A Menu of Educational Offerings
Performances
Story time - Thread Ensemble brings the storybook of your choice to life with original musical composition and improvisation. For ages 3-7, to be performed alongside narrator and picture book.
Interactive Performance - Thread performs original and improvised music for large audiences of kids and their parents. The program is highly interactive and educational, and includes storytelling, musical explanation, abstract imagination, and more!
Free Improvisations - A specialized performance of musical improvisations for upper elementary - high school school students. Musical parameters and individual interpretations are discussed. Students give prompts to inform the improvisations and also join in on their instruments.
Workshop Ingredients
Musical Story - Students learn to compose and improvise music for a familiar story. 2nd - 5th grade with a minimum of 1 year playing an instrument.
Recomposition - Students learn a compositional model and compose their own music based on the model. They must work together to create an aesthetically pleasing piece of music. 3rd-12th grade. No musical experience necessary.
Wordplay - Using only the natural tones and rhythms of spoken language, students create a musical composition. 9th-12th grade with no musical experience necessary.
Graphic Scores and Conductions - Students interpret visual signs starting with graphic scores and moving towards large-scale visual gestures and/or signs as an ensemble. 1st-12th grades with no musical experience necessary.
Teacher Workshops
- An introductory improvisational tool-kit for teachers of young musicians. This is an interactive workshop where teachers experience each of the beginning exercises on their own instruments. The focus is on tools for teaching students how to improvise starting from just one note.