Kinetic Canvas

Educator: Michael Hershkowitz, Director of Fine and Performing Arts

Cultural Partner(s): Paolo Bartolani & Alina Wilczynski - Music Interpretation through Light/Color/Movement

School: Islip High School, Grades 9-12

District: Islip UFSD https://data.nysed.gov/profile.php?instid=800000037206

Summary

This multidimensional partnership involved high school students exploring unique relationships across disciplines of visual and musical art with an artist who paints with light, a classical musician, and a school administrator. They created a contemporary composition of music and light to better understand relationships that people make to be understood across languages, cultures, and abilities. 

Rationale

Encouraging students to venture beyond the technical aspects of learning a pre-written musical score into the realm of finding personal and cultural expression in between the notes. Furthermore, how to foster a multi-dimensional experience of sharing music — not only within their peer groups, teachers and their parents, but also with students outside of their school’s arts programs, their local community at-large and social media — by exploring ways of presenting music as connected to emotion-filled themes like nature and the passing of the seasons, local or family history, the historical context from which the composer was inspired, or other themes they may resonate with.

What learning goals/standards did this meet?

Arts

Musical Ensemble Performance that explores cultural relevance and personal expression 

“A Choir of Sound” that connects music to a larger context of creative themes through sound and movement

Light Painting (Long Exposure) Photography that renders these themes on an immersive 3D canvas

CCCR

Cross-Disciplinary Project Development

Advances students to be able to combine musical expression and creative collaboration,
together with experimental/experiential digital technology. 

CR-S

This project gives students the opportunity to discuss musical scores that are of interest and relevance to them, especially those with a variety of tempos and styles that would work well with movement and spoken word and other sounds, etc. in creating an immersive, experiential, multi-dimensional “Kinetic Canvas”.

Outcomes: 

Students’ learning has expanded as a result of this project because now they…

KNOW… creating and performing music is more than just repeating notes on a page with perfect precision… Composers and musicians alike are inseparable from their personal history and the cultural context of the time when a musical score was written and the time when it is played and/or performed for an audience.

UNDERSTAND… all music is connected to contextual themes, feelings and experiences outside of the musical notes themselves. These larger themes serve as inspiration for the composers, for the musicians learning the scores and their audiences. All three groups may all know about and even share similar feelings around these themes, or they may have their own unique relationships with the music. And in this understanding, music has the power to move people emotionally, and even to create cultural movements and global change.

ARE ABLE TO… think creatively across the disciplines of music and art and begin to seek connections and ways of expression with larger, seemingly “unrelated” topics like science and sports, culture, current events, etc.