Day I
1. Watch the video and add more instruments under corresponding class types in the picture below
2. Prepare answers:
1. What instrument can you play? If none, which ones would you like to learn to play and why?
2. Do you have an ear for music? Do you think it is possible to develop it even if you don't have it by birth?
3. Summarize the text below. What does it teach us? How is the method called? Do you think it would work for you?
3. Speaking task.
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When and where do you usually listen to music. -Name a few places and times. -What genres of music is it that you listen to usually? -What do you feel at such moments? -How long can you listen to music non-stop? Use:- to influence smb powerfully - to bring back emotional events of our life - to engender a feeling of sadness/ joy/ melancholy / enthusiasm - to energize smb = to pep smb up=подбадривать, оживлять - to make smb feel depressed / more confident / cheerful / elated /excited / light-hearted /gloomy / hypnotized / miserable / sorrowful / optimistic /carefree, etc.. - to get on smb's nerves =действовать на нервы кому-либо |
Some more questions to prepare answers to:
- Are lyrics important to you or do you mostly care about melody?
-What is your attitude to live music concerts? Do you attend them? Why?
-Will classical music get completely forgotten sooner or later (=sink into oblivion)? Ground your opinion
Watch/listen to this fantastic gig by Nightwish, reading the lyrics presented below and choose one of the items below that best describes the main idea of the song in the poll below
Archaean horizon
The first sunrise
On a pristine (первозданная) gaea (мать-земля)
Opus (творение) perfectum
Somewhere there, us sleeping
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries
We have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous (роскошный) planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life
Within decades we must close our eyes again
Isn't it a noble and enlightened (грамотный) way of spending our brief time in the sun
To work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?
The cosmic law of gravity
Pulled the newborns around a fire
A careless (беззаботная) cold infinity (бесконечность) in every vast direction
Lonely farer in the Goldilocks zone (Зона Златовласки)
She has a tale to tell
From the stellar nursery (ясли) into a carbon (углеродный) feast(пир)
Enter LUCA
The tapestry ("мозаика" / хитросплетения / гобелен ) of chemistry
There's a writing in the garden
Leading us to the mother of all
We are one
We are a universe
Forebears (предки=ancestors) of what will be
Scions (потомки=descendants) of the Devonian sea
Aeons (=billions of years, geological time) pass
Writing the tale of us all
A day-to-day new opening
For the greatest show on Earth
Ion channels welcoming the outside world
To the stuff of stars
Bedding the tree of a biological holy (святыня)
Enter life
The tapestry of chemistry
There's a writing in the garden
Leading us to the mother of all
We are one
We are a universe
Forebears of what will be
Scions of the Devonian sea
Aeons pass
Writing the tale of us all
A day-to-day new opening
For the greatest show on Earth
We are here to care for the garden
The wonder of birth
Of every form most beautiful
Every form most beautiful
We are one
We are a universe
Forebears of what will be
Scions of the Devonian sea
Aeons pass writing the tale of us all
A day-to-day new opening
For the greatest show on Earth
After a billion years The show is still here
Not a single one of your fathers died young
The handy (проворные) travelers out of Africa
Little Lucy of the Afar
Gave birth (породили) to fantasy
To idolatry (поклонение, обожание, идолопоклонство)
To self-destructive (саморазрушающее) weaponry (оружие)
Enter the God of gaps (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_o...)
Deep within the past
Atavistic dread (страх) of the hunted (те, на кого охотятся)
Enter Ionia , the cradle (колыбель) of thought (здесь: философская мысль)
The architecture of understanding
The human lust (вожделение) to feel so exceptional (исключительными)
To rule (править) the Earth
Hunger for shiny rocks (блестящие камушки)
For giant mushroom clouds
The will (желание) to do just as you'd be done (как обращались бы с тобой) by
Enter history, the grand finale
Enter rat-kind (крысиное отродье)
Man, he took his time (выжидал) in the sun
Had a dream (мечтал) to understand
A single (=each) grain of sand (песчинка)
He gave birth to poetry
But one day'll cease (перестанет) to be
Greet (Поприветствуйте) the last light of the library
Man, he took his time in the sun
Had a dream to understand
A single grain of sand
He gave birth to poetry
But one day'll cease to be
Greet the last light of the library
Man, he took his time in the sun
Had a dream to understand
A single grain of sand
He gave birth to poetry
But one day'll cease to be
Greet the last light of the library
We were here!
We were here!
We were here!
We were here!
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones
Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born
The potential people who could have been here in my place
But who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber (превышают численно) the sand grains of Sahara
Certainly those unborn ghosts (нерожденные призраки) include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton
We know this because the set (множество) of possible people allowed by our DNA
So massively exceeds (превосходит) the set of actual people
In the teeth of those stupefying (отупляющие) odds (расклад вещей) it is you and I, in our ordinariness (обычность) , that are here
We privileged few (немногочисленные), who won the lottery of birth against all odds ( несмотря ни на что, вопреки ничтожно малым шансам)
How dare (Как смеем) we whine (хныкать) at our inevitable (неизбежный) return to that prior state
From which the vast majority have never stirred?"
There is grandeur (величие) in this view of life, with its several powers
Having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one
And that whilst (пока=while) this planet has gone cycling on (продолжает крутиться) according to the fixed law of gravity
From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been
And are being, evolved (эволюционируют)
Click on the statement which best renders the main idea of the song
Total Questions: 0
Incorrect Answers: 0
Day II.
