Get creative with Angeline Bell's music
Practical examples of how to inspire your students
Angeline Bell has rapidly established herself as a wonderful educational composer, with three great books appearing in the last couple of years courtesy of Editions Musica Ferrum. I’m a big fan—I invested in studio licenses of My Lyrical Notebook and My Garden Notebook—and my students are too!
Angeline has a lovely ear for melody and an appealing contemporary style. My teenage students seem to really be drawn towards her music. Pieces like “Getting Better” and “Water Lilies” from My Garden Notebook and “Butterflies” and “Dubrovnik” from My Lyrical Notebook have been popular student repertoire choices in my studio this year.
But what I particularly value about Angeline’s work is that she encourages people to use her compositions as a springboard to their own creativity. She recently posted a couple of lovely videos of student variations on her pieces and I’ve been given permission to repost them here. They’re wonderful examples of how a piece can be enhanced or transformed. Angeline and I hope that you’ll find them inspiring examples of how your own students could use her music as a creative inspiration.
Write your own lyrics
In this charming video, “Getting Better” from My Garden Notebook has been turned into a song with lyrics, which Angeline and her student Flora have fun singing in Cockney accents.
Thanks to Flora and her parents for permission to post the video here.
Writing a variation
Angeline’s student Alex came up with this wonderful variation of “Fireflies” from My Garden Notebook. He’s changed the key, altered the chord sequences, added a more intense accompaniment pattern, and used the opening motif as the basis of a new melody. If I’m right, he’s also distributed the opening motif differently between the two hands. Awesome work, Alex!
Thanks to Alex and his parents for permission to post this video here. Here’s Angeline’s original for comparison:
What about your students?
Have any of your students come up with creative twists on one of Angeline’s pieces? She would love to hear them! You can email her at angelinebell@hotmail.co.uk or contact her on Facebook messenger.
More soon!
Angeline has put together a few ideas for getting creative with students that I’ll share with you soon.