Primary Music Magazine
Issue 3.0 Autumn 2018
A step-by-step guide to Imaginative Listening 1. Choose a piece of music. 2. Ask your pupils to find their own space, lie down, and close their eyes. If the floor isn’t conducive to lying, then sitting is fine, as long as they close their eyes. After all, closing your eyes strengthens your ears. 3. Inform the pupils that they’ll be listening to a piece of music that they’ve probably never heard before, and that as they listen, they should imagine what the piece of music is about e.g. a story, a picture, an event, a time of day, or year. 4. Play the piece of music. Once finished, ask the pupils to sit up slowly, open their eyes, and share what they thought the piece of music was about. You may need to have a sharing order already devised, as more often than not, everyone wants to share. 5. Once everyone has shared, play the piece of music again, however this time ask the pupils to imagine one of the stories their peers shared, so as to give them a different perspective on the same piece. This is also beneficial for those who are less confident at the task, as it gives them some examples to tap into. 6. After a couple of weeks, start to expand the sharing session into the ‘why’, encouraging deeper reflection about the music, and the use of musical vocabulary.
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