Welcome Back!

Hello everyone and welcome back to ‘The Alexandro Chronicles’. I hope everyone reading had a good week and is excited to read some more about my insights into my experiences at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music!

My first class this week taught me a few valuable lessons. The first one is to make sure you save your work from the week before. It put me at a slight disadvantage as I was a bit behind my peers. After catching up we continued to work on Abelton Live, going through our lesson adding to the song we had started to create from last week. I found that I was quick to catch up to the rest of the class and would eventually be able to cross everything off my checklist by the end of the lesson.

This was my end result, I had created a funk groove from the available clips. I also incorporated some Latin percussion to create a fusion style.

This task over the last few weeks has really shown me the importance of engaging teaching and active learning. As musicians, we’re already actively learning when we practice daily, but for school students, this is an effective way of teaching key syllabus points whilst creating an engaging learning environment.

My second class this week at the con, which focused on composing, unfortunately, saw me participating from home due to the severe weather and rain in Sydney. In my opinion, I don’t feel that I was able to absorb absolutely everything that was being taught, being in-person fits with my personal style of learning. I was able to play along with the tasks and found it really interesting when famous pop songs were rearranged by the class for other instruments. Again showing a way to engage students by making the content more relatable to them. Some students tend to disengage when they’re rearranging 300-year-old pieces of music. But if we can apply the same principles to modern music at first, it’s a great way to get them hooked and engaged. We then spoke briefly about the assessment task which would have us do just this. Take a song of our choice and rearrange it for a secondary school class.

Thanks for reading!! I hope you’re enjoying the blog. I’ll have more for you next week so stay tuned!

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