National Year 13 Music
Chapters: 3
1. Optional areas of study (choose two)
AoS2: Pop music · AoS3: Music for media · AoS4: Music for theatre · AoS5: Jazz · AoS6: Contemporary traditional music · AoS7: Art music since 1910
- Popular Music: How Pop, Rock and Urban Songs Work – Popular music is music made for a wide audience, spread by radio, records, TV and the internet. A band plays in layers: drums and bass make the rhythm section, guitar and keys fill the harmony, and the voice sings the melody. Most songs use 4/4 time with a backbeat on beats 2 and 4, a verse-chorus structure and a catchy hook or riff. Styles grew one from another: blues and jazz, rock and roll, rock and pop, disco and punk, hip hop and electronic dance music, plus world styles like reggae, K-pop and Bollywood.
- Film Music and Music for Media – Music for media is written to support pictures and stories in films, TV, adverts and video games. It can be diegetic (heard by the characters) or non-diegetic (heard only by the audience). Composers use leitmotifs for characters, hit points to match action, and choices of tempo, pitch, harmony, instruments and dynamics to create mood. Game music is often adaptive: it changes as the player acts.
- Musical Theatre – Musical theatre tells a story by combining spoken scenes (the book), songs (the score), dance, sets and lights. Characters sing when feelings grow too big for speech. Common song types include the opening number, the 'I want' song, duets, ensemble numbers, comedy songs, showstoppers and reprises. Opera is the older relative: usually sung all the way through. Composers such as Kurt Weill, Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Jason Robert Brown each shaped the style in different ways.
- Jazz – Jazz is a music that grew in African-American communities in New Orleans in the early 1900s, mixing blues, ragtime, brass bands and church music. Its key features are swing rhythm (long-short beats), blue notes, syncopation, rich chords, call and response, and above all improvisation over a repeating chord pattern. Over a century it changed style many times: New Orleans, swing and big band, bebop, cool and modal jazz, fusion and today's global jazz.
- 20th-Century Music – In the 20th century composers broke many old rules. Impressionists (Debussy, Ravel) used hazy whole-tone and modal sounds. Expressionists (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern) left keys behind (atonality) and then built music from rows of all 12 notes (serialism). Neoclassical composers (Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Poulenc) went back to clear old forms with sharp new harmony. Bartók and Kodály used folk tunes and uneven rhythms. Later came electronic and chance music, then minimalism (Riley, Reich, Glass) with slowly changing loops, and postmodern mixing of styles. National voices included Copland, Britten, Shostakovich and Messiaen.
2. Component 2: Performance
Solo and/or ensemble recital or music production
- Music Performance: Playing Solo and in an Ensemble – Performing music means playing or singing a piece for listeners. A good performance is accurate (right notes, right rhythm), keeps a steady tempo, uses dynamics and phrasing to show feeling, and fits the style of the music. In an ensemble, players also listen to each other, balance their volume and follow cues. Good preparation is slow, careful practice in small chunks, then speeding up and performing for others.
3. Component 3: Composition
Composition to a brief · Free composition
- Music Composition: How to Build a Piece from a Tiny Idea – Composing means building music from small ideas. Start with a motif (a few notes). Develop it by repetition, sequence (the same shape higher or lower), and variation (change rhythm, turn it upside down). Put harmony under it: chords like I, IV, V, I, ending with a cadence. Choose a texture (tune alone, tune with chords, or many tunes together). Shape the whole piece with a form like A B A or verse-chorus. Improvising is composing on the spot. A brief tells you the purpose, length and instruments; you plan, draft, test and refine.