your beautiful singing of all your favourite melodies.

So let's start learning a new song.

So this is what the melody sounds like.

♪ Lowlands, Lowlands away my boy ♪ ♪ Lowlands away I heard them say ♪ ♪ My Lowlands away ♪ This song is called "Lowlands Away" and it's a folk song.

So I'll sing it first so you get familiar with it and then we will do it like we did before, call and response.

♪ Lowlands, Lowlands away my boy ♪ ♪ Lowlands away I heard them say ♪ ♪ My Lowlands away ♪ ♪ Lowlands, Lowlands are away my boy ♪ ♪ Lowlands away I heard them say ♪ ♪ My Lowlands away ♪ It's a really really beautiful melody.

And I love how it starts, it starts higher then by the end we're right the bottom of my voice.

So I'll sing a line and then you repeat it back.

♪ Lowlands, lowlands away my boy ♪ ♪ Lowlands away I heard them say ♪ ♪ My lowlands away ♪ ♪ Lowlands, lowlands away my boy ♪ ♪ Lowlands away I heard them say ♪ ♪ My lowlands away ♪ Brilliant.

So we're going to sing this together now.

So you're singing along with me, now there is a word in music for when we all sing together, the same tune, same melody or maybe everybody plays the same melody together.

And that is called being in unison.

So we're going to sing this in unison and I'm also going to play the melody on the piano.

And that still means we're in unison.

♪ Off we go ♪ ♪ Lowlands, lowlands away my boy ♪ ♪ Lowlands away I heard them say ♪ ♪ My lowlands away ♪ ♪ Lowlands, lowlands away my boy ♪ ♪ Lowlands away I heard them say ♪ ♪ My lowlands away ♪ So that was his performing it in unison.

Now there is another thing that we could do with this.

Well, there many things that we could do with this malady.

but the next one I want to do is where we sing the song.

And then I play, an accompaniment.

So accompaniment, is something that can bring the song to life, give it some colour, give it some decoration, give it some grounding so we can sing along and make sure our voices still sound nice together.

So lets have a go, ♪ Lowlands, lowlands away my boy ♪ ♪ Lowlands away I heard them say ♪ ♪ My lowlands away ♪ ♪ Lowlands, lowlands away my boy ♪ ♪ Lowlands away I heard them say ♪ ♪ My lowlands away ♪ Can we have a go now, singing a tuneful song with a complement, so our voices, are still in unison because we're singing the same melody together but we'll do it without accompaniment, so I need to test, if you could remember the words.

So line one, ♪ A melody is a ♪ Chewed, fantastic, well done.

♪ Sometimes memorable for ♪ ♪ Me and you ♪ Well done ♪ Made by ♪ ♪ And a ♪ I'm really hoping you said ♪ Made by pitches and a rhythm too ♪ ♪ Just that dispel your every mood ♪ Fantastic 100% of time hoping okay.

That's how it goes singing it from memory.

♪ Off we go ♪ ♪ A melody is a tune ♪ ♪ Sometimes memorable for me and you ♪ ♪ Made by pitches and a rhythm too ♪ ♪ To satisfy your every mood ♪ ♪ A melody is a tune ♪ ♪ Sometimes memorable for me and you ♪ ♪ Made by pitches and a rhythm too ♪ ♪ To satisfy your every mood ♪ So we're about to do our listening task and I'd like us to listen to a piece of music called Seguedille, which comes from a really famous opera called Carmen.

And in this piece of music, normally the female singer the main character Carmen is singing about going to Seville a place in Spain and dancing the Seguedille.

So you're listening challenge for today is to try and spot the melody in the music and see if you ever hear the melody played by two instruments at the same time.

And it's a bonus question.

Can you figure out what the instruments are called? Because I'll just give you a little hint, this is not the original with the singer and a big orchestra, it's actually a set of instruments, all of the same family.

So I hope you enjoyed the music and let's see what you found out.

So the melody dare to move around different instruments, and there was some times when the melody was played by two instruments at the same time.

Now, when the melody was played by two instruments it was played in something called octaves.

Now octaves if you listened to the keyboard is where the tune, the melody, Can be played higher or lower or even lower, but they can be played at the same time.

And you still have everybody on the melody.

And hopefully you can hear that in the music.

If you didn't hear it, maybe go back rewind and have a listen again.

Now the instruments were in fact recorders, cause recorders are pretty amazing instruments, they can do all sorts of different things so that was a recorder on sample.

So to finish, let's recap what we've done today.

So we've been learning all about melody, and one of the ways we learned about it was to sing a tuneful song.

And then we also that a new folk song, Lowlands Away while we sang the melody in unison together.

And we also sang it with accompaniment and then to finish, we had a listening challenge listening out for the melody in the piece of music or caramel, and also identifying the instruments playing the music.

So that's it for today.

If you would like to share any of the work from today perhaps recording one of the songs that we've learnt then please ask your parents or carer to share this work with Oak on Twitter at @oakNational or on Instagram #Learnwithoak.