Tamworth Public School takes part in Music: Count Us In 2017

The show was part of Music: Count Us In, which invites school students across Australia to celebrate music by singing a song together and interacting with professional musicians. 

And while there was no singing at the Tamworth Public School session – a teacher saying the students were perhaps a little too self-conscious at their age – the students loved the livestream.

A Year 5/6 group joined about 650,000 other primary school students across Australia to take part in the annual event.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra also introduced students to the sounds of their individual instruments, and performed The Bush Concert.

Based on Helga Visser’s classic picture book, The Bush Concert was composed by Adelaide’s Mark Simeon Ferguson to conjure all the sounds of the bush birds in the story, from galahs to noisy miners.

Teacher Hannah McKerrow said many of the students took music lessons, and this was “a great opportunity to see what all their lessons can work towards, just to see what it looks like as a real orchestra”.

“Many of them don’t have the chance to go down to the Opera House or go to shows in Sydney on the weekends, so this is as close as they’ll get for some of them,” Miss McKerrow said.

“It gives them a great opportunity to see what all those hours of practice can end up being one day.”

Even non-musicians had something to gain from being exposed to new genres of music, she said.

“They’re not going to find out what they enjoy in music if we never expose them to something outside just the normal radio stations.”

Year 6 student Abigail Carr, 12, and Year 5’s Kendra Fitzpatrick, 11, both play violin in the school band and in Tamworth Youth Philharmonia.

Abigail said she felt learning music helped with “brain power” at school.

“It’s also a way to get away from stuff that’s happening in your life: you can concentrate on that one thing and you don’t think about anything else,” she said.

Kendra said she also enjoyed the challenge.

“I like the beauty of the music and how proud you get being able to learn this musical instrument,” she said.

“I like the sound of the violin, especially, and I’m learning clarinet this year – it’s a blowing instrument, so it’s very different from the violin.”

Miss McKerrow said the school took part in Connected Classroom activities frequently, interacting with people from Questacon, the National Portrait Gallery and Parliament House, among others.

“For us [this] is just another of the great ones we get to be involved in.”

Many schools took part in singing the official “song that stops the nation” – written and rehearsed especially for the event – which this year was a tune called Shine Together.