2015 School Magazine

COMPOSERS CLUB ISABELLA LYONS (8H)

DEBATING ALEX BROWN (12G) AND VARANYA VASUDEVAN (12W)

Composers Club is an interactive opportunity for girls of all grades to receive help with their song writing and developing their music skills across a broad range of styles, from classical to pop. Since joining I have learned a great deal about techniques for my composing and ways in which I can make my compositions the very best they can be. The opportunity to collaborate with other club members to create group compositions has also been lots of fun and has given me new ideas for my own composing. One of the most interesting things that I have explored is the method of composing that best suits me. There are no set rules about how you should compose music. Everyone needs to find the technique that works for them. Even the world’s greatest composers used different methods. Beethoven, for example, preferred to compose at his piano. However, Bach and Mozart chose to hand write their music on paper away from their instruments because it helped them to focus on the music rather than being distracted by playing their instruments.

The debating season was filled with numerous enjoyable experiences and incredible successes for the 180 Girls Grammar debaters. The year began with a charity comedy debate against Somerville House, with the Senior A Team of Varanya Vasudevan (12W), Josefine Ganko (12R), Emma Cockburn (12M) and Angela Goggin (12G) arguing, ‘That veganism can save the planet’. After many weeks of intense training, writing and re- working of speeches, and perfecting rebuttal and points of information techniques, BGGS entered twenty teams into the Queensland Debating Union (QDU) competition, which runs from March through to August. From these twenty teams, a massive thirteen teams were successful in the first four rounds of preliminary debates to enter the knockout Finals Series. Both the 12.1 team — Alexandria Brown (12G), Caitlin Philp (12R), Shiye Su (12R), Jess Darvenizia (12O), Aarthi Sritharan (12M) and Davina Lo (12G) and 10.1 team — Isabel Nolan (10B), Abirami Somasundaram (10M), Evangeline Noble (10M), Alice Dunn (10E) and Lucinda Duke (10H) — were runners-up in the QDU competition. The Senior A girls reached the quarter finals, where they were ranked in the top eight teams in Queensland. In the Brisbane Girls Debating Competition, six teams were entered, with the Year 10 and 11 teams as runners- up in the Grand Final debate. BGGS also fielded six Year 7 teams in a QDU competition consisting of four round robin debates from June to October. The Junior TriSeries Competition saw fourteen BGGS teams comprised of Year 7s, 8s and 9s also participating in a round robin format competition. In the September holidays, four girls competed in the Australian Individual Debating and Public Speaking competition which took place over four days in Melbourne, with Anna Ruddell (11O) and Caitlin O’Meara (11R) named in the Australian team to compete in Pittsburgh, USA next Easter. Isabella Busby (11M) was also awarded a medal for persuasive speaking. This year has been a highly rewarding one for our debaters and as captains, we are so proud to have led such a group of hard-working, dedicated and extremely talented girls. 2015 was especially exciting as we were able to expand our debating community by welcoming our new Year 7 members. Finally, we would like to wish all the debaters the best of luck for their argumentative pursuits in the years to come.

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During the second term, I also had the opportunity to perform my compositions at the Junior Music Festival and Open Day, which were both amazing experiences that contributed to my learning, and helped me build confidence in performing. I would definitely recommend Composers Club to any students who love music, even if composing isn’t something they think they are very skilled at. So come along and have your say in music. As Gustav Mahler said, ‘If a composer could say what he had to say in words, he would not bother trying to say it in music.’ You never know, you might discover a talent you never knew you had!

CO-CURRICULUM