I have recently been doing a marimba ensemble in school in Grade 11 which I have also done in previous years as I have always enjoyed music. Revisiting it this year again will allow me to not only develop my music skills further but will also help with my collaboration skills as when working together in a music ensemble, collaboration is critical. This is because everyone has to know what their part is within the piece and where it fits in so that the end result will be the best possible performance.
Over the first few weeks of doing this activity I have had to collaborate with other students within the ensemble so that our parts would fit together cohesively. This started off being quite challenging as people learnt how to play their parts at different rates which lead to some people being ready to start fitting it together while others were still increasing their fluency. As well as this while trying to put the parts together we all had to be playing at the same tempo and listen to where to come into the music. Thinking about all these things made it quite challenging to start off with but after practising a little it has started to get a little easier. I think that in order for us to perform our pieces well in the future, collaboration will continue to be very important so that we sound like an ensemble playing a piece with many different layers. A way that I may be able to help improve this is by helping teach people who don’t understand the part how to play it if I know how to already, since I have done this activity before and have skills in this area. I can also contribute to this myself by listening carefully to where my part fits into the piece as a whole.
Overall, I think that the start of my creativity part of CAS has been going quite well and that while there are some things I can improve on, I have been enjoying my time playing in a music ensemble.
#LO1 #LO5
#CAS
