Learning Music in ATCS
by Abby Sinberg
Coming from all different levels of musical talent, the 16 of us learned how to play music together. However, to do so, we needed to research and learn some music history to appreciate how music is created. We studied various composers and musicians, such as Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Wagner, Bernstein, and Norman, and analyzed the stories being told by the notes. In particular, we studied the original story of Tristan & Isolde and its more modern sister-play, Romeo & Juliet. We listened to four different musical interpretations of this story: Wagner's opera, Tristan & Isolde, with Isolde's liebestod sung by the iconic Jessye Norman; Tchaikovsky's fantasy-suite; Prokofiev's orchestral suite and ballet; and Bernstein's musical, West Side Story. You can learn more about these artists and pieces below!
After learning how to interpret and understand the stories behind great pieces of music, one of our assignments was to choose our own piece of classical music and write a short story that corresponded with the tempo and style of the music. This exercise allowed us to explore our own feelings towards music. During the month of December, we learned how to play the handbells and performed excerpts from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony plus a variety of holiday songs for our peers. We had so much fun doing this! Everyone smiled and laughed when they heard the music that we created. ​Click the button below to learn more about the handbells and to hear some of our handbell performances!
The World's Most Eternal Love Stories:
Tristan und Isolde and Romeo and Juliet
by Elizabeth Lannin
by Elizabeth Lannin
One of the many units we studied was the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Before we talked about them, we first learned about Tristan and Isolde, the story that the base for Romeo and Juliet. The story of Tristan and Isolde starts with two warring families, and an injured Tristan encounters Isolde. This makes way for a forbidden romance as Isolde is arranged to marry another. With the addition of a love potion that is consumed by both Tristan and Isolde, they are bound together by the effects of the potion. Despite this, Tristan gives Isolde up to his cousin the King and gets married to another Isolde, but only because he must. Their end comes, Tristan is stabbed with a poisons dagger and calls for Isolde to come and heal him. The twist is that Tristans wife tells him that Isolde comes bearing a black sail with translates to rejecting him instead of a white sail which would accept him. This deception is what ends Isolde, as she comes too late and found her lover dead. She dies from a broken heart. Buried together, a tree from each grave sprouts up and intertwine their branches together to eep them together forever. During this unit we also watched Baz Luhrmann's film version of Romeo and Juliet and listened to music based on certain part in the movie by famous people like Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky and Bernstein. One of the task given after listening to the music was to tell how we felt listening to the music that how well it resonated with its assigned part in the play.
Who was Jessye Norman?
by Sammie Blicker
Jessye Norman was an African American opera singer. Her rich soprano voice covers an uncommonly wide range, from classical to modern compositions. She was able to perform dramatic soprano roles, but refused to be limited to that voice type. The Guardian newspaper describes her as, “a diva so grand she needed to Rolls Royce just to get across the street. Martin Kettle kicks off stars’ tributes to the great American soprano.” Her musicality, her versatility, her eloquence in many languages and her standing in the world of classical music made Jessye Norman an icon and a role model for every singer of any nationality and any colour. she inspired black singers everywhere and gave them belief and hope that they could be successful too.
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A five-time Grammy Award winner, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Norman has received forty-five honorary doctorate degrees, is a Kennedy Center Honoree and holds the National Medal of the Arts. Graduate fellowships at the University of Michigan’s School of Music have also been named in her honor. Norman serves as a spokesperson for The Partnership for the Homeless and was named an honorary ambassador to the United Nations. Additionally, she serves on the board of trustees of the New York Public Library, The New York Botanical Garden, The Dance Theatre of Harlem, Paine College and Carnegie Hall.
Romeo & Juliet Re-Imagined
by Maxine Danni
Pyotr IIyich Tchaikovsky
1840-1893
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Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer and, in 1870, he created his fantasy-suite of Romeo & Juliet. It took him three revisions of this specific piece to finally get the right flow. In my opinion, Tchaikovsky has a more romantic and "chill" tone than the other composers we studied throughout ATCS. Tchaikovsky gave each scene and character in Romeo & Juliet its own motif-- a musical theme-- which the audience's ears are able to identify and follow throughout the story. The love motif, in particular, has become particularly well-known in pop culture and can be heard at the 8:12 minute mark.
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Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev
1891-1953
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Prokofiev was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor. In 1935, Prokofiev created his Romeo & Juliet orchestral suite. In 1938, he then transformed his piece into a complete ballet. However, the piece is more commonly performed today as an orchestral suite and is a beloved standard in orchestral repertoire. Each movement of the ballet represents a different scene from the play. If you listen carefully and you know the story well enough, you will be able to pick out the different scenes. The most famous movements are "The Death of Tybalt" and "The Death of Juliet", which can be found at the 25:45 and 47:25 minute marks, respectively.
Leonard Bernstein
1918-1990
Bernstein, unlike Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, was an American conductor and composer. Bernstein's most famous work, West Side Story, premiered on Broadway in 1957. The musical was later adapted into a film, which came out in 1961. Also in 1961, Bernstein arranged the musical into an orchestral suite called the Symphonic Dances that could be performed without vocalists in orchestral settings. Bernstein’s inspiration for West Side Story was, of course, Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. Instead of being set in Renaissance Italy, though, the story is set in New York city in the 1950s, and the two warring families, the Montagues and the Capulets, become two gangs: the Sharks and the Jets. Bringing up issues of immigration and race, Bernstein modernized Shakespeare's story without losing the original plot line. The story lines are close to identical with one major exception: the character of Juliet, known as Maria in West Side Story, survives. As Tony-- our modernized Romeo-- dies, Maria sings a reprise of the famous "Somewhere", which can be heard directly below. To the bottom right, you'll hear the symphonic suite arrangement with Bernstein as conductor.
