THEME TEACHING LESSON THIRTEEN - MUSICAL SOUNDTRACK

Students will use our studies in Romeo and Juliet and the main concept to choose musical selections that they feel “appropriately reflect” a character, relationship, situation, or theme in the play. This is designed to be a “musical intelligence” lesson. The lesson will require the students to link two kinds of performing arts. Students will learn how subjective elements such as art artifacts can represent other subjectivities.

Each student has chosen a musical work that he feels represents a character, relationship, situation, or theme in the play. Each student has prepared on paper the name, composer, and (if applicable) lyrics to the song they choose. They also submit a reference for where one can hear the song, including the song name, album name, artist, recording company, recording date, and release date. Most importantly, they furnish a paragraph (or more) explaining the reasons for their selection(s).

Each student presents the particulars of his chosen work and his reasons for choosing the work(s). Some students will have multiselections. We will play excerpts of the selections.

The students’ response to this has been overwhelmingly positive and positively overwhelming! Many students entered the room with CD’s with many songs on them; still more had requests that I visit AOL or Yahoo! music for their songs. Many wrote longer-than-necessary explanations for their choices. I think that this has been the most popular assignment thus far. I knew that most of my students were intensely into music, but this confirms it to a surprising extent. There are more requests to play music than we can accommodate in a single block. G-Block features a trio who raps a popular song that most of the students seem to know. The students are enthusiastic. A variety of genres is represented, and, collated, will create an engaging diverse soundtrack to represent the play.