Educational activity based on the short film Les Musiciens de Brême
6-9 years: Listen, compare - Basic vocabulary for describing music: timbre, pitch, simple forms, dynamics, tempo. / A few great works from the musical heritage.
9-11 years: Listen, compare and comment - Describe and compare sounds from different musical contexts and geographical or cultural areas, from both past and present.
Les Musiciens de Brême © Masataka Hiroyasu / Tokyo University of the Arts
TitleLes Musiciens de Brême
ThemeFriendship, Animals, Traditional tale
Genre & keywordsNarrative, folk tale, animated painting, friendship, animals, thief.
Age (for the film)6-11 years old
Duration03 min 38 s
DirectorMasataka Hiroyasu
MusicYumeko Miyamoto
ProductionTokyo University of the Arts (Japan, 2102)
Discover the instruments of baroque music.
The short film presents an adaptation of the Grimm tale “The Musicians of Bremen”. In this adapted version, we meet the personified animals with their instruments. The soundtrack doesn't let you identify the instruments but draws on this world. The work here will focus on identifying the instruments (naming, exploring) and will introduce baroque music and its instruments.
As an extension, work on the orchestra and the city of Bremen could be added.
First, students will watch the whole video and share their thoughts freely about it. The original tale is a cumulative tale. This means that it is a short text that presents a chain of characters and events that repeat until the final resolution.
The animals are personified and presented in anthropomorphic form while keeping their animal characteristics.
On the second viewing, students will be asked to focus on the animals' instruments (the donkey, the dog, the cat, the rooster): lute, violin, timpani, trumpet. We can read the original tale to the students to see if the instruments are the same as in the video.
Discover on classic-intro.net, the Jean-Paul Chorier site, the instruments of baroque music, the lute, the trumpet, the violin and the timpani and to go further, an introduction to baroque music and the masterpieces of baroque music.
Cross-curricular links and resources
Activity sheet written by: Aurélie Moriceau du blog Maikresse72. Discover the Maikresse72 blog...
