Part 2 of ‘The sound of art’ exposes students to the 4 instrument families of the orchestra and their different timbres (or tone colours).

The students will also explore what a composer is and the role of a conductor in the orchestra. This is achieved through experiencing Benjamin Britten’s ‘Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’. The students will also explore cartooning and create their own cartoons through exploring exaggeration of features and characteristic of people and animals.

• String instruments are usually made of wood and have a hollow centre.

• The strings are attached and stretched over the body of the instrument. Sound is produced when the string is made to vibrate.

• The earliest violins used strings made of sheep intestines, but now strings are mostly made of metal.

• The string can be made to vibrate using a bow or by plucking (using one’s fingers to pull the string).

• The bow hair comes from the tail of a horse (even today).

• Some examples of string instruments are the violin, viola, cello, double bass, guitar and even the piano (the strings are inside, hitting a key causes a little hammer to strike the string inside, making the sound).

• The violin is the smallest string instrument and plays at the highest pitch, the viola is a little bigger and a little deeper in tone, the cello is bigger and deeper still, and the double bass is largest and lowest in pitch.

Start to also tie in musical comprehension as well. For example:

• Which instrument played which character and why?

• Why do you think Prokofiev chose the specific instruments for the character? What is it about the flute that fits the bird, for example? What characteristics of the clarinet make it a good cat and so on?

• Did any of the instruments actually sound like the animal? For example, the oboe sounds like it quacks like a duck.

• Notice how Prokofiev uses the music to create the mood or to show feelings. For example, in the beginning did Peter’s theme sound like he was happy or sad? Did the wolves sound scary or friendly?

• Note the anxiety of the chase scene when the duck gets caught, and the sadness when he is eaten, the drama of when the wolf is captured, the triumph of the processional and so on. How is this achieved musically?

• Notice how Prokofiev ‘paints’ the story with sound. For example when the cat climbs up the tree, the music goes up and up. When Peter carefully lets the lasso down from the tree the music winds down from high to low just like a lasso descending. As the wolf is caught, the snap of the capture and his jumping to and fro are audible.

Using the same basic methods as above, have the students create a comic strip telling the story of ‘Peter and the Wolf’. Materials needed are a pencil, black pen or marker, eraser, colour (crayons, textas or coloured pencils), and paper.

1. Make an outline of the main plot points in ‘Peter and the Wolf’. The students must summarise the plot in no more than 10 sentences or dot points.

2. Create empty comic strip boxes for each sentence. Have the students write each sentence on the top or bottom of each box.

3. Before starting to draw, make sure that the strip tells the whole arc of the story, with all of the key points. The idea is to distil the story to its essence, while still covering the whole arc of the story, beginning, middle and end.

4. Have the students create the picture cartoon within each box that describes the scene using the steps above (from the previous cartoons). The students incorporate the instruments into the drawings of the animals such as a flute with a head and wings becoming a bird; the cat has with a clarinet tail and so on.

5. Further to this, an exploration of surrealism would be an extension in artmaking and appreciating due to the common exploration of the exaggerated features of objects, places and situations.