Lesson video

Hello, my name is Miss Charatan and I'm going to be your music teacher for today's lesson on how can Baroque melodies be phrased.

We'll be doing some breathing and singing in today's lesson.

So we're going to do some vocal warmups to begin.

We're going to do three warm up, starting with our body.

You're going to really gently with me, roll your shoulders back like this.

You might be feeling a little bit stiff from sitting down all day like me and either way, I like to stretch as far as you can, to the ceiling, make sure your hands out of sight and the big yawn back.

If you like to spend a bit more time on that, that's absolutely fine.

You just need to pause the video and do that.

I'm now going to move on to some breath.

So you're going to breathe in.

Then you're going to breathe out to a sh sound and you're going to breathe out for four beats to start with, I'm going to click those beats.

So you know when to start and stop, so breathing in and out.

And stop, that was quite easy, that's only four beats.

Let's now make it up to eight, 12 and 16.

Breathing in and four one, two, three, four and stop, breathing in and eight 12, five, six, keep going, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 and stop, take a moment breath in again and 16.

Five six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.

Well done, if you got to the end.

16 whole beats of breathing out, fantastic.

We're going to finish off lastly, we've warming up our vocal chords.

If you need more time in your breath, that's fine.

Pause the video and do some more breathes yourself.

We're going to do something called electro, where you do this, almost like what a horse does, like this.

If you can roll your eyes, it's absolutely fine.

You're going to go all the way down from your lowest note in your voice all the way up to the highest like this.

Can you try and do that a few more times by yourself, let's go! If you're finding it hard, all you need to do is just relax.

Cause you can't make this sound with a really tensed mouth like this.

You can just try on one note, that's even better.

Pause the video, have a go and resume when you're ready.

Great, hopefully we had some great lip chores or rolled eyes and that's a really good way to warm up our voices quite quickly.

And because it actually really helps us with our breathing and it helps us make sure we've got a really nice even tone throughout our voice.

We're now ready to get started.

I'm now going to tell you what equipment you need.

In this lesson, you will need a piece of paper or something to write on, pencil or a pen and a voice, instrumental app.

If you need to go and get those things, pause the video and join us again when you are ready.

Fantastic, let's now see what we're going to be doing in today's lesson.

We're going to begin by recapping our knowledge of Baroque music.

Before going on to analysing phrases from Pachelbel's Canon.

We will explore how to play these phrases musically, we'll then arrange melodies into Pachelbel's Canon into something of your own.

And finally, we'll finish by performing our arrangement.

Let's begin, so for a recap, what is contrapuntal texture? Choose the correct answer now.

Fantastic if you said many interweaving layers of equal importance.

Contrapuntal texture is very similar to polyphonic texture.

What is counterpoint? Choose the correct answer now.

Counterpoint is a polyphonic or contrapuntal texture with strict rules.

This is often found in Baroque music.

Well done, if you got that one, correct.

Look at these three images, which one represents a canon and for all of them, what are their textures? So remember that each block represents a different idea.

Take a moment to think, I'm going to reveal the answer now.

Pause your video if you need a bit more time.

So the correct answer was two, this is because we have got the ideas coming in one after another.

What are the textures then? So the texture of a canon is contrapuntal, because we have many different ideas of equal importance happening at the same time.

Number one is homophonic or contrapuntal.

We don't really know because we obviously don't know what exactly those squares represent, but we have certainly got more than one idea.

It's just we don't know which one is melody and which one is not.

And the last one is monophonic, because as you can see, everyone is playing the same thing at the same time, all the way through.

So for example, that second column, both the parts are playing the blue part.

Then all three are playing the purple part.

So therefore it is a monophonic texture.

Let's now have a look at the canon enlist a bit more detail.

You can see that there are four different colours, they represent different parts of the same melody.

They're all doing the same thing, except they start at different times.

Cause you can see the number one starts here for the first one, here for the second one and here for the third one.

So obviously if the rectangle continued, the second and third line would also have that complete set of four different colours.

If you're a bit confused by this, don't worry, playing a canon makes much more sense in practise.

You might want to go back to an earlier lesson where we sing row, row, row your boat in canon.

I start first, you start second and that creates a canon, that is exactly the same as the image in number two here.

So we will need some key words to describe melody today.

Look at the words on my screen and choose four of them that we use to describe melody, pause the video and resume when you are ready to check your answers.

Okay, let's check our answers.

So you should have said, ascending, step, descending and leap.

