Music and Literature joined forces in the final composition assignment of the term for Year 8. Their brief – to compose a piece of music inspired by an extract from Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein. The extract began: ‘It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs’. Frankenstein is captivated by the beauty of his creation’s hair and teeth but utterly repulsed by his ‘shrivelled complexion and straight black lips’. The scene reaches a climax when the monster appears in the scientist’s bedchamber and Frankenstein consequently flees in horror.
Here are a couple of their compositions: