Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 1; January 03

David Cranmer and Clement Laroy, secondary +adult
Pilgrims-Longman, 1992

Level Elementary +
Time 20 min + (according to the level)
Focus Describing people; Discussion; Reading (optional)
Extras A text about the character described by the music (intermediate +)

You can do this activity several times, using different music and introducing new words every time .

Preparation Choose a piece of music as suggested below.

Procedure 1 Explain to your students that some musical compositions are intended to portray people, and add that they are going to try to describe the person they hear in a short piece of music. Ask them to take notes while they listen.
2 Play the music you have chosen (twice if the students ask you to). Give your students some time afterwards to look up any words they need in the Longman Lexicon, the Oxford Wordfinder or a bilingual dictionary. They can also ask their classmates and yourself for help.
3 In groups of four students try to find points in common in their descriptions. The group appoints a student to report to the class.
4 When possible, give the students a description of the person the musician had in mind. You can read out a description in a few sentences, or hand out a text written by the composer or by the author who gave the original idea to the composer.
5 The learners discuss in groups in what ways their perception is similar or different to the composer's.
6 Alternatively allow the class to ask you twenty Yes/No questions to find out how close they are to the composer's idea.

Extension
Invite your students to bring music to class (or to come and play music) that they feel describes themselves. The class discusses in how far they feel the music describes the student.

Variation (for Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel)
1 Put your students in groups of three or four. Ask what kind of person they think is described by the music. Invite them to imagine this person physically, where he or she lived and what kind of things she or he did. Play a two-minute excerpt from the beginning.
2 Allow the students to talk it over in groups, and a secretary reports to the class.
3 Tell your students he was a prankster, and hand out the list of pranks below.

Fig. 5.1

4 Tell your students only some of the pranks are described musically, and ask them to listen once more and to decide which ones they can hear. Play the rest of the music(about 12 minutes). (The pranks that Strauss had in mind are two, four, five and seven in that order. The others are not depicted in the music.) Finally, Till is sentenced to death, but his conclusion is 'Even gods fight stupidity in vain' )
5 Tell the class which ones are actually told in the music. Allow students who got some right to explain what associations they made between the music and the pranks.
6 Ask your students to write a composition for a later lesson. Possible titles, e.g.
'A trick I played on someone'
'A joke I enjoyed'
'A prank I did not find funny'
7 Photocopy a class set of the compositions so that all the students read each other's compositions at home, and in a later lesson they can vote to decide which one is the most funny. The winner gets an Eulenspiegel award. (Decide with the class what it should be.)

Suggested music
1 Saint - Saëns: Carnival of the Animals - The lion(1 min 30) Students usually describe a strong, tall, arrogant person.
2 Mussorgsky orchestrated by Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition
a) Gnomus ( 2 min 30): This piece should suggest the eerie shape of a gnome and his waddling, awkward physical movements.
b) Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle (2 min 30): Interesting to use when the students have got used to this kind of exercise, as there is a dialogue between two people here; one rich and laconic, the other poor and restless.
3 Holst: The Planets - Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age - Two minutes at the beginning. This suggests the calm, the serenity and the slow pace of old people.
5 Richard Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel : In this piece Strauss describes a mischievous character, Till Eulenspiegel (Till Owlglass) who plays pranks on everyone. Works both with the main activity and the variation. ( Strauss's annotations are found below )
6 Nielsen: Symphony No. 2 - The Four Temperaments: Each of the movements describes a different kind of person in a very expressionistic way. This is ideal to practise describing people several times. Here are some texts from Nielsen himself in which he describes what kind of people he had in mind. Select a three-minute excerpt from the movement you have chosen.
a First movement: Allegro collerico : Nielsen recollected the picture on which he based his music as portraying a man on horseback with a long sword in his hand: 'His eyes were nearly rolling out of his head, his hair flew madly round his face; it was so full of fury and devilish hate that I burst into laughter.'
b Second movement: Allegro comodo e flemmatico: Nielsen tells us that he visualised a youngster of about seventeen or eighteen, the despair of his teachers who gave up on him because he never knew his lessons: 'But it was impossible to scold him, for everything idyllic and heavenly was to be found in this young lad, so that every one was disarmed. His real inclination was to lie where the birds sing, where the fish glide noiselessly through the water, where the sun warms and the wind strokes mildly round one's curls. He was fair; his expression was rather happy, but not self-complacent, rather with a hint of quiet melancholy, so that one felt impelled to be good to him. When the air was shimmering in the heat, he would usually be lying on the pier at the harbour, with his legs dangling over the edge. I have never seen him dance; he wasn't active enough for that though he might easily have got the idea to swing himself in a gentle slow waltz rhythm.'
c Third movement: Andante malincolico (sic): 'I have tried to express the basic character of a heavy melancholy man'
d Fourth movement: Allegro sanguineo : 'In the finale I have tried to sketch a man who storms thoughtlessly forward in the belief that the whole world belongs to him, that fried pigeons will fly into his mouth without worry or bother. There is though a moment in which something scares him, and he gasps all at once for breath in rough syncopations: but this is soon forgotten and ...his cheery superficial nature still asserts itself.'
As quoted by Robert Layton: Nielsen's Symphonies & Concertos, notes for the EMI recording of Nielsen's symphonies and concertos (1975)
5 R. Strauss: Don Juan (opening 2-3 minutes)
6 Debussy: Général Lavine - from Préludes, Book I(2 min 45)

Richard Strauss's notes about Till Eulenspiegel:

1 Till's father rides through town with his son behind him on his horse. Till shows everyone his bottom, and the people shout at him.
2 Till rides to the market place on his donkey which tramples rides the market women's pottery to bits. They shout at him but Till rides off, making faces.
3 Till works for a miserly baker who wants him to sift the flour in the moonlight, which Till does literally. He sifts the flour on the ground where the moon shines. The baker is very angry.
4 Till, disguised as a priest, says a sermon. When his listeners realize they have been made fun of, Till has already scarpered.
5 Till sees a pretty girl and falls in love, which is against his deeper nature. She refuses him.
6 Eulenspiegel meets three blind men and pretends to give them three shillings. They go to an inn to have a meal. When the time has come to pay, nobody has the money. They accuse each other of keeping the money for themselves. The innkeeper is very angry and throws them out.
7 Till has a discussion with scholars and makes fun of their wisdom saying the world is full of superstition and stupidity.