Happy Monday morning students!
Last week MPR posted a music exploring the structure of a theme and variations in music. They picked Mozart’s arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star as their example. As violinists, it is one of the first peices we learn – but do any of you know who wrote it? Did you know that Charles Bradlee borrowed the melody in 1835 when he wrote the Alphabet Song? Most people think that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed the melody, but he actually borrowed it from a french folk song that already existed and arranged a Theme and Variations around it. When composers write a theme and then want to make it fancy, its fairly common to have only two or three variations – but Mozart wrote twelve. (They are all really pretty, but I think that number five, and number seven and maybe number 8 are my favorites.)
I found a video on Youtube that has the twinkle song in D major (starting on our open D string) that you can try play along with. Even if you learned Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star a really long time ago, its still fun to try play along. Pay close attention to the metronome’s beat before you start so you can match the tempo. When you’re finished, go back to the MPR music lesson page and use their guidelines to composing you’re own variation of Twinkle and we can go over it in our lessons this week. I can’t wait to hear what you create!
Practice well this week!
Miss Cara
Paper & Tea Studio 