Year 10 (Stage 5) Elective Music - Music of a Culture (Hispanic/Latinos Music): ‘Tacamun’

Topic: ‘Tacamun’ (2006), composed and performed by Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero. For Music of a Culture (Hispanic/Latinos), Stage 5 Year 10.

Prior learning: Students should have a sound understanding of the 6 musical concepts (pitch, duration, texture, tone colour, and dynamics and expressive techniques), explored in the stage 4 mandatory music course. The piece introduces more complex expansions of stage 4 musical concepts, such as rhythmic patterns: triplets, dotted notes, tied notes, off-beat accents, anacrusis, modulation. Students should have a general understanding of how to incorporate their chosen instrument into a variety of styles or genres. Students should have some acquired understanding of major and minor chord structure and their relationship to melodic phrasing.

In this online lesson, students shall address the following outcomes/objectives as a result of the Listening, Composition and Performance tasks provided:

1.     Improvise and arrange both individually and in groups in the styles of the compulsory and additional topics studied.

2.     Experiment and improvise both individually and in groups using stimulus characteristics of Music of a Culture (Hispanic/Latinos Music).

3.     Hurdle Task: Identify similarities/relationships between a chord progression and a melody.

Introduction

Music is a diverse and variable phenomenon that has been implemented into world cultures as an essential aspect of traditional identity. The focus of Music of a Culture, and the skills acquired from studying this unit, enable students to have a greater understanding and appreciation of music as a universal experience, regardless of which culture is involved. By studying Hispanic/Latinos music, as well as the examples and source material provided, students shall identify and recognise the style/genre as an influential element in modern society and the array of emerging popular music styles.

In this lesson, students shall learn how to implement their own individual approaches to the subject genre through composition and performance. As previously explored, students are familiar with the musical style and the relationships between the musical concepts that shape and define this genre from other forms of music. This lesson is designed to challenge students to apply musical techniques in order to overcome the designated hurdle task:

'What are the similarities/relationships between a chord progression and a melody?'

By using this as a focal point in the lesson structure, students are able to develop further compositional understanding from an individualized viewpoint, rather than the teachers.