Reading about compositions and performances

Interpreting and reviewing performances is a key aspect of the Music curriculum. Students must generate their own interpretations and reviews of performances and consider others' interpretations.
However written interpretations of performances may have sophisticated language and sentence structures. It is helpful for teachers to deconstruct interpretation responses at both the sentence and whole-text level. In the first instance, this should support students reading and comprehension; in the second, it should improve the writing of their own interpretations of musical performances.
Two strategies to support students to do this are:

Unpacking expanded noun (nominal) groups

A noun or nominal group is a group of words that represents or provides information about something (e.g. places, things, ideas) or someone, whether concrete (i.e. physical entity, such as a guitar) or abstract (i.e. concept or idea, such as enjoyment) in a clause. 

A noun group can comprise a single word (such as 'composition') or be expanded to include pre- and/or post-modifiers which provide clear details about the head noun (such as 'the orchestral composition which depicts the Antarctic landscape'). The pre-modifier 'orchestral' indicates that the composition is intended for a large orchestral ensemble, while the post-modifier 'which depicts the Antarctic landscape' describes the inspiration for the composition.

The sentences below are taken from John Hardaker's review of Australian composer Andrea Keller's ensemble Five Below, which appeared on the Australian Jazz website. In the selected sentences from this review, some of the expanded noun groups have been colour coded to illustrate the ways in the artist and her compositions are appraised and how details are elaborated upon for the reader. The head noun is pink, the pre-modifiers in blue, and the post-modifiers (also called qualifiers) are in yellow.

In the first two sentences, the expanded noun groups relate to the artist. In the following sentences, the noun groups concentrate more on her compositions.

Using expanded noun groups adds description, critique, and detailed information. Teachers can explicitly teach students the components of expanded noun groups to improve their reading comprehension, their critique of texts and in their writing.

To do this, teachers can encourage students to:

1. Highlight (or circle) the head noun in one colour
2. Highlight in another colour (or underline) pre-modifiers
3. Highlight in yet another colour (or underline with a squiggly line) post-modifiers (Qualifiers).

Curriculum links for the above examples: VCAMUR038, VCAMUR045.

Jointly deconstructing a review

Jointly deconstructing a review supports students to provide an evaluative analysis and response to a text such as a musical composition or performance, a book, film or play (Derewianka & Jones, 2016). To jointly examine and annotate a review, teachers can use coding to identify the various elements used in Music analyses.
In the text below, the response describes and evaluates the musical elements of compositions on an album of music and comments on the impact of these.
The typical structure of an interpretation is:

• Context (background information to the text)
• Text description (description of elements of the text)
• Judgement (evaluation of the work) (Humphrey, Droga & Feez, 2012).

Many of the language features of persuasive writing are relevant to reviews, for example, attitudinal language choices, such as those that express feelings, make judgements of behaviours, or evaluate qualities. These attitudes can be amplified or softened through vocabulary choices which increase or decrease the intensity of a viewpoint.
To attend to these kinds of choices:

1. The teacher explains that the purpose of a review in Music is to identify the key or idea of the music or performance and evaluate its qualities and effect. They do this by selecting elements of music to justify their analysis of the intended effects on the audience or listeners (Derewianka & Jones, 2016).
2. The teacher presents a model text of a paragraph from a review to the class. This may need to be written by the teacher.
3. The teacher reads the text aloud, pausing to clarify any unknown or ambiguous terms.
4. The teacher asks students to highlight:
   • the key theme or idea (for example, in blue)
   • Musical elements in another colour (green)
   • evaluative and/or amplified verbs, adverbs, or adjectives which express attitude (bold italics)
   • complex or expanded noun groups (underlined)
   • prepositional phrases which provide details of manner (italics)
5. The teacher leads a discussion, encouraging students to explain:
   1. how the topic sentence is supported by elaborations
   2. how the musical elements are used to realise intended effects
6. Students can later use the deconstructed paragraph as a model for their writing.

In the below example, a teacher used paragraphs from Des Cowley's review of the Vanessa Perica Orchestra's album Love is a Temporary Madness, which appeared on the Rhythms website. The text has been highlighted according to the colour-coding above.

Curriculum links for the above examples: VCAMUR045, VCAMUR046.