Unit 1: Create

Essential Questions:

Why do musicians generate creative work?
How do musicians generate creative ideas?
How do musicians make creative decisions?
How do musicians improve the quality of their creative work?
When is a creative work ready to share?

Enduring Understandings:

The creative ideas, concepts, and feelings that influence artists work emerge from a variety of sources.

Musicians’ creative choices are influenced by their experience, context, and expressive intent.

Musicians evaluate and refine their work through openness to new ideas, persistence, and the application of appropriate criteria.

Musicians’ presentation of creative work is a culmination of a process of creation and communication.

Generate and conceptualize artistic ideas and work.

Organize and develop artistic ideas and work.

Refine and complete artistic work.

• Compose and perform 4, 8, and 16 bar melodies with rhythmic variations, chordal structure, and attention to best practices in theory. 

 

• Improvise melodic and harmonic material when given chords and structure.

 

• Explain and verbally articulate compositional choices made. 

 

• Use self-assessment and other feedback to improve upon original work. 

 

• Manipulate various elements of music through the effective use of compositional techniques.

 

• Apply compositional techniques for creating variety, tension and release, and balance to convey expressive intent.

 

• Document creation of original music ideas through the use of notation and/or audio/video recording.

 

• Explore various mediums and experiences with using different sounds to express ideas or feelings.

 

• Identify sounds, rhythms, melodies, harmonies, that could be used to express an idea or feeling.  

 

• Convey expressive intent in music performance.  

 

• Perform and create harmonic/rhythmic accompaniments when provided with melodic content. 

 

• Individually or collaboratively plan and generate multiple creative works that explore a personally meaningful theme, idea, or concept.

 

• Experiment with a range of materials and/or techniques with clear intention.

 

• Effectively organize and develop artistic ideas that explore meaningful concepts through experimentation, practice, and persistence.

 

• Demonstrate advanced techniques and deep knowledge in a given compositional task.