Lesson Plan- What is Romantic Music?
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Class: Music History-Romantic Era
Grade Level: accelerated middle school students, early high school students
Curriculum: A History of Western Music, Grout & Palisca
Assignment:What is Romantic Music?
Materials: Macintosh or PC computer
Objective: To have a basic understanding of what Romantic Music History is, and how it relates to other areas of music history.
Intro: This lesson is meant to use a word processing program to record analogies that relate to major ideas and issues from the Romantic era. The key is that the students take an issue from that time, and create an analogy for it in their modern culture, and discuss it in small groups. They will then record it into a word processing program to present as a series of analogies.
Some basic themes from the Romantic Era (please see teacher pages for other ideas, or more in depth info):
-Music became more concerned with feelings and less concerned with form.
-Two main battles occured between absolute and progrommatic music.
-Beethoven's liberal attitude convinced other composers to take risks.
-Composers/musicians specialized in a certain instrument or genre.
After the teacher presents some basic ideas about the Romantic Era,
students would then take these, extrapolate how they related, and create
analogies in their groups. When ready, the students will move to the computer
and write their analogies down to be presented to the class.
These analogies serve two purposes, they make a connection between music history and what the kids are interested in. They teach them some basic ideas about that period in history that could be applied to English, History and other subjects.
Some questions to get your class discussing in groups:
How are these composers like current composers?
Do any of these ideas sound like things you talk about?
What would MTV be like if they had TV back in the Romantic Era of Music History?
Evaluation:
Students would be evaluated by group, by the teacher. Then, in addition, each member of the group could write down comments about how much everyone contributed, and what they learned in a form of reflection on the project. A certain amount of points would be assigned and would be distributed by group to all members, unless a very unfavorable reflection came in from several members of a group about another member.
link to a sample: