Australian Female Composer, Ella Macens.
When brainstorming what resources to create for this piece, I first looked to the specific teaching points I jotted down when writing my program:
Some contemporary notation ie. artificial harmonics, glissandos
How to read alto/tenor clefs
C Aeolian mode
Uncommon metres and frequent metre changes
sense of "free time" which contrasts with Stanhope's rhythmic based work
Range of each stringed instrument and how to write for strings
As this is not the focus work, I did not plan as many activities and resources as Ockham's Razor and Five Hallucinations, but decided to focus on the notation, duration and tone colour as well as clefs. Therefore, the activities I designed for this piece include:
A melodic dictation of the cello line (the main theme) from bar 16 - 19 in treble clef (not tenor clef as written on score) with the time signatures given
A few musicology questions to encourage students to discover the specific composition and string techniques that Macens used in her work, accompanied by a built-in audio soundcloud player for students to refer to the work while working through the activity
An alto clef transposition task directly from the work itself so that students will have some experience reading the clef if it appears in an excerpt of a musicology exam paper
