One of the difficulties which faces students is how to start a composition. With the Music 2 course requiring a composition based on the mandatory topic, Music of the last 25 years (Australian Focus), all students are required to create at least one composition. I decided to create an interesting task with LogicPro allowing students to use a different program other than Sibelius/Finale. This exercise requires students to import a movie into LogicPro, and compose based on a visual stimulus. The work I relate to this task is Nigel Westlake’s ‘Antarctica: Suite for Guitar and Orchestra’ for the movie ‘Antarctica’ (1991) for IMax. Here we are specifically looking at the movement ‘Penguin Ballet’ and its relation to the film. Issue is score and film is rather hard to find but Westlake’s album ‘Out Of The Blue’ can be purchased on iTunes, and the film can be purchased online.
The idea is while compositions are generally limitless in their possibilities, I want students to have some sort of inspiration/visual when they compose. This not only allows students an opportunity to improvise, but when they are ready for their composition on the mandatory topic rather than the teacher giving the students limitations the students will limit themselves based on their visual inspiration.
Here are screenshots from the tutorial, as uploading .mp4 is not possible on WordPress.
I did end up cutting some of the movie file due to tutorial being rather time consuming, and as such one part was turning off the metronome while recording. This was pretty important if you did not configure tempo within global tracks. To fix this, I created a PowerPoint which students can look at to give them additional information.
Music Teaching Resource 