Unit 4: Connect

Essential Questions:

How do individuals choose music to experience?
How does understanding the structure and context of music inform a response?
How do we discern the musical creators’ and performers’ expressive intent?
How do we judge the quality of musical work(s) and performance(s)?

Enduring Understandings:

Individuals’ selection of musical works is influenced by their interests, experiences, understandings.

Response to music is informed by analyzing context (social, cultural, and historical) and how creators and performers manipulate the elements of music
Through their use of elements and structures of music, creators and performers provide clues to their expressive intent.

The personal evaluation of musical work(s) and performance(s) is informed by analysis, interpretation, and established criteria.

Perceive and analyze artistic work.

Interpret intent and meaning in artistic work.

Apply criteria to evaluate artistic work.

• Develop personal interpretations that consider the composer’s intent.

• Evaluate and refine personal and ensemble performances, individually or in collaboration with others.

• Explain and justify revisions needed toward refinement of a performance piece.

• Compare and contrast music selections/arrangements using descriptive musical vocabulary. 

• Use musical vocabulary to aurally identify articulation, dynamics, harmonic structure, historical/cultural style, tempo, timbre, texture, differentiate instrumentation and voice parts, and recognize appropriate performance practices. 

• Collaboratively and independently reflect on, revise, and refine artistic ideas and work through critique and discussion of the methods and process, considering personal artistic vision.