Date: 15-1-16 Music and Literacy Lesson with Ms Susanne

For our music and literacy lesson, we started out by stretching and shaking out the "stress and tension" from our muscles. Then, we each hummed a note or tone of which we were more comfortable to hum, and did some sort of jumping exercise. When we jumped  or stood taller, the pitch that we hummed at rose, and when we crouched down, the pitch that we hummed at became lower.

After that, the whole class sang a few warm-up exercise. Ms Susanne wrote out a list of words on the whiteboard, with the lowest note being "so" and progressing to "do", 10 notes above the lowest note. She let us sing from the lowest "do" to "fa" and back to "do", then from "do" to "so" and so on so forth, till we would sing a full octave and back. I have learnt from Ms Susanne that we cannot stress our vocal cords. If we stress them, we can do them quite a bit of harm! (Gasp!) So, she told us that when the pitch became too high for us, we had to stop singing to avoid us doing harm to our vocal cords.

After that, Ms Susanne let us sing "All Things Shall Perish from Under the Sky". As the people from Percussion had not heard of that song before, she let the whole class start from scratch. In the beginning, I thought that I would actually not need this "revision", yet to be frank, I had forgotten most of the tune of this song. Thanks Ms Susanne!

Then, she let us sing that song in canon form, and this time it was more confusing as there was more people. I had to concentrate harder.

After singing that, Ms Susanne let us do dictation. She clapped out a rhythm and we had to say it out loud in the "ta ti-ti" pattern. She then let us write down a selected tune and we had to make up our own rhythm using only four notes: "do", "mi", "so" and the high "do". We could only use "ta" and "ta-a".

Since there was a shortage of time, Ms Susanne only chose one tune to showcase. She picked Shiroy's rhythm and chose Yau Wai to play the xylophone to keep time. The whole class had to sing out the tune and it was rather difficult!

I have learnt from this lesson that music students have to be spontaneous too. We have to learn to improvise to, for example, cover up mistakes. Also, we cannot stretch our limits as it may harm us. This is what I've learnt!