MUSICAL MEANS OF EXPRESSION TAUGHT VIA AN ELECTRONIC TEXTBOOK FOR FOURTH GRADE OF THE GENERAL EDUCATION SCHOOL
Authors: Georgieva Fileva – Ruseva Krasimira 
Published: March 2020

Musical means of expression - this is the language of music, the materialization of the idea of the one who created the particular musical work, the means by which the listeners can reach the author's idea. Knowledge of some musical means of expression, such as harmony and polyphony, requires a long preparation, they are accessible to professionals. Others, such as dynamics (force of sounding), rhythm, metrum, timbre, the main characteristics of the melody, are accessible to any listener who is familiar with their possible meanings. Due to the great importance of the musical means of expression to understand the meaning, the message of the work, they are studied in music classes in the Bulgarian general education school in a form accessible to the age of the students. The music curricula require the teaching musical means of expression each school year. Initially, they are presented in the most elementary form without introducing terms, gradually, with each new school year, knowledge is upgraded and complicated. In this publication, I will present some of the tasks involved in teaching musical means of expression through the electronic textbook for fourth grade at Prosveta Publishing House.At first tasks are placed for mastering the new information. Such tasks are, for example:- Horizontal arrangement of dynamic signs, starting from the sign for quietest sounding to the sign for strongest sounding. Graphs of dynamic signs are offered that students to rearrange to the correct order;- Tasks of calculating durations, such as “at three-quarters size, which groups of note values make one beat?” Of the suggested answers, “a half and two eighths”, “a dotted quarter and three eighths” are true;- Tasks for arranging of photos of known for the pupils musical instruments in a table by indications: strings, plucked strings, wind instruments, keyboard instruments, percussion instruments; as well as "Bulgarian folk" and "classical".Later the tasks become more complicated. In another electronic resource the students listen to the piano piece "Bagpipe" by Bulgarian composer Dimitar Nenov, but the title of the piece does not reported. Fourth-graders, answering the following questions: what dynamics prevail in the play; whether a low voice that maintains the same tone sounds and for which Bulgarian folk instrument this is distinctive; in which folk musical instrument the initial tone of the melody is reached with a slight "sliding" in an upward direction; have to guess which Bulgarian folk music instrument is imitated.In a next task, students are asked to indicate by what musical means of expression - what size, character of melody, character of accompaniment - the characters of a child operetta on the Andersen story "The Brave Lead Soldier" are depicted.In other electronic resources, students are now required to compose a brief musical description of the characters of the fable "Grig and Ant". At first, students answer questions about what is the nature of each of the two characters - grig is cheerful, irresponsible, lazy, vain, party-goer and a little cheeky, and ant is hardworking, unpretentious, thrifty, even stingy, devoid of compassion. Through successive questions are clarified the appropriate dynamics, timbre, metrum, rhythm and character of the melody to "portray" the characters. Then pupils proceed to composing.