About Red Priest Red Priest is a chamber music group – where each musician plays a different line of the music. The different lines or instrument voices join together to make a conversation in music. Specifically, Red Priest is a Baroque chamber music group. Baroque refers to the period of time in which the music they play was written.

ProgrammeExpect to hear music by famous masters such as Vivaldi, Handel, Telemann and Bach interspersed with curious items by forgotten composers and some energetic gypsy dances!

There will be lively spoken introductions and some audience participation.

The four virtuoso musicians of the internationally renowned Baroque group Red Priest – Piers Adams on his arsenal of recorders, violinist and multi-instrumentalist Adam Summerhayes, cello dynamo Angela East and harpsichord genius David Wright – will take you on a wild carnival ride through the music of the Baroque era!

UKPiers Adams RecordersAdam Summerhayes ViolinAngela East CelloDavid Wright Harpsichord

Known for their uniquely energetic performance style and dazzling musical arrangements, the players perform from memory, vividly demonstrating the sounds and techniques of their instruments as well as the extraordinary imagination of the 17th and 18th century composers.

TEACHER RESOURCE KIT: A resource for Years 3 – 8 (Level 2 and 3)

WHAT IS CHAMBER MUSIC?In classical music, works that have smaller numbers of players all playing their own part are called chamber music. Music like this, only requiring a handful of people, could be played in someone’s living room or ‘chamber’. This is different to large works for orchestra that can have 60 players or more and must be played in large halls. The music does not usually need a conductor and the players must all follow each other carefully so to stay together and agree on how the music should sound.

JUST WHO WAS THE ‘RED PRIEST’?The Italian composer and violin player Antonio Vivaldi’s nickname was ‘The Red Priest’, because of the colour of his hair and on account of him being a Catholic priest. Although he trained as a priest some say that the incense aggravated his asthma-like symptoms, and he worked mostly as a teacher of music in an orphanage. The UK based ensemble (band) Red Priest have named their group after him. Vivaldi was truly prolific writing 100s of pieces of music during the Baroque period that where popular at the time and influenced many other composers. After being largely forgotten during the nineteenth century when his music went out of fashion, his popularity in the twentieth catapulted him to the top of the classical charts. His work The Four Seasons is instantly familiar and has been reimagined in all sorts of ways.

BAROQUE STRING INSTRUMENTSThere have been instruments for thousands of years that employ a wooden box or gourd, a tight string and some kind of bow (perhaps the idea came from hunting bows). From one of these instruments evolved the violin, which about 400 years ago started to look very similar to what it does today. Famous makers such as Antonio Stradivari developed violins that others would copy for hundreds of years. With four strings stretched over a beautiful wooden box, and a bow of wood and horse hair to stroke sound from the strings, the violin has been used in many kinds of music. During the Baroque period violins had strings made from gut rather than metal, cellos did not have a spike, the shape of the bow is different and the sound produced is gentler than today’s violins.

WHAT IS BAROQUE MUSIC?Baroque refers to a period of time that started in about 1600 when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet and the first English invaders were settling in Northern America; and finished when Bach died in 1750. The word is easy to say, it sounds like the noise a sheep would say if it tripped on a rock ‘Baa-rock’. It can also be pronounced ‘Baa-roke’, rhymes with stoke. In the same way that the style of clothing people wear today is different to what people wore in the past, it is the same with other types of artistic expression; paintings, buildings, literature and music written at a particular time will have similarities in style, for this particular time the style is called Baroque.

We say that the music of Handel, Vivaldi, Pachelbel and Bach is Baroque Music because of the style in which they wrote it. Art, music and buildings made during this time are usually ornate, highly decorated, full of little details that all fit together.

PART OF THE WHĀNAU?Although the recorder in the twentieth century is most often associated with classrooms full of children, the instrument was once an instrument played for kings and queens. In the hands of a skilled player the recorder can produce astonishing and beautiful sounds and has a history going back at least to the 1300s. Very popular with composers and performers during the Renaissance and Early Baroque, during the 1700s the trend towards larger orchestras favoured the louder (traverso) flute. A member of the woodwind family, the recorder is essentially a form of whistle. In the past most usually made from wood, recorders can now be moulded plastic. The recorder can be made in many different sizes, with the largest having the lowest sounds while the smallest member of the family (sopranino) will have the highest pitch. Examples of the recorder finding its way into popular music include The Rolling Stones “Ruby Tuesday” and Fleetwood Mac “Oh Well, part 2”.

