We listen when our students tell us what they’re learning. We post a lot of the information here that we give to the students in lab for the theme.
Archers and those who made the bows and arrows were the first to realize that the strings made sounds and that it was musical. While the bone flute pre-dates this, that is a really cool discovery!
Chordophones – the earliest ones date back to 4500 years ago and they’re string instruments. The first chordophones were the lyres of Ur, and the ravanastrom was a very old stringed instrument from Sri Lanka. The Oud is considered the king of instruments in the Middle East.
Andrea Amati was a violin maker in Italy. Orchestras sync up in cool ways to do music. There are specific woods that are better for instruments and specific ways of moving on those instruments to make sounds.
High is happy and lively and low is sad and slow. (That’s quite a metaphor for life, right?)
Many of the Asian styles of string instruments were surprising and unknown to students, but they loved the patterns of notes.
The evolution of the string instruments, how the guitar gained strings over time and how you can do rhythm and melody on string instruments playing together was quite a revelation.
As a lover of string instruments, I appreciate all of the thought about the way strings are created and played – and I wonder if these kids will be considering that for future composition stations.
