The aim of our first workshop at Netley was to introduce Janacek’s Mladi to two primary school classes. Janacek often used speech as a way of incorporating real-life influences into his compositions, so we set about creating our own phrases made up of ‘speech-melodies’. 

 

We began by imagining our own ‘speech-melodies’ to accompany Janacek’s main motifs. Here are few of our ideas - listen along with the music! Throughout the workshop, the classes were encouraged to react and express themselves physically to excerpts of Mladi, in order to explore the different characters that Janacek portrays.

 

In the first movement of Mladi, Janacek draws on playground rhymes and taunts to create melody. Using their own playground experiences, the Netley classes acted as composers, creating their own pieces by combining their ‘speech-melodies’, which they presented to the group.