Greensboro Montessori School:
Liberal Arts - Music, Performance & Production

Music, Performance & Production
Jonathan McLean, Instructor

The Greensboro Montessori School has created a true spiral music curriculum based on cultural sensitivity, diversity and the GMS mission and vision statements. The curriculum runs from Lower Elementary to Middle School.


Sequence

1. Music/playing – singing, playing, listening & dancing
2. History – where it came from
3. Theory – the mechanics/rules of singing, playing, listening & dancing
4. Context
   A. Practical Application – how you sing, play, listen or dance
   B. Cultural – how singing, playing, listening and dancing affects/enhances our culture

Lower Elementary

Year 1
New Orleans, USA - Havana, Cuba – Rio, Brazil
Listen, sing, dance and play one new song from each city.
Begin connections from cities to other cities and their global context.
Continue notation: introduction to melodic syllables, intro to other cultures rhythmic syllables & eighth note, sixteenth note, treble clef, C major scale, song writing, depth of instrumentation and culminating year end performance.

Year 2
Dakar, Senegal – Seville, Spain – Delhi, India
Listen, sing, dance and play one new song from each city.
Continue notation: introduction to melodic syllables, intro to other cultures rhythmic syllables & eighth note, sixteenth note, treble clef, C major scale, song writing, depth of instrumentation and culminating year end performance.

Year 3
Denpasar, Bali – Bejing, China – Perth, Australia
Listen, sing, dance and play one new song from each city.
Continue notation: introduction to melodic syllables, intro to other cultures rhythmic syllables & eighth note, sixteenth note, treble clef, C major scale, song writing, depth of instrumentation and culminating year end performance.


Upper Elementary

Year 1
New Orleans, USA - Havana, Cuba – Rio, Brazil - Dakar, Senegal - Seville, Spain
Listen, sing, dance and play one new song from each city.
Continue connections from cities to other cities and their global context. Introduction to social context of songs.
Continue notation: independent song creation & writing, non-basic meters and tempos with their cultural context, bass & alto clefs, major & minor scales, depth of instrumentation and culminating year end performance.

Year 2
Delhi, India - Denpasar, Bali – Bejing, China – Perth, Australia
Listen, sing, dance and play one new song from each city.
Continue notation: independent song creation & writing, non-basic meters and tempos with their cultural context, bass & alto clefs, major & minor scales, depth of instrumentation and culminating year end performance.


Middle School

Year 1 - Origins
New Orleans, USA - Havana, Cuba – Rio, Brazil
Listen, sing, dance and play one new song from each city in the context of a set of original songs.
Continue connections from cities to other cities and their global context. Depth of social & political context of songs.
Continue notation: Begin independent reading of music, transposing original songs into notation and culminating year end performance.

Year 2 - Survival
Dakar, Senegal - Seville, Spain - Delhi, India
Listen, sing, dance and play one new performance from each city in the context of an opera.
Continue connections from cities to other cities and their global context. Depth of social & political context of performances and theater.
Continue notation: Begin writing of scripts and production schema and culminating year end performance.

Year 3 - Possibilities
Denpasar, Bali – Bejing, China – Perth, Australia
Listen, sing, dance and play one new film from each city in the context of a film.
Continue connections from cities to other cities and their global context. Depth of social & political context of film.
Continue notation: Continue writing of scripts and production schema and culminating year end film release.

The Middle School Performing Arts curriculum seeks to develop the student’s ability to create, translate, produce,
maintain and further an original idea/s through the performing arts. Different media is explored laterally while we answer the essential questions in depth. We start with original bands for the Origins Year, move on to an original Rock Opera during the Survival Year and complete the cycle with films in the Possibilities Year. Classes begin with practical life tasks like painting and construction. Then the practical life tasks are combined with the basics of any media for that year’s theme such as script/song writing. These basics are covered concurrently with a review of the media’s twentieth century history.

The essential questions we will seek to answer are:

• Origins Year
• How do you create an original idea?
• How do you translate your original idea?
• How do you produce your original idea?
• How do complete/finalize your original idea and move on to the next?

• Survival Year
• How do you maintain an original idea?
• How do you maintain the translation of your original idea?
• How do you maintain the production of your original idea?
• How do you create a foundation of maintaining original ideas?

• Possibilities Year
• How do you exploit originality or an original idea/s?
• How do push the translation of your original idea/s even further?
• How do expand the production of your original idea/s?
• How do exploit the possibilities of any maintained foundation/thread of original ideas?

Specific standards related to this course are available for viewing. Please ask the classroom teacher
for a copy.