- Looking at the music of John Dowland, William Byrd, Palestrina (If the students are up for doing things in Italian). Also how the Renaissance period affected the early Baroque period (so also incidently looking at composers like Purcell, Monteverdi, etc).

- Singing madrigals and/or solo pieces and/or duets

- Stage presentation and Renaissance ideals of beauty and expression – This would focus mainly on communicating through gesture and body language.

- Florentine Camerata and the birth of opera – I won’t spend too much time on this if the kids aren’t into it, but the idea would be to discuss how the Camerata thought that music had become corrupt, and that it could be improved by going back to the ancient tradition of greek tragedy, thus the birth of dramatic music etc. In parallel, as a class we would list what qualities we like and don’t like about current music (kind of like our own “cab camerata”) and from that create a class “opera”/composition project.

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