Category Art

Prokofiev, the Children’s Composer

Imagine composing songs for a play at age 9. Sergei Prokofiev did just that. Prokofiev’s play, The Giant, included marches and waltzes. It also told of an outlaw giant who became a king.

Sergei Prokofiev was born in 1891 in Ukraine, a country in Europe. (At that time, Ukraine was part of Russia.) Like most children, Sergei enjoyed fairy tales. But he considered them amusing rather than magical.

Prokofiev did not like popular tunes. He preferred music that surprised people and made them smile. He developed his talent for writing such music at the Conservatory, a music school in St. Petersburg, Russia.

In 1917, there was a revolution in Russia. A Communist government took over. The Communist rulers tried to control the arts as well as the government. So Prokofiev left Russia for the U.S.A. in 1918.

Within five years, orchestras in the U.S.A. and Europe were performing Prokofiev’s music. In 1927, the Communists welcomed Prokofiev’s performances to the Soviet Union, the Communist’s name for Russia. Nine years later, Prokofiev, his wife, and their two sons moved to the Soviet Union and settled in Moscow.

Soon after, Prokofiev wrote Peter and the Wolf for the Moscow Children’s Musical Theatre. He gave each character its own special music. Violins play when Peter takes the stage. Flutes announce the presence of a bird. An oboe speaks for a duck, and a French horn warns that the wolf is near.

Peter and the Wolf  has been loved by children for years. It also helps children recognize the sounds of different instruments.

The Basic Ingredients of Music

To make a cake, a baker uses basic ingredients like flour, sugar, and oil. To make music, a composer – a person who makes up music – uses basic ingredients too. They are tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony.

Tone is the difference in pitch between two notes. Pitch is the highness or lowness of a note’s sound. Notes are the building blocks of a piece of music.

Different notes are held for different lengths of time. Some notes last a long time just as some sounds do. Think of the slow swish-swish of windscreen wipers. Other notes last a short time – like the rapid raindrops in a storm. A composer mixes slow and quick notes to create rhythm.

Melody is the part of music that people hum. To make a melody, a composer mixes tones and rhythms. Short pieces of music, such as songs, have only one melody. Very long pieces of music, such as symphonies, have several melodies.

A composer creates harmony by sounding three or more notes together. Most music in Western countries is based on the idea of harmony.

Picture Credit : Google

The Great Sphinx

What has the body of a lion and the head of a man? A monster, No – a sphinx! A sphinx was a figure from Egyptian myth that was often represented in ancient statues. The Great Sphinx at Giza is the largest of these statues.

About 4,500 years ago, a gigantic limestone hill stood where the Great Sphinx is now. Stonecutters cut blocks from the limestone, perhaps to build the Great Pyramid of Egypt’s King Khufu, or, more likely, to build the pyramid of a later king, Khafre. But the rock in the centre of the hill was too crumbly to use for building.

On this leftover limestone, sculptors carved a rough face and body. To do this, they wedged picks in the stone and hit the picks with wooden hammers.

Next, the sculptors covered the image with a kind of plaster. They could carve the plaster in greater detail than would have been possible in coarse stone. Then artists painted the plaster to add more detail. The Sphinx still wears bits of the red paint, but most of it has worn away.

Playing with Clay

Clay is a clown with no bones.

No roll, stretch, and split – no feat of change is too great for it.

Pinch a thin nose, a chin.

Gouge two eyeholes. Chisel a grin.

Would you then pummel him flat, thumb him again?

No! He’s become someone.

Terracotta Statues

Today, the emperor’s terracotta army is kept in a large museum. Museum artists have a workshop where they make copies of the soldiers. As much as possible, these artists follow the steps the emperor’s sculptors used more than 2,200 years ago.

First, an artist forms long ropes from clay. To build a soldier’s body, the artist coils these ropes around and around. Next, the artist places one hand inside the body to steady it. With the other hand, he or she beats the coils together with a paddle.

The artists make the hands, ears, and basic head shapes in moulds. They cover each moulded head with a layer of clay. In this clay, they model the features of each soldier by hand. They use clay modelling tools to add details on the armour.

Workers then put the body parts in a kiln with a low fire. When the parts dry, the kiln’s temperature rises to 1000 °C. The statues are baked until they glow red.

China’s Terracotta Army

China’s first emperor lies in a tomb outside the city of Xian in eastern China. The emperor is not alone. Buried nearby are thousands of terracotta soldiers and their horses. They were created more than 2,200 years ago.

Terracotta is clay that has been fired, or hardened, in an oven called a kiln. Large solid pieces of terracotta would shrink and crack. So figures like the bodies of the Chinese soldiers are usually hollow.

The figures represent all branches of the early Chinese army – archers, cavalry, charioteers, and foot soldiers. And, out of 7,000 statues, no two faces look the same. Each is a life-sized portrait of a real person. The heads must have been sculpted one by one.