As a gateway into the traditional music of Indonesia, the Grade 8 class were presented with a journal entry of a musician who had observed this traditional music and taken notes of his findings and observations. From this the Grade 8 class (who split into 2 groups) had to reconstruct the music that he recorded in his journal entry.

The Grade 8 class had to use many skills to decipher what was written in the journal:

  • investigating the location of the journal entry and the names of the instruments
  • conjecturing what the traditional musical notation in the journal meant
  • understanding the musical directions specific to the musical genre
  • presenting all the information in an understandable form
  • performing the piece together as an ensemble.

The students managed to process this information quickly and by the end of the lesson had undertaken their first rehearsals in getting ready to perform this piece!