MUSIC

We welcome 24 new year 7 students to our Encore Program through the Pathways stream. Encore Pathways is a talent development program for year 7 students. It is designed to help students continue with their instrument from the Year 7 beginner instrumental program, and be well prepared to transition to the Encore Gifted and Talented Program in Year 8 if they wish. Our Encore Pathways students will receive tuition from an instrumental specialist each week, will fast-track their notation reading skills with authentic learning experiences, and will have the opportunity to join with our existing Encore Year 7 students in College Ensembles in Term 4. Over 25% of Year 7 students are now enrolled in our Encore Music Program, either as part of the Pathways stream or as part of the Gifted and Talented stream. Auditions and applications for Encore Year 8 will open in Term 4.

Many hopeful students have contacted me to ask if our celebrated Sydney Band trip is going ahead this year. Each year for the last 4 years, the Band and Orchestra have travelled to Sydney to play at the Australian Schools Band and Orchestra Festival. Sadly, COVID restrictions mean this festival will not go ahead as a live festival, BUT, it is going online! We will have the opportunity to make a video and audio recording of our Ensembles to submit in the Festival. This presents a wonderful opportunity for us to create some great documentation of our music-making, and gives us the high level performance goal we love to strive for each year. I am currently investigating how we can make a video of our Band, Stage Band and String Sinfonia for the Festival, and really look forward to communicating with students and families about this.

It’s been difficult to share our talents through live performances in recent months, but Shave For A Cure and TRAC Idol presented some great opportunities for our musicians at the end of last term. Our Stage Band played Chattanooga Choo Choo, Rock Solid, and with Year 11 vocalist, Charlotte Wickson, pulled Valerie out the bag to open TRAC Idol. Two Year 8 Encore students, Harry Pratt and Caitlin Cumberlege, wowed the crowd with their vocal performances. Harry and Caitlin not only sing with great voices, but also play trumpet and euphonium (respectively) in the College Band. Year 9 student Kat Scott delivered a trumpet solo, and Karin Rezkalla, Encore student and sub-principal piccolo upheld the musicians’ reputation for having a perspicacious sense of humour.

Music and the Brain

This term, I will be sharing readings and research collated by esteemed music educator Dr Anita Collins. Dr Collins studied neuroscience and the impact of music education on brain development. This week I share with you Dr Collins findings about the auditory processing network of bilinguals and musicians. 

“The more effectively our auditory processes are firing the more effectively children can learn”. 

Researchers have studied the impact of music learning and language learning on the six areas of auditory processing in the brain. The six areas of auditory processing are:

Pitch - highness and lowness

Prosody - stress and intonation in language

Harmonics - overtones

Neural timing - the co-ordination of messages around the brain

Response consistency - the consistency with which our brain responds to a noise

Neural noise - the amount of extra noise in our brain when our neurons transmit messages.

In the brain activity of people who learn or listen to music the areas of prosody, harmonics, neural timing and response consistency are enhanced, pitch remains neutral, and neural noise is reduced. This means that, for children exposed to music, the brain’s ability to send information from the auditory network to the cognitive and sensory networks is increased as is the ability to block out distracting noise. 

“Making music requires an individual to engage multiple cognitive systems and to direct attention to the sounds that are heard, produced and manipulated”. (Kraus, N et al 2015 cited in Collins 2020).

Pictured below are some of our new Encore Pathways students.

Clare Brassil | Director of Music Performance