At Trafalgar High School, our Music program has embedded the Musical Futures approach, with a particular focus on modern contemporary music making. Students have the opportunity to learn and play a variety of instruments, including but not limited to guitar, piano, bass, drums and vocals. A selection of stringed and woodwind instruments (e.g. violin, viola, cello, flute, clarinet) are also able to be learned in extra-curricular music lessons. Our school offers compulsory classroom music in Years 7 and Year 8, with elective music classes beginning at Year 9 and Year 10 and continuing through into VCE Units 1-4 in Music Performance.
Students have the opportunity to undertake private music tuition (pay-as-you-play lessons) with our suitably qualified music instructors. This is an extra-curricular activity and these lessons all run during school hours throughout the week. Students also have the opportunity to work in bands, duos or as solo artists when their interest and skills are at a suitable level and thus, they can begin to develop their own musicality and focus on developing their own individual tastes in music.
Click here to download the Music Tuition Form for 2022.
Little Blue Couch
Our YouTube music show, “Little Blue Couch", will be featuring musicians from Trafalgar High School and we will be talking to them about their music and their musical experiences. This show is purely developed, performed, filmed, mixed and edited by a creative team of students including but not limited to some of our Arts Captains and Music students. The show is still evolving and we are working to improve it each time. We hope you enjoy it!
Rockfest
Trafalgar High School proudly hosts the annual Gippsland heat of RockFest, a school-aged battle of the bands event, sponsored by Cranbourne Music, D’Addario Australia, Concert AV and Fender Australia. However, sadly, COVID has halted these events in 2020 and 2021 but we hope to be able to run events like these again in the future. For more information about RockFest go to RockFest . We have had many successful bands and solo artists go through to the State and National Finals over the years. In 2021, one of our very talented VCE Music students, Em Istraty, won the “RockFest Futures Award" for her performance and took home over $2000 in prizes. In 2018, one of our bands, “The Leftovers”, were successful in winning both the overall “Best Senior Band” and “Best Original Song” awards at the 2018 RockFest National Finals and at the time, went on to record their music and begin doing gigs of their own outside of school. This event, like many of our school music events, aims to foster skill development in music and provide students with a real life “live performance” opportunities, as well as the chance to see other student bands play too. For many years this event has been a hugely positive experience for both the students and the school community and we look forward to performing in-person again one day.
Trafalgar High School’s music program not only offers students a wide variety of performance opportunities, it also offers students the chance to participate in the Kool Skools Studio and Song Writing Program. Through Kool Skools, students are encouraged to write their own music and record it with studio engineers in a professional recording studio in Melbourne (Studio 52 – Empire Records). At the end of the Kool Skools project, students complete a CD with a compilation of original music and cover songs, all performed and recorded by the students themselves, including the creation of all album artwork and photography. This project often involves a mix of talented students from Years 7 to 12. We hope to be able to run our Kool Skools event again in 2022.
All songs on the compilation album recorded at Studio 52, Empire Records, in Melbourne Australia for the Kool Skools project. The album comprises of a mix of original songs composed by students as well as covers of popular songs and is a snapshot of the Music program at our school in 2019. All music was played and recorded by the students over two days in September 2019.
To learn more about our classroom, elective and VCE music program, or our instrumental music program, please contact our school’s music coordinator during school hours on (03) 5633 1733. All forms will then be forwarded to the music coordinator and appropriate instrumental teaching staff.
