Song list for Grade IV Trinity

Choose 3 songs, no more than 2 from any one list

Song list for Grade V Trinity

Choose 3 songs, no more than 2 from any one list

Examples of work and comments from examiners

Read this to see the standard and amount of work expected

Example of an annotation for a composition

If you find it difficult to produce a score in traditional notation or TAB you can do this kind of thing instead.

Composition Appraisal Booklet 2015

This is the booklet you will complete to assess your composition for Unit 2. Send me your drafts soon!

2014 Talent Show

The 2014 Talent Show was held on the 24th September. It was another memorable evening and very difficult to choose just 3 winners.
Eventually we decided to award 3rd prize to Emily Lockett (Y9), who sang and played the guitar with great skill and personality. 2nd prize went to Daisy Mitchell (10), who bravely and beautifully sang an aria in Italian. The 1st prize was awarded to William Davenport (Y11) who played his own composition "Ice" on the piano.
Special mention should also be given to Luke Imber, Millicent James, Alex Webb, Kieran and Jordan Picken for their great performances.
Sound and lighting were provided by Dominic Axford and Christopher Davis, with help from former student Daniel Jones.
Tickets and refreshments were organised by Caitlin Duncan and Rosie Bould

Composer of the month: Mahler

Mahler's work is at the end of the Romantic era and greatly influenced what happened in music in the rest of the 20th Century. His pieces are mainly written for huge orchestras, sometimes with singers added. They are highly dramatic works with a huge variety of material: Mahler thought that the symphony should "contain the whole world", so you will find funeral marches, military music, Jewish klezmer, Viennese waltzes.
What Mahler adds to this is:

• a sense of irony - sometimes he seems to be making fun
• predictions about the future - as a Jew frequently suffering from antisemitism he seems to portray both the death of millions of Jews in the Holocaust and the Nazi marching boots
• music which shows the full passion of love, builds to a climax and then suddenly stops (he was a friend of Freud and seems to understand his ideas of psychoanalysis

Try this for his irony and Jewish music. The double bass is playing a minor version of Frère Jacques and then Jewish music, sounding like the much later Fiddler on the Roof, takes over

And try this for those Nazi boots marching:

And this because it just might change your life!

Something to read while you listen?

Mahler's favourite novel, religion, morals and murder:

A great book about the suffering of the Jews at Auschwitz:

And a romance with Freudian overtones: