Speyer’s Music curriculum provides a foundation for our students to become participants in the world of music rather than observers.
Music is part of the Speyer curriculum from Kindergarten through Eighth Grade. In addition to their regular Music class, Lower School students have the opportunity to take musical afterschool classes (past offerings have included chorus, piano, and drums), while Middle School students may sign up for Rock Band or other musical electives.
In Lower School Music, students grow into musicians step by step through lessons that are active, joyful, and grounded in musical building blocks. The curriculum begins by putting rhythm in the body through movement, clapping, speech, and percussion play, helping students internalize steady beats and connect what they hear to what they see on the page.
Singing is central to the program, with folk songs from many traditions, canons, and harmony work developing confident voices with strengthening pitch recognition, listening, and audiation. As students grow, they begin reading and writing rhythmic and melodic patterns, practicing dictation and inner hearing in playful ways that help them truly think music from the inside out.
Through Orff ensemble work, students feel music physically and collaboratively as they improvise, compose, and perform together. Through practice with the ukulele and xylophone, they begin to deconstruct songs into chords, accompaniment patterns, and form, laying the groundwork for modern band and songwriting. Across the grades, students build the skills to understand, create, and appreciate music, and to see themselves as capable and expressive musicians. Lower School students have Music twice per six-day cycle.
Middle School Music instruction focuses on music history, singing, and performance. Musical performance through singing is a foundational element of the Music curriculum. On top of singing, each grade concentrates on a different musical, theoretical, and historical element of music connected directly with their Humanities unit of study.
The guitar is introduced in Fifth Grade where the students learn basic guitar chords and songs. Sixth Grade studies the science of sound and with this knowledge, construct percussion instruments to be used in a percussion ensemble. Seventh Grade students analyze rock music from the 1950s to the present to compare and contrast pop music over time. Eighth Grade works on composing a musical fugue where the students learn the basic rules of music theory and how they apply to music of different periods of time, as well as preparing their graduation song.
Fifth and Sixth Grade has Music either two or three times per six-day cycle depending on the semester, while Seventh and Eighth Grade has it three times for the full academic year.
All Middle School grades perform in an annual Speyer tradition: Speyer Idol. Each class selects a song, works on the arrangement, and rehearses in order to compete in a proper head-to-head musical contest — complete with a panel of judges and crowd input just like the popular reality TV show (only much more community-building and fun). Allowing them to embrace their musical talents cultivated outside of Speyer, our students sing as well as play instruments to accompany the performance (drums, piano, guitar, bass guitar, french horn, violin, and flute are all instruments that have all been featured in previous Speyer Idols… we are waiting for trombone and, of course, more cowbell).
