Category 8: Local Music and Art Forms
A: Task:
Design a website and/or create a video story that showcases local music and musicians or art
forms that are important elements of the community experience (e.g. dance, festivals,
ceremonies, parades, sculpture, painting, crafts).
The theme for
CyberFair 2024 is COLLABORATE & Unite!
Let's unite to protect our communities, our environment, our
culture, our health, our animals, and our future.
"In collaboration we find strength, support, and the power to overcome any
challenge. Magic happens when we collaborate with an open heart and a shared
vision."
~Unknown
B: Content Standards:
As outlined in the National
Standards for Arts Education:
- Students should be able to communicate at a basic level in the four
arts disciplines—dance, music, theatre,
and the visual arts. This includes knowledge and skills in the use of
the basic vocabularies, materials, tools, techniques, and intellectual
methods of each arts discipline.
- Students should be able to communicate proficiently in at least one
art form, including the ability to
define and solve artistic problems with insight, reason, and technical
proficiency.
- Students should be able to develop and present basic analyses of works
of art from structural, historical, and
cultural perspectives, and from combinations of those perspectives.
This includes the ability to understand and evaluate work in the
various arts disciplines.
- Students should have an informed acquaintance with exemplary works of
art from a variety of cultures and historical periods,
and a basic understanding of historical development in the arts
disciplines, across the arts as a whole, and within cultures.
- Students should be able to relate various types of arts knowledge and
skills within and across the arts disciplines.
This includes mixing and matching competencies and understandings in
art-making, history and culture, and analysis in any arts-related
project.
- National Standards for Arts Education,
Learn more.
C: Learning Objectives:
-
Students will understand how music
and other art forms play an important part in creating community.
-
Students will list local music and
art forms, musicians and artists and explain they're significance to the community.
-
Students will take an active role in
documenting and preserving their local culture.
-
Students will better understand their
community's history by tracing a timeline of it's cultural heritage.
D: Discussion Questions:
-
What are the origins of local musical
traditions?
-
Is the music or art form from your
community part of a rural or urban tradition?
-
How is local music part of the
community experience: festivals, history, holidays, religion, family, education,
story-telling, and politics?
-
Does each member of your community
participate in its music and art, or are performances solely for individuals or groups?
-
What local music or art forms have
garnered attention outside your community?
-
Does the music of your community use
language or colloquialisms that are particular to your area?
-
Can the local music you've identified
stand alone or is it part of a celebration, dance, or ceremony?
-
Is your community actively preserving
their music and culture?
E. Suggested Starter Activities:
-
View past projects
produced by students in this category.
-
Music and culture are indispensable
parts of the community experience. Each community maintains its own songs, instruments,
dances, art forms and styles of expression. It is a major part of who we are. It reminds
us of where we're from and where we're going. By learning what role both music and culture
play in their communities, students better understand their diverse environments. Students
also gain insights into their cultural history as well as take an active role in the
cultural documenting of their communities.
-
List and classify the different types
of music or art forms in your community.
-
Attend local cultural performances.
Listen and watch for qualities which make that cultural event particular to your
community.
-
Name and identify the different types
of instruments and tools used by artists in your community and determine if they're a
product of a local tradition. Demonstrate how these instruments or tools are used. Discuss
how these instruments are made and what resources and materials were used in their
creation. Do they require specialized knowledge? Can anyone participate or is performance
limited to those who have had specific training?
-
Compare the different types of music
in your community and determine if there are any recurrent themes in the music you're
identifying (history, myths, culture, social or political struggle).
-
Look for similarities and differences
between the music of your community and popular music played at a national level. Decide
which music speaks more closely to your everyday experiences, and why.
-
Analyze and interpret musical factors
that have helped shape your community.
-
Create a catalog of community culture
which includes recordings, photographs, reviews and interviews.
-
Create a dictionary of terms which
define expressions, instruments and styles that are particular to your community.
-
Interview local artists and musicians.
Learn how long they've been involved in music, dance or art and what were the factors
which lead them in that direction. This would also be a good opportunity to identify the
influences of each individual artist. Who were their teachers? Whose styles helped shape
their own?
-
To better understand the extent of
music's role in the identity of your community, create a calendar of local holidays,
festivals and celebrations and then list the types of music and songs which are part of
each activity.
-
Musical styles are rarely created in a
vacuum. Most music is a combination of a number of different sources. Trace the history
and create a timeline of local musical traditions to identify the diverse influences that
have helped shape the music that is performed in your community today.
-
Determine how music and art both
create and involve the community.
F: Examples of Project
-
Carnival Festival of Trinidad and Tobago
Curepe Presbyterian School
(Curepe, Trinidad and Tobago, 2001)
-
Performing and Visual Arts Scene of Singapore
Raffles Secondary Girl's School
(Singapore, Singapore,
1999)
-
Santa Barbara Community Arts
Hollister School
(California, USA, 1999)
-
Greek Tradition in Folk Music & Popular Art
4th Elementary of Argyroupolis
(Athens,
Greece, 1998)
-
Music and Art
Alpha Omega Christian School of Leonard
(Texas, USA, 1998)
-
Diablo
Valley Music
Woodside Elementary School
(California, USA, 1997)
-
Choctaw
Music and Arts
Bogue Chitto Elementary School
(Mississippi, USA,
1997)
-
Temasek Rendezvous
CHIJ St Nicholas Girls' School
(Singapore, Singapore,
1997)
-
Vancouver's Sight and Sound
North Surrey Secondary School
(British Columbia,
Canada, 1997)