Kandinsky Reloaded

by MIRIO COSOTTINI
    School sections
    • Lower secondary school
    Educational subjects
    • Instrumental practice
    • Composition
    • Music and technologies

Kandinsky Reloaded

Kandinsky Reloaded is a multidisciplinary musical activity combining graphic skills with those of interpretation, performance, and musical improvisation. Initially, students produce graphic shapes on a rectangular sheet of paper; this is a compositional phase in which the students choose (more or less intuitively) where to place the graphic signs within a given space. They then interpret these graphic signs musically and associate each sign with a sound result (instrumental or vocal). 
 
In the end, one student acts as a conductor (real time musical direction) by touching the geometric shapes displayed on a screen or an IWB in order to “activate” and “deactivate” the other musicians who will execute these forms according to the previous interpretation within a context of musical improvisation. 

Work tools

To carry out this activity it is necessary to work in a room containing some desks, using sheets of paper and drawing materials (pencils, markers, ink, watercolours, and so on), and then move on to a music room with an IWB (in the absence of an IWB the activity can also be done using a video projector). 
 
In the music room, students will be able to use both their own voice and musical instruments. The IWB serves to display one of the students drawings to use as a graphic score which the students then have to interpret musically. 
 
It is necessary to visualize the graphics in a large format given that one of the students will be acting as a conductor in real time, touching the various graphic elements to be performed by the musicians; it is also possible to have two or more directors, this complicates the improvisational strategies of the whole group in a positive sense. 

Educational purposes

The skills, goals and training objectives selected by the teacher for this experience are shown below.

Competences
    Listening
    • Interpretation
    Production
    • Execution
    • Improvisation
    Reading and Writing
    • Use of unconventional analogic music notation
GOALS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMPETENCES [...]
    Lower secondary school
    Production
    • Capacity to conceive and create music and multimedia messages, also though improvisation or collective elaboration processes, using also IT tools, in critical confrontation with models belonging to the musical heritage
    Reading and Writing
    • Using different notation systems functional to reading, analysis and reproduction of pieces of music
Educational targets

The specific objective of the skills development is 

  • the use of alternative notation systems for the reading, analysis and production of musical pieces. 
  • to develop the ability to bring sense to sound/music (or a score) in multiple ways, re-expressing (translating) it using sounds/music, words, images, and gestures. 
  • to develop improvisational ability by producing music extemporaneously starting from an interpretation of graphic signs.

The reason for developing these skills is that improvisation is the cornerstone of any musical practice and is emblematic of creativity in general. 

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