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:

Y9 assessment

You can avoid recording in class by recording your work at home and bringing it in to school on a memory stick or emailing it to me here
It's often difficult to send large files so it's best to upload it to services such as YouTube, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud etc and then sending me the link

Want to record your piece away from the rest of your class? Book a practice room at lunchtime

I am currently reading: Boyhood Island by Karl Ove Knausguaard

Talent Show

Congratulations and thanks to all who took part and helped in the Talent Show. A full report with photos and recordings will follow

Texture

Y10s - GCSE introduction

This is the presentation from the first lesson, in case you missed it or want to check something

Music to revise by

I have produced playlists which will help with your revision in two places:
YouTube

and Spotify. Here are some sample playlists:

 You can use this music as a sort of passive revision - to listen to while doing something else, or you can use it in a more active way - try listening to 1 minute extracts 3 times and then writing what you can about the different Areas of Study. They are: rhythm and metre, harmony and tonality, texture and melody, timbre and dynamics and structure and form. Good luck!

GCSE 2013 paper

The paper, listening examples and answers are now available at the same link - see previous post

GCSE exam materials

You can access exam papers, mark schemes and the mp3s here:



Get revising!

Composer of the month: Beethoven

 

 

It’s quite possible that Beethoven is the greatest composer ever. His symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas are amongst the best (probably the best) examples of each genre. His music divides into three periods:

·         Early – where his music shows the influence of Classical composers like Haydn and Mozart

 

·         Middle – where, perhaps because of his sympathies with revolutionary politics, his music becomes more powerful and full of extreme emotions, signalling the beginning of the Romantic period

 

·         Late – where, perhaps as his deafness became worse, his music becomes more inward-looking and spiritual and looks forward to a world of sound many years ahead of its time

Beethoven’s music is full of rhythmic vitality and often uses short ideas (motivic development) to bind his structures and give them a logical inevitability. Many works seem to have a sense of struggle being overcome by a united humanity. His only opera, Fidelio, tells of people, unjustly imprisoned, being released into light and freedom.

Want to read something while you listen? Try these:

 

Victor Hugo: Les Misérables – this is a long book but it really captures the spirit of Beethoven in its story of struggles against poverty, revolutionaries and love

Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther – a coming of age novel from 1774, one which began the Romantic period

Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities – an exciting story about the French Revolution

If you like Twitter, you're welcome to follow the official music department account "BHS Music" for the latest news: @tdwindsor

Pinning Butterflies: Music and Recording - presentation from lesson 30-1-14

Dr Who?

Last summer, William Davenport and Jordan Picken brought me their composition entry for the BBC Dr. Who Proms competition. I was expecting to make a few suggestions as to how to improve it, but it was perfect already and I felt that it was a potential winner. But how could it possibly win when there were hundreds of entries? Well it did win. There were two classes and William and Jordan won the junior class.

We went to the BBC studios in London to work with Ben Foster, one of the composers of the music for Dr. Who, to prepare this piece to be performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. This is the orchestra that is used to record all the Dr. Who music. 

The piece was performed at the Dr. Who Proms on the 13^th and 14^th of July, at the Royal Albert Hall in London. 

So I found myself at one of the greatest venues in the country, at the greatest music festival in the world, watching a performance of a composition from two of my students! Not a bad day!

There is an important lesson here: the best that we produce in this school is often equal to, and can be even better than, the best that anyone in the country can do.

A2 listening skills checklist

A2 Listening Skills

Use the right hand column to write explanations or examples

Cadences – perfect, imperfect, interrupted, plagal
Chords I, V, V7, V7d, IV
Inversions of chords: a b c
Cadential 6/4 Ic-V-I
Diminished 7th chord Bb+C#+E+G
Augmented 6th chord Ab+C+F# in key of C
Secondary 7th chord II#37 D7-G7-C
Sequence
Circle/cycle of 5ths
Pedal, tonic and dominant
imitation
canon
Ostinato
Riff
Hemiola
Augmentation/diminution
Appoggiatura (chromatic)
Passing note
Note of anticipation
Suspension
Dictation of melody/rhythm
Tonality
Modulation to dominant
Modulation to subdominant
Modulation to relative minor
Modulation to tonic minor
Modal tonality
Atonal tonality
Whole tone tonality
Bitonal tonality
Recognise instruments and techniques: pizzicato, arco, con sordino, double stopping, col legno
Homophonic/melody and accompaniment
Polyphonic
Unison
Playing in octaves
Monophonic
Ornamentation: trill, mordent, turn, portamento
Time signatures: 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 6/8, 12/8, 5/4, 7/4
Intervals: 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, octave, minor, major, perfect, diminished, augmented