I started to compose when I was about 9 years old and wrote about 5 pieces of music. Back then I had played the piano for about 5 years already. I started to play the oboe when I was about 12 years old and still play both instruments today. What inspired me to write this piece was another composition that had a rhythm as the bass and a violin that was playing out the melody much louder and unique. I decided to create a piece for the oboe and piano because I am familiar with them. It was to represent a melody that related to the calmness and the subtleness of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata left hand, which consists of the melody, and the right hand, which plays a simple yet iconic rhythm over and over again while the left hand plays different chords and keys. The piece is something that sort of questions and answers the melody (as you might be able to tell), and also has one instrument play most of the melody in the first section. My teacher helped me with what to do and the rules when doing this kind of piece. We decided to split up the piece into multiple sections and that is how we got the piano solo at the end. Why not try playing Justin’s piece yourself? You can get a complete pdf copy of the music here. If you make a recording of yourself playing his piece, send it to us using the submit button! Whether you listen or play, please a comment on this page.
Video
Writing Activity: plot a story on a graph with the brilliant, funny “Shapes of Stories” talk by Kurt Vonnegut
This writing activity is based on a very funny Kurt Vonnegut lecture on the shape of stories. In this project, students learn to develop compelling narratives by graphing the plots. American author Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is best known for his book Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). In this very funny, very brilliant talk on the fundamentals of the narrative arc, Vonnegut explains through a chalk-board lecture how to graph the ins and outs of a story. Using the example of Cinderella, Vonnegut proposes a universal story structure that can be plotted with an X/Y axis. Only partly tongue-in-cheek, he suggests that most stories can be understood (and plotted) as moving from happy/sad on the Y axis (the vertical in a graph) and in time with the X axis (the horizontal in a graph) moving from the story beginning to story end. The X axis (happy/unhappy) could also be re-thought as good/bad, calm/scary, good fortune/bad fortune and any number of other dynamic pairs to shape story lines and characters. This talk is appropriate for young writers and can easily be adapted to concrete classroom writing projects. Project: Plot a story on a graph. Follow Vonnegut’s general concept of plotting a story on an X/Y axis. Have your students actually write on the graph’s curve the major plot points as the story moves from its beginning through its middle to its end. While Vonnegut’s model is for plot, this same structure can be used for character development to show how a character’s personality might change over the course of the story.
Sunny Morning, Piano Music by Julius Ugo, age 10
This lovely piano piece is written by Julius Ugo, age 10. Julius lives in Toronto, Canada. This is what he says about the piece, “My video is about waking up on a freezing, sunny day and looking out the window at my neighbourhood. I snapped some pictures of nature and a lot of ugly buildings some how snuck in to the shots. I liked the effect and I hope you like it too.”