We need to say goodbye to first polyphonic and canon, because they described different elements of music, bye bye.

Okay, so we're going to using those notes later.

Those words later, we also now need to check that we know what the root, third and fifth note of D major are.

If you're stuck at how to work it out, start by numbering the D major scale that you can see just here, numbering it from one to eight.

That will help you work out the answer.

I'm going to evade it now, pause if are not quite ready.

The correct answers are D, F-sharp and A, they are the root, the third and the fifth and we work it out like this.

So we can see, we've numbered them from one to eight.

Our root third and fifth correspond to one, three and five.

And together they make up the three major triads.

That is going to be really important when you eventually write music off your own.

So that was a really quick recap, well done.

If you want to revisit any of those things or you're not quite sure, then just rewind the video and watch them again.

We're now going to move on to analysing phrases from Pachelbel's Canon.

So when we analyse a new melody or even a melody that we already know, we need to ask ourselves some key questions.

We ask ourself, does the melody move in steps or leaps? Does it ascend or descent? What notes does it start and end on? And how long is the melody? And also how can we measure the melody, what do we use? We don't use centimetres.

So we're going to try and analyse a melody together before you go off and analyse the melody by yourself.

So, here is melody one from Pachelbel's Canon.

I'm going to play it for you now, actually on my accordion, because it's good to have a change from the keyboard.

Okay, as I was playing that melody, I hope you were thinking about those four questions.

We're going to tackle them one question at a time.

So let's think about that first question.

Does it move by step or by leap, tell me now.

Yes, it moves completely by step, the notes are next to each other the entire time.

If you'd see my hand that would have given you a clue.

That second question, what direction is the melody going in? It is descending, it might have been confusing cause I'm actually going up on my accordion, but the accordion just work that way.

So the lower notes are up higher on it.

Do check out your accordion, it's a great instrument to play by the way.

So it's descending at the end.

There's a tiny little one ascending step just at the end here.

And it helps us bring us back around to the beginning because these melodies are repeated again and again and again, so it descends.

Let's now look at what note it starts and ends on.

So we see that labelled here, so we can say it starts at on F-sharp, great.

And it ends on C-sharp, great.

But that doesn't really tell us much about the melody.

Let's now think about what degree of the scale it starts and ends on.

So F-sharp, if we count up from D, D, E, F-sharp, this is the third degree of the scale.

Can we work out C-sharp? What degree of the scale is C-sharp? Great, let's check our answers.

So it starts on F-sharp, which as we said was the third degree and ends on C-sharp, Which is a seventh degree.

That's really important because that's C-sharp again, helps us just go back up to D, the C-sharp wants to go to a D chord.

So that C-sharp is a kind of note, which makes it sound unfinished.

What note would make it sound finished? If you said D, you are correct.

If I went , that sounds like a finished melody.

And doing on a C-sharp doesn't sound finished.

It makes you want to go back to the note beginning again, to repeat again.

Let's now look at how long the melody is.

So we don't measure melody like key words and at the table or a room.

We work out the lengths of melody in different ways.

What is this at the very beginning of the staff.

This is a time signature.

It tells us how many beats are in the bar, that tells us four, four, tells us there are four beats in a bar.

The four in the top tells us how many beats, four and the four in the bottom, tells us those beats are worth one beat.

They are crotches, so we can see there's two minims. That means there are four beats in a bar.

A bar is the little section of music and very small section.

And we can see these two lines, which divide the bars up.

We can see that there are full bars in this melody.

They are on the screen now.

So therefore we would say the melody is four bars long.

We could say 16 beats long, but four bars makes more musical sense.

It makes more musical sense because when we talk about melodies, we talk about them in terms of phrases or we talk about phrases in terms of bars.

So what is a phrase? A phrase is a musical sentence.

A melody can be made up of several phrases, just like a paragraph is made up of several sentences.

When you hear melodies, they don't just go on and on and on and on and on and never have a single break, that would be a disaster if you were singing it, because you won't be able to breathe.

And it would also be really difficult if you're playing it on a wind or brass instrument.

However, a shorter melody might only have one phrase.

A phrase can sound finished or unfinished.

As we had with melody one earlier, that sounded unfinished.

I'm not going to show you an example to illustrate what I mean by a musical sentence.

Here is a nursery rhyme, "Twinkle, twinkle Little Star".

You might know it already, you might not.

I want you to sing this nursery rhyme and decide, when do you need to breathe, I guarantee you, you will not go all the way to the end without breathing.

