Discovery Learning Assignment: listen to this piece of music, which has no words, and write down a narrative of your thoughts on what that music is “saying.” There is no right answer, but it will be interesting to compare what different people “get” out of the same piece. We will all be listening three times to the same music.

• The first time through your listening, write down the emotions you feel—just a series of words to describe what the music elicits in you.
• Now listen to it again, and this time write down a story line (you know, like in the Disney version of Fantasia—a series of images, like a dream, which unfolds and mirrors those emotions that the music arouses in you. [by the way, after you listen, you can find the composer’s intended story by looking up “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from the Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 Movement 4 by Edvard Grieg. Don’t read about it until AFTER you have written your OWN story!]
• The third time through the piece, use as many musical terms as you can to describe what you are hearing on a purely musical level: what pitches, rhythms, instruments, form, volumes, tempos, meters, melodic gestures, harmonies, etc.