THE HARPSICHORDThe instrument like a small piano that Red Priest plays is a harpsichord. It has keys similar to a piano, but underneath the lid the mechanics are quite different. When you press a key on the harpsichord the string is plucked, somewhat like a harp, giving a characteristic ‘twang’. It does not matter how gently or strongly you push down the key, the sound will not be significantly louder or softer. When the keys are pressed on a piano it causes large, felt covered hammers to strike the strings; depending on how hard the key is pressed the music can be loud (forte) or soft (piano), giving the piano its full name the pianoforte. The piano also has a pedal that prevents the sound from being cut off when the key is no longer pressed. Although the harpsichord was very popular in the Baroque period, over time it was replaced by the piano as people preferred the richer sound and relative ease of playing gently.

Core Funder

RESPOND TO AND REFLECT ON LIVE MUSICLearn about Baroque instruments and reflect on the music of Baroque times.

WHAT ARE WE LEARNING?

Level 2• Recognise that music serves a variety of purposes and functions in our lives.

• Explore and identify how sound is made and changed.

• Improvise, explore and express musical ideas.

• Respond to live and recorded music.

Level 3• Identify and describe the characteristics of music associated with a range of sound

environments, in relation to historical, social, and cultural contexts.

• Explore and identify how sound is made and changed as they listen and respond to music.

• Use musical elements, instruments and technologies in response to sources of motivation.

• Respond to live and recorded music.

INTRODUCE

Introduce your students to Red Priest - which instruments do they recognise when watching the video?

There are more videos of the group playing on their own website.

Prepare a listening quiz, can the students identify each of the instruments? Recorder, violin, cello and harpsichord.

Introduce the difference in sound between an orchestra and a small group of players performing chamber music.

Introduce the recorder, a family of instruments that come in many sizes.

During the Baroque period different styles existed, even though the music is said to have a particular character. Vivaldi wrote mostly homophonic music, while Bach is renown for his complex polyphonic music. Introduce the class to the difference.

Ngā taonga puoro (traditional Māori instruments) include a variety of wind instruments such as kōauau, pūtōrino, nguru, and hue puruhau. Look at the similarities and differences between these and a recorder.

Introduce the class to important scientific discoveries during the early Baroque period. It was during this time that Galileo and Newton changed our understanding of the world.

Investigate the Romani people, the gypsies of Europe. This ethnic group have a vibrant musical tradition that has influenced the music of Eastern Europe and composers further afield. Red Priest shall play some gypsy dances.

King Henry VIII is most remembered for his ill-fated love affairs with unfortunate young ladies, but he also had a love affair with the humble recorder and according to some wrote several works for the instrument.

CREATE

For the adventurous, you could try to make a recorder out of a carrot. There is more infor-mation here about how it works.

Investigate other ways of making high and low sounds – try rubber bands stretched over boxes or tin cans – vary tightness and string length. Take it to the next level and make a tube-tar. Here is a story about a whole orchestra made from landfill.

Using either the instruments they’ve made or just their own body, have the students work in groups to create their own piece of music. Writing a piece of music can be a game:

How to play:

1. Create symbols and denote the sounds they mean. For example, a star symbol means ‘clap’, a circle means ‘stomp your foot’, a trian-gle means ‘hit the desk’, and a square means ‘snap your fingers’.

2. Put these instructions on the board and get the students to compose their own music, using only the symbols.

3. Then let the children display their music on the board while the others follow the ‘notes’ to create the music. They will clap, they will snap, and clap again before stomping their feet and hitting the desks.

Music plays an important role in the story of Hinemoa – Tutanekai used his playing to guide the princess to their rendezvous. Have your students write their own legend to explain how the recorder got its look or sound.

Build a Baroque cathedral out of toilet rolls. Find some pictures online to inspire the class.

Have the students pick a favourite piece of classical music and design a CD cover for it along with a description of the piece of music.

Alternatively, students could listen to a piece of music and paint a response.

DISCOVER

Discover more about Vivaldi and Italy during his lifetime.

Discover more about Italy (esp. Venice) and Germany during the 1600s. What was happen-ing in Aotearoa at this time?

In the 1600s children played many games that are still played today. Children jumped rope, played tennis, swinging, scotch-hopper (mod-ern day hopscotch), and played on a see-saw. The children even played leap frog, tag, hide-and-seek, sack and relay races.

Discover how the harpsichord works and how it is different to the piano – go and have a look inside a piano if you can.

During the Baroque period the primary purpose of music was either to entertain or as part of religious ceremonies. Bach and Vivaldi wrote both and were employed by the church.

Blown instruments are some of the oldest me-lodic instruments to have been discovered.

If the class do not already play recorders, introduce them to this instrument and discover how it is played and how covering the holes changes the sound from high to low. Com-pare with the sound of the piano and the very different method of producing sound.

Research ideas include Italy, architecture/visual art during the Baroque period. Have students prepare a short presentation to the rest of the class. Look at and compare different artistic forms in Baroque and more modern style: portraits Baroque/modern; landscapes Baroque/modern; architecture Baroque/mod-ern; clothing Baroque.

People have invented electronic recorders.

Expand vocabulary by creating a list of de-scriptive words to describe music.