Film Music Lesson 1

You will need

• Piece of paper

• Pen or pencil 📝

• A way to listen to the music ♫ Headphones would be useful. 🎧

Plan for today

In this page, there are...

• My words to read

• Sound files to listen to

• Videos to watch and to listen to

• Activities to try

Activities are in a box with a green tick

Read these carefully.

Sometimes you will need to submit something to Teams, sometimes not.

1. What is the plan for this term?

This term we will be...

• Thinking about how composers use musical elements and musical devices to create effects

• Listening to some famous film music

• Performing some famous film music!

• Creating our own soundtrack

2. Let's hear some film music

On your piece of paper, draw this table:

Clip number	Matching Picture
1
2
3
4
5

1. Look at the pictures A, B, C, D and E.

2. Listen to the music clips below. They will download when you click the orange words.

3. Can you match each clip with a picture? Write your answer in the table.

11MB

Music Clips.mp3

Open

Click here to listen to the music clips

Match these pictures to the music above.

Click on the Answers tab underneath this to see the Answers and mark your work.

Click on the Answers tab >

♫

Answers

3. How do composers do this?

Let's think about the musical elements and how composers can use them.

Read the table below carefully. We will need to use these when we do our own composing.

Musical Element	What it means.
Melody	The tune. How the notes move, e.g. skip, step or leap
Articulation	The way something is played, e.g. pluck
Dynamics	Loud and quiet
Tonality	Major and minor. We did this in our keyboard lessons and we will revisit these words.
Structure	The sections of music
Harmony	How notes are combined together.
Instruments	Recognising which instruments are playing.
Rhythm and tempo	Tempo = the speed
Texture	The layers of music
Sonority	How something sounds, e.g. harsh or bright.

4. Batman

Listen to the Batman music again.

Think about the musical elements you have just read. What musical elements are used in this piece of music to make it sound like a Batman film?

For example: the pitch starts low. The tempo is slow.

What other musical elements can you hear?

2MB

Bamtan.mp3

Open

Batman Theme

5. Match the musical elements

Copy the two lists in this picture. Draw them next to each other.

Listen to the music file below.

Draw a line between every clip and the right description.

23MB

Musical elements.mp3

Open

Musical clips

Click on the Answers tab below to see the Answers and mark your work!

Click on the answers tab >

♫

Answers

6. You're finished!

That's the end of the activities for this week.

Now we know about some techniques that we can use in our own pieces.

7. Extension (optional)

If you've done everything and you still have some time left over, why not listen to some more film music?

Here are some of my favourites: