Rumpelstiltskin

A classroom guide for teachers

What are Musical Motives?

Which music fits the characters?

OBJECTIVES:

Students will examine how a melodic idea or motive musically describes each of the characters in Rumpelstiltskin.

PROCEDURE:

Launch

Ask the students if they have heard a piece of music that reminds them of a memory or person?

What is it about music in particular that can bring on associations with events, places/people?

Development

Guide students through a review of the Rumpelstiltskin synopsis. List the main characters on the board for reference. Ask students to brainstorm adjectives that describe the characters.

Introduce the term “motive” to the students. A motive is a recurring musical idea that creates a unifying element in a musical work. Some examples of motives are Darth Vader’s music in Star Wars: Harry Potter’s theme music, The Wicked Witch of the West’s music in The Wizard of Oz, etc.

Practice

Pass out the Musical Motive Handout for students to use. As you play excerpts from the listeningCD, refer to the adjectives students listed to describe the characters. Ask students to match the musical samples to the characters.

Essential Questions/Assessment

• Ask students to share out their selections.
• Why did you know certain selections were right for certain characters?
• Which ones were the easiest to choose?
• Which ones were harder? Why?
• Read Nicolas Reveles notes on his musical ideas as he composed Rumpelstiltskin.

Excerpt from UCSD TV Opera Talk

with Nicolas Reveles

You can also watch this on-line at http://www.sdopera.com/education/intheclassroom.html

Composing Rumpelstiltskin: What was I thinking?

Hi. I’m Nick Reveles, the composer of the opera Rumpelstiltskin, and I want to share with you some of the things that helped me make music out of this wonderful story by the Brothers Grimm I think it’s important for you to know that composers don’t live in some kind of solitary bubble. I’m influenced by the things that I see, that I hear and that I experience every day, and often those simple things come back into my brain in the form of a kind of ‘memory’. Things stick with me, and when I’m writing a piece of music I can’t help but be influenced by those memories. Now sometimes I chase those memories away because I don’t think they’ll be good for the piece I’m working on. Other times, I think about them for a long time before I use them, or discard them. But on rare occasions, they seem just right. Let me give you a simple example.

When I was a kid, my brother and I would come home from school and the first thing we did was turn on the TV and watch…you guessed it…cartoons! Especially the Looney Tunes and Warner Bros. cartoons like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and there were other favorites like Heckle and Jeckle, two crazy crows, Woody Woodpecker and Tom and Jerry. But our favorite cartoon was Popeye. You might be too young to remember Popeye, but your teacher might remember him. He was this skinny little guy with a big chin and a corncob pipe permanently stuck in his mouth And he’d always get himself in trouble with bullies and crooks who were bigger than him by pulling out a can of spinach at the last minute, which would give him super powers, and then he’d beat up the bad guys. “I fight to the finish ‘cause I eats my spinach. I’m Popeye the sailor man!” Well Popeye was in love with Olive Oyl and his arch-enemy was a big muscled brute called Bluto In one episode Olive Oyl has been tricked into getting married to Bluto, so Popeye has to come and save the day. Well, here’s Olive Oyl, looking fine in her wedding dress, walking down the aisle. A little old lady is sitting at the organ in the chapel playing Wagner’s “Wedding March”, but she can’t play very well. So what you hear is this (musical excerpt). As a musician and organist myself, I just thought that was one of the funniest things I’d ever heard!

Well, in Rumpelstiltskin, our heroine Nell marries the King, and you just can’t have a wedding without a wedding march. That old ‘Popeye’ memory came back to me, and I thought I’d have a little fun. So that was a simple, kind of stupid little memory, but I used it to influence what I created as a moment in my opera.

Here’s another memory. When I was in kindergarten, my favorite song was “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic” and every once in awhile our teacher would play a recording of it. It’s a funny, silly little tune that goes like this (musical excerpt). Now, I couldn’t get enough of that song and my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Brokenshire at Pine Street School in Carlsbad, CA, never played it enough to satisfy me. I guess because of that, the tune stuck with me

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