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Year 7

The main focus of Year 7 is to develop singing skills including harmony singing and the ability to pitch in their heads. All students sing a great range of music and put on a concert in the first term. They also play African rhythms on a range of percussion instruments and develop basic keyboard skills to enable good use of these instruments in the future. Students have the chance to try many instruments and learn about the ways sound is produced and varying tone qualities of strings, brass, woodwind and percussion.

 

In the summer term students begin to develop composition skills. All projects involve listening to different excerpts of music.

 

Written work is minimal and mostly takes the form of learning about music notation.

 

 

Year 8

The Year 8 curriculum is based around half-termly projects concentrating on musical structures and scales. We also consider TV and film music and folk music. All listening relates to these projects and includes performing pieces by Mozart and John Williams; composing using pentalonic scales and creating contrasts in music. There is a variety of paired keyboard work, singing and whole group performing and all students learn to play chords as well as melodies.

 

 

Year 9

Year 9 begins with a project on popular music where students divide into small groups and choose a popular song they wish to perform. They are provided with instruments and work on their own interpretation of the piece chosen. Once completed and performed they progress onto constructing their own compositions in any popular style they choose. They have use of the Apple/Mackintosh computers and most appropriate instruments.

 

This then moves on to looking at the 12 bar blues and again producing their own blues pieces in groups and finally considering the development of the musical including a look back at Opera.

 

They develop their understanding of how all the different instrumentalists in a band work together and the development of all popular styles of music. They have the opportunity to learn new instrumental skills and the art of song writing.

 

 

Years 10 & 11

The option groups study the Edexcel GCSE music course. This involves 3 elements – Listening (40%), Composing (30%) and Performing (30%). They study set works for the listening course covering a vast range of music from classical to popular dance and music from other cultures. At the end of the course they sit a listening exam.

 

For the Composing they must produce two compositions relating to two different areas of study and for the Performing element they must give one solo performance and one ensemble performance where no other part should be the same as theirs. These are assessed by the teacher and checked by the exam board.