1. Watch the following video. What can happen in a mosh pit (=the place, just in front of the stage, where the audience at a concert of rock music dances and jumps up and down) during a violent music concert?
2. IELTS speaking 2.
Describe a situation when you or someone you know had an accident at a public event. You will have to talk about the topic for one to two minutes. You have one minute to think about what you’re going to say, and you can make some notes if you wish.
You should say:
- Where and when it happened
- What exactly happened
- Who was involved
- and explain how you felt about the incident.
Useful phrases you could include:
- We shouldn't have gone to that concert.
- We got squeezed in the crowd.
- It was impossible to breathe.
- We nearly got into a deadly mishap.
- I regretted going to the event.
Day III. Write at least one of each type of the following essays:
1. Opinion (Agree or Disagree) Essays
- Some people believe that traditional music is more important than international music. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
- Some say that music is a universal language that can bring people from different cultures together. Do you agree or disagree?
- Many people argue that listening to music while studying helps students concentrate better. Do you agree or disagree?
Universal Template for "To What Extent Do You Agree or Disagree?" Essays
2. Read this passage quickly to get a general idea of its meaning. Don’t worry if you don’t understand every word. Then suggest an appropriate title.
It was the Greek philosopher Plato who said that music gave ‘soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life’. According to the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, it was the ‘shorthand of emotion’. From our
earliest societies, we have filled our lives with music. Nowadays, we are increasingly surrounded by music of all kinds, which we sometimes cannot escape. The difference in our modern world is that while we listen to more music, we make less.
Why does music affect us so powerfully? Professor of Psychology John Sloboda believes that there are three reasons for this. Firstly, music is a strong source of personal associations. Research into the psychology of memory and the psychology of emotion suggests that close to events of high emotion, your brain takes a ‘recording’ of all the other things that were going on at that heightened moment. So, a piece of music linked to an emotional event in your life may well bring it flooding back when you hear it again. However, this reaction is unpredictable and, by virtue of its individual nature, idiosyncratic.
A second important reason is rooted in our physiology, which dictates the range and organisation of the sounds we call music. Some of the most popular rhythmic patterns in music reflect rhythms in our own bodies, especially heartbeat and breathing. This mimicry extends to emotional signals, such as the manipulation of human speech: if you speak very slowly, pitching your voice down at the end of words and sentences, anyone listening will assume you are pretty depressed. In the same way, slow music with a falling cadence engenders a feeling of sadness. Sloboda observes that this is an ‘iconic connection’: when you listen to music, you make links to innate human vocalisations of excitement, depression, anger, and so on. This might explain the universal appeal of many forms of music, since basic human emotions are common to all cultures.
For Sloboda, the third reason is the most interesting one. He points out that a key aspect of our emotions is that they are tuned to detect change. The change may be positive (falling in love, winning the lottery) or negative (sickness, bad luck), but either way, the message of change is: pay attention now! In general, patterns are easily recognisable to us humans and, more to the point, so are deviations in patterns. Since music is essentially pattern in sound, it is easy to see how it can ‘hook’ its listeners with subtle variation in melody, structure or rhythm. People pick up on the patterns and make predictions about what will come next, without needing any formal music training. When musical surprises happen, emotional responses are guaranteed.
In recent experiments, Sloboda has been plotting emotional highs and lows by having his subjects move a joystick while they listen to music. In this way, he has been able to record a trace of their emotional reaction. Interestingly, unlike the associative memories, these reactions are not idiosyncratic, and by and large, people experience higher or lower emotion at the same point in the music. This is scientifically useful because the investigator can isolate those points and question what's going on.
So we may in fact have little control over the roller-coaster ride from sorrow to joy that music seems to take us on. Some melodies are quite manipulative, working on our emotions very effectively, and composers have often exploited this to the full: take an orchestral piece by the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, for example, which for most listeners is a gripping and totally involving experience. Such is the raw power of music, which should never be underestimated.
TEST SPOT: An IELTS reading task will often include three or four multiple-choice questions. They are likely to follow the order of the text.
• Read the question or ‘stem’ only and decide what part of the text it refers to.
• Read the relevant text carefully, underlining any key phrases.
• Try to answer the question or complete the stem in your own words.
• Look at choices A-D and decide which is the closest to your answer.
• Check that the other three choices are incorrect by re-reading the text.
2.1 Read the passage again more carefully and answer questions 1–3, following the advice given in the Test spot.
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Iteration #1
- What explanation is given for why a certain piece of music can bring back memories?
A) Music making is still of central importance to our lives.
B) If music is playing during a period of emotion, we register this.
C) Our recall of music is highly predictable and universal.
D) We remember music more readily than other experiences.
- According to Sloboda, it is possible for music to
A) mirror universal emotions.
B) reproduce bodily sounds.
C) reflect individual cultures.
D) mimic the human voice.
- Why is the notion of change important to Sloboda’s work?
A) It is easier to recognise musical patterns if they change.
B) His subjects prefer to listen to music that is unpredictable.
C) Listeners show better concentration when music varies.
E) People never fail to react to the unexpected in music.
Total Questions: 0
Incorrect Answers: 0
Iteration #2
1. What explanation is given for why a certain piece of music can bring back memories?
2. According to Sloboda, it is possible for music to
3. Why is the notion of change important to Sloboda’s work?
Total Questions: 0
Incorrect Answers: 0