Picture The Music

     This is a project I came up with for our annual Picture The Music Art Competition with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.  Every year the Symphony requests artwork completed by elementary students in the St. Louis area to complete a work of art based on a selected piece of music.  This year, our musical selection is Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition:  The Great Gate of Kiev.
     I begin the lesson by explaining how music and art can be related based on emotion and feeling.  We talk about some of the most common feelings people associate with music...excitement, sadness, happiness, fear, and so on.  Next, we talk about colors and some of the same feelings that people associate with certain colors...like "feeling blue", and so on.  Next, I play the song selection and ask the students to think about some colors that they would use to represent the music.
     For this project, we began by drawing a piano keyboard, adding music notes, and watercolors.  I decided to use the image of a bird for this class to use in their artwork because birds are not only easy to draw, but they can easily be associated with music.  Here are a few great finished works of art:

By Jada K. 

By Oliviah M. 

 By Anna Rose E.