Music

A multicultural group of young students are led in a choir by a female teacher

Lower School
The Lower School music program is rooted in the understanding that every child is inherently and uniquely musical. We organize challenging, engaging, and collaborative musical activities, through which students develop high standards of musicianship. Our students sing expressively, in tune, and in harmony. They learn to play instruments in ensembles, including world drums and percussion, mallet instruments, keyboard, guitar, and recorders. Students learn to sing increasingly difficult music from notation. Through movement and directed listening, they understand recorded music from the inside out, appreciating and falling in love with music from a variety of cultures and historical periods. Finally, students create their own music, improvising, arranging, and composing, most often in small group projects.

Middle School 
Music students train their "musical ears," learning musicianship, and music appreciation skills. Students learn to sing polyphonic harmonic music, how to choose vocal techniques that are appropriate for a genre, and how to use musical vocabulary to critique their own performances. Students engage in choral and solo singing, call and response percussion playing. They are introduced to drum set and string instruments, and practice performance etiquette in live (concert) and not-live (recording studio) settings. Students who are first learning to play have opportunities to experiment and try out different instruments. Music students have many opportunities to showcase their newly developed and cultivated musical talents in community events, including our Peace and Light ceremony each winter, our spring musical, our ArtBeat showcase, where students vote for their favorite band to perform an encore, and our Moving Up Ceremony at year’s end. 

High School
Music class focuses on experimentation with vocals and a variety of instruments including drums, guitars, and keyboards. All students learn to play an instrument and read music. Classes are differentiated so that all students work on their level but are engaging with the full class in the same overall lessons. Each semester ends with a performance that includes playing and singing the song the class learned. At our winter Peace and Light Ceremony, students in the band and chorus performed “Higher Ground” by Stevie Wonder. This performance saw a range of students singing and playing solos. During ArtBeat, our annual spring display of student work, small bands under the guidance of the music teacher perform in a showcase format. Drama students also perform skits from the spring musical or from their classes.