If you're not sure how it goes, sing it with me, but try not to copy when I breathe, decide for yourself, are we ready, twinkle is like going to be our first night, one, two.

♪ Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are ♪ ♪ Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky ♪ ♪ Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are ♪ Lovely, beautiful singing from you too, I am sure.

If you want to try again, when exactly do you want to breathe and not copy me, pause the video to complete this task of singing, twinkle, twinkle, and working out when you breathe.

Once you're ready, resume the video and let's see.

So you can breathe in several places.

You could breathe, ♪ twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.

♪ You so you could breathe after every two bars, but a natural place to breathe would really be up to every four bars.

Cause that means that the melody doesn't necessarily have lots of chunky breaks.

This second line as well.

You could breathe halfway through it or you could be either the end, but it may be makes more sense to breathe at the end, because you'd beat at the end of the last line.

And lastly, you breathe at the end towards you would breathe to finished the song.

So we can see that we breathe every four bars.

That gives us a clue as to how long our phrases are.

Cause that is a type of musical sentence.

When I say a sentence, I may or may not take a breath, but it's a kind of breath in my speech.

So in music, when we want to kind of take an actual breath, that is the end of a phrase.

So therefore we have three, four bar phrases in "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star".

Let's now have a quick quiz to work out and recap what we have done so far.

What is this called? So I'm really talking about that area between the two lines.

Choose your answer.

If you said you bar, you are correct, well done.

What is a phrase, is it the number of beats in a bar, a musical sentence or a melody? If you said a musical sentence, you're correct, well done.

So we're going to go right back to when we first analysed our melody, what are the four questions we ask ourselves when we analyse a melody, pause the video, write them down and then check your answers against mine.

So we're talking about steps or leaps, ascending or descending, what notes it starts and ends on and how long is it.

When we talk about length, that is when we talk about phrases.

So "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", the length is three, four bar phrases.

It's got a total of 12 bars in them.

You are now going to analyse these melodies by yourself.

You will analyse melodies two, three, and four.

I'm going to play you these melodies now to remind you what they sound like, but you should on your own voice, instrumental app play or sing these melodies to help you with your analysis.

So this is melody two one, two, three, four.

Here is melody three.

And here I'm going to move myself even further, here is melody four.

You are now going to pause the video to complete your task.

Play and analyse melodies two, three and four from Pachelbel's Canon.

Think about this questions that we asked ourselves earlier, step or a leap, ascending or descending? What pitches does it start or end on? Thinking about those in scale degrees as well, so is it the root, the third or the fifth? Does it make it sound finished or unfinished? How many phrases do we have? Are they four bars, eight bars and if it's too easy for you, of course, go on to the melodies five and six too.

You can make a note of your ideas on a piece of paper and compare them with mine in the moment.

Resume the video, when you are ready to check your answers.

Fantastic, we have already recapped on Baroque music and we are still going to be analysing melodies and phrases from Pachelbel's Canon, however, now it's your turn.

You should have done that analysis already.

So let's think about our question.

About what degree of the scale, do these melody start and end on and does that make it sound finished or unfinished? So looking at melody two, that starts on the root, because D is the root of D major.

So does melody three, melody four, what degree of the scale does that start on? You said five, you're correct, it starts in the fifth.

So let's now look at the ending notes.

So melody two, end on the second, melody three, ends on the fourth, but has the fifth just before it.

like that.

And melody four ends on the fifth with a trip.

So does it make them sound finished or unfinished? If you said unfinished, you were correct.

They all sound unfinished, why? Because they want to go back and repeat again.

They need to finish by repeating back around.

Let's now think about the direction of these melodies.

Are they ascending or descending? So melody two was largely descending, there was one very smooth ascension, but it was mainly descending.

Melody four starts with a really big leap.

And then it descends all the way back down.

So fairly similar actually to melody number two, even though it doesn't look on the page, melody three, you might have done that in another lesson with me.

Melody three is a mixture of ascending and descending.

Melody three is a mix of ascending and descending all the way through almost like a wave.

Let's now think about whether it moves in leaps or steps.

Hopefully, melody two, you've got as moving completely by step just like melody one.

Let's have a look at melody three.

So melody three has a leap, a leap and then a step and another step.

Then that repeats, we have another leap, leap, steps, steps.

Then we a have a leap, leap, leap, step.

And then we have a leap, a move by step by step and then by step and then a big leap to repeat back to the beginning.

