Musical terms for the what?

Sorry to say that this set of music worksheets is NOT about learning what the difference between Hip Hop and House, Drum n’ Bass and Techno is.

This is about an age old problem…

Helping students to learn what italian music terms like “Andante” and “Leggerio” mean

The thing is.. that these things are still important!

Italian is the Universal Language for Music – at least for musical terms that are written on scores. Its been that way for 300 years, and its unlikely to change. Even Percy Grainger couldn’t change it, and his use of English in his scores makes his music now look like something of an oddity. Nearly all music uses Italian terms in its scores – even pop music usually uses the convention of Italian names.

It’s a fact that music students still have to learn the correct meaning of “Andante”, “Allegro” and “Presto”- or they will end up looking very silly – especially if they are going to take examinations in music.

Helping students to know their terms well is really vital for all types of music teachers, both private music teachers who are preparing students for practical and theory exams, as well as classroom teachers that are responsible for making sure that students meet national standards in their respective countries.

Why the Digital Age then?

Because at the Fun Music Company we really wanted to find something different, something that would really enable the students to be able to do these on their own, rather than just having to “know” the answer.

Students in the digital age are different – information is much more readily available at the touch of a button, and its much more difficult to get students to learn things by rote as once they were able to.

Students don’t like to learn by rote – as educators we need to find ways to make even the most boring and repetitive of subjects into challenges for their mental abilities.

We struggled with this for ages because the fact is that learning what “Andante” means can never really be that interesting! It is always a challenge to make stuff interesting for students as they really don’t embrace an old fashioned way of making them write it out 10 times very well. I know… I’ve tried teaching theory, and I found this was one of the hardest parts to get the students to do well in.

What we didn’t want to do was create a worksheet like this:

But the problem with that is that the students really have to know the answers… or be able to look them up in a Dictionary.

What we have attempted to do with this module of worksheets is to create an activity that:

• Was possible to find the answer without actually knowing it in the first place. This meant that students could do the worksheet by themselves… without having to look it up or know the answer.
• Had an activity that was relevant to TODAYS students.. most of the activities in current theory books could have come straight out of the 60’s, 50’s or earlier! Today’s teenagers couldn’t think of much worse!
• Inserted a little bit of FUN in an otherwise one of the most boring (but necessary) parts of music education.