Let's start looking at melody four.

Melody four as I said earlier, starts with a big leap and then it means by step all the way down.

It's a big leap like this.

And then we moved by step all the way down by step.

And then we have some smooth leaps at the end.

And then by step again.

So you can further your musical analysis by talking about how wide these leaps are.

So this leap in melody four , is much bigger than the leaps in melody three.

Even though they both have leaps in them.

So how long are these melodies in terms of phrases? How many phrases do they have in them? Or they are just one phrase? All of these are four bar phrases.

Generally, if you were singing this, you would want to take a breath after four bars.

That is how we decide our phrase.

However, phrases can be divided up further.

So we could divide melody number two into two main parts.

So we got this part.

You can may be take a breath.

Same with melody three, we can divide into two parts.

That can kind of stand alone.

And then we've got another part here.

And then melody four, could also be divided up into two, two-bar phrases or two two-bar phrases.

So let's think about how we can play these phrases musically.

How do you play something musically on your instrument? Or how do you sing something musically? How can we make something sound musical and not robotic? Here are some clues, what are all these things? Take a moment to think, then I'm going to share my answers.

Okay, so we have got something called dynamics.

This is a crescendo, that tells you to get gradually louder.

What do we think, the other is, diminuendo, getting quieter.

Check that you can say these words now, crescendo, diminuendo.

We may, you may have covered the two diagrams below.

This one is staccato, what does this tell us? That tells us to play really short and spiky notes.

Legato tells us to play smoothly.

So how would we go about playing these phrases musically? So we would want to use dynamics and not just playing really loud or really quiet with the time.

We'd want to do a mixture because that is how something sounds musical.

For example, for melody, number two, you might want to start quietly, get louder toward the middle of the phrase and then get quieter.

So it might sound a bit like this.

So on the keyboard, my keyboard is weighted.

It's touch sensitive, so therefore when I press harder, it makes a louder sound.

Your keyboard might not have that.

So you might want to experiment with a volume dial on your other instruments.

If you play the violin, you need to put more pressure on to make it sound louder.

If you play a wind instrument or brass, you need to blow more air down to make it louder.

How do we think, we can make the third melody sound more musical? Where would you get louder and where would you get quieter? Have a think now, here are my ideas.

So you can do the same as many two and get louder in the middle of the long four bar phrase or you could shape it in smaller chunks.

So you could shape it like this.

And then you could do the same with the second two-bars.

That sounds way more musical than if you play them all exactly the same.

Cause that sounds a bit robotic.

Let's know, have a look at the final melody.

So we can do a similar thing here, where we're growing in volume and then decreasing in volume at the end, with a beautiful crescendo at the beginning and the diminuendo.

You can also pay attention to the articulation.

We can see here in that circle, something called a slur.

Do you know what a slur means? I'm going to play it for you.

And you're going to tell me what it means.

Here is it without a slur.

And here's it with a slur.

A slur makes music sound really beautiful.

A slur is when you make two notes, we legato and we often do this in pairs in Baroque music.

And this makes it sound much more natural and musical.

You are now going to practise, play melodies one to four, really musically with expression.

So you're going to do this using your voice or your instrument or with technology and your instrument will have different way of making it sound expressive.

So you will need to be adaptable.

You need to make sure you put in crescendos and diminuendos, use staccato and legato pay attention to those slurs in melody four, if this is too easy, you don't need to follow my guidance, you can experiment with your own slurs.

Could you think about slurring melody three, for example and making sure you're put in staccato and legato in different places.

Pause the video to complete your task and resume once you have finished.

I'm sure there was some really musical playing going on in your homes, well done.

We will come back to that later.

Let's now revisit some of our key vocabulary from this lesson.

What is the correct word for getting louder? Choose it now and check it, it is a crescendo.

What is the correct word for getting quieter? Choose it now, it is a diminuendo, well done if you got that correct.

What is this? I'm going to play it for you.

Try that again.

It is a slur and that tells us to make the notes, which are slured really, really smooth.

So we have done loads of things today.

We've just explored how to play phrases musically.

We're going to go on to explore how to arrange melodies from Pachelbel's Canon in a way that you like.

So we can make a 12 bar melody in many different ways.

So we can do it in three phrases or four bars, just like in "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star".

We could have a four-bar phrase and then two shorter phrases of two bars followed by a four-bar phrase.

Again, "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" is sort of a bit like that.

Cause you could have divided up that middle phrase into two quite easily or you could do a massive eight-bar phrase and an a four-bar phrase.

We're going to be experimenting with some of these different phrases and blocks of Pachelbel's Canon, to make our own 12-bar melodies.

So you're going to create your own melody.

And here is my example.

You're going to take bits of Pachelbel's Canon, any of the melodies wonderful that you know and arrange them to create a new melody.

So for example in my melody, I have taken the first bit from melody one.

And the second bit from melody two.

so that's the beginning of melody one and the beginning of melody two.

Let's have a look in the second line.

So I took two lots of melody four, but I repeated it, so it sounds like this.

And that leads really well onto melody two.

And I'm just going to be finishing off with a whole strip of melody two.

So you might have noticed I've added an extra note on the end, I've added in a D, why is that? What would happen if I didn't add in that D? So I'm going to play it without the D.

with the D.

You may have been thinking that the D makes it sound finish, you're correct.

So my melody is made up of basically a four-bar phrase at the beginning, even though it's taken from melody one and two, but I've kind of glued them together, followed by two, two-bar phrases, followed by one four-bar phrases.

You might want to do yours, all with two-bar blocks.

So I've got four plus two, plus two, plus four.

You might want to do it differently, it just totally up to you.

You are now going to arrange the melodies from Pachelbel's Canon to create your own 12-bar melody, using your voice instrument or technology.

So the first thing you're going to do is break up one of the melodies into a fragment, just like I did earlier.

So I actually started with melody one and broke that up into a fragment.

Then try to have a mix of two and four-bar phrases.

Don't have to move the same meds, make it more interesting.

If you're finding this too easy, then go ahead and make a 16-bar melody.

And you could even add in some of your own ideas, think really carefully about what notes you want to start on and what notes you want to end on, think about how the phrases, lead really well into each other.

Some melodies will naturally go into others.

Some won't sound as good, have an experiment, pause the video to complete this task and resume when you're finished.

Great, I am really excited to hear some of these melodies.

I've got some key questions to be asking you.

How long is your melody? Is it 12 bars or 16 bars? Why did you choose your melody to be that long? One idea is that actually, it's much easier to have an even number of bars.

If you had 15 bars, that might sound a bit strange because you couldn't have a neat four or two-bar phrases.

Why have you chosen to start and end on certain pitches.

Maybe that's because it would make it sound finished or unfinished.

You don't want it to sound finished, only two bars in.

You want it to sound finish at the end.

How many different phrases do you have? I can't answer that one for you.

You can pause the video and have a check back at your melody.

How many different phrases make up your 12 or 16 bars? I want to know which melodies did you actually choose and why? I chose melody four, cause I really love melody four.

So I want that to feature my melody.

But what about you, which ones do you like most of all? so we have got through so much today.

We are now onto performing your arrangement of your melody.

You have got various options on how to perform your melody.

You could play it on your own and just play the melody.

You could play it with me and play the melody along backing track, it may or may not fit.

You could record yourself playing one part and then play it over the top or you could play it using technology.

So if you were familiar with something like BandLab, you can play it on there.

If you're going to be playing it on your own without me, pause the video now, so you don't get confused by the backing track.

If you are going to play with me, I'm going to play it backing track now, so you can play along with it.

One, two, three, four.

Fantastic, I really wish I was in a room with you to hear all your amazing melodies.

Do you show them off to people in your household.

So before we finish for good, we need to now check our key question.

How can Baroque melodies be phrased? You're going to use these key words below to form an excellent answer to that question.

Pause the video while you come up with your answer, write it down or get ready to say out loud.

Resume when you are ready.

Okay, I'm going to share my answer and you need to now make sure you can pair yours with mine so that you know exactly how Baroque melodies be phrased.

A phrase is a musical sentence.

It is almost like where we want to take a breath in music.

Phrases can be a various lenghts.

For example, two or four bars.

These two or four-bars phrases come together to make melodies, 12-bar melodies or 16-bar melodies.

Melodies can be phrased and made more musical by using diminuendos and crescendos to make them more interesting to perform unto the listener.

If you weren't quite about your answer, take some time now to rewrite it and rephrase it and have a go again.

Well done for your hard work today.

Please ask your parent or carer to share it on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, tagging Oak National and using the hashtag, #LearnwithOak.

Don't forget to click on an answer the quiz to show off all the knowledge that you have accumulated in today's lesson.

All that's left for me to say is well done, take care and see you soon.