Guitar

Planning for Listening at GCSE

Piano

In the final of a series of blogs on KS4 Music, Dan Francis takes us through the requirements for Listening at GCSE, including how to enhance students’ understanding of vocabulary and notation to enable success in this part of the assessment.

Requirements

This final blog in the series has a focus on the externally-assessed unit at GCSE Music, the exam your students all sit in June. This is where the biggest differences of approach exist across each of the four exam boards (AQA, Edexcel, Eduqas and OCR), which is helpful in providing the flexibility for you to choose the right one to cater for your own students. Rather than going into the detail of these differences (there are subject experts at each exam board who can do that), I’m going to look at the similarities which underpin them and some general teaching principles which I hope will be helpful.

Content

There are Four Areas of Study and, due to regulatory requirements, all of them have one area of study which has a focus on the Western Classical tradition. The other Areas of Study broadly cover Popular Music and Music whose origins lie in other geographical regions. OCR has no set works; AQA and Eduqas have two set works; Edexcel has eight. Each specification appears to have a daunting amount of content which looks almost impossible to teach in five terms, especially as there’s all the Performing and Composing to do too. So let’s break it down a bit.

All the areas of study focus on demonstrating students’ ability to understand how music is put together, how it is communicated in written and aural form, and why it sounds the way it does. Helping students to use the right words to answer these questions is at the heart of the whole GCSE specification.

Listening v Hearing

As music is so ubiquitous and intrinsically linked to identity, students will hear a piece of music and make a quick judgement as to how they will engage with it. It might immediately be assigned to the status of background noise while they focus on more important stuff; they might focus on the lyrics; or on the rhythm; or on the part played by the instrument they play; or an unidentifiable element which affects their emotional response at one key moment. Essentially, their tacit knowledge and lived experience will affect what they hear and then focus in on. In the early stages of Year Ten, it can be worth using the first play of a track simply to allow them to have an initial reaction before you then ask them specific questions.

Training students to listen like musicians requires a build of substantive and disciplinary knowledge through gradual, iterative development. Being able to describe, evaluate and analyse how certain elements are used requires increasingly sophisticated language and understanding. Posing focussed questions which pinpoint exactly what the student should listen to will gradually train their ear so they can ‘think like a musician.’ Taking the beginning of Killer Queen as an example, you might structure a question as follows: In Verse One of Killer Queen, the piano plays staccato chords for two bars and then adds a bassline for two bars. The bass guitar comes in at bar five and plays on each beat of the bar. What direction does it move in? How does that compare to the vocal line at the same point? This can then lead into looking at the notes contained in each triad of each chord and how slash chords are formed. Later on in the course, you could play the same extract and ask: Comment on the harmonic structure of the introduction to Killer Queen.

Integrated Approach

All four exam boards support an approach where substantive knowledge is learnt through performing, composing and listening as an integrated activity. It is far easier for students to understand how the bassline in the first verse of Killer Queen is constructed if they go through the process of learning how to play it as an ensemble. Giving them the lyrics and the chord chart and guiding them through the process of learning how to play it will develop their ensemble skills. Asking them the same level of focussed questions during this rehearsal process means they can develop their substantive, theoretical knowledge and understand how this helps them to develop as a performer. Setting a composition exercise where they have to ‘voice’ their own chord sequence helps to consolidate their substantive knowledge and use it to enhance their ability to compose.

Target Language

When students are working individually or in groups to perform or compose, consistently using target language when discussing anything with them is vital. This target language also needs to be appropriate to the genre and, of course, will get more sophisticated as the course progresses. Consistently saying things like ‘four bar phrase with chord x at the end’ when giving feedback on performance rehearsals or when looking at a section of their composition will set the long-term habits for how they talk and think about music, especially if you insist they do the same. It also means you have ongoing opportunities to verify, consolidate and teach the sort of terminology and language they need to use in the exam.

Notation

The exam boards all talk of a ‘working knowledge of appropriate notations’. This doesn’t mean they need to be fluent but it does mean they need to understand enough to de-code what they can see and hear to understand what’s going on. A fully-notated score is obviously mindblowing at the best of times but I don’t think there is a problem with using them from the start of Year Ten – if not earlier. As with targeted questions, or the first rehearsal with an ensemble, it’s just about zoning in on specifics.

The 4th movement of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 5 has a lot of instruments and notes in it! It also opens with a short, distinctive motif which is then thrown about all over the orchestra both in its full form and split into two bits. As a graphic, the motif is easy to spot once you’ve pointed it out so you can develop habits of score analysis whilst generating an investigation into use of motif, instrumentation, pitch, shifting pitch to match chords etc by getting students to go through the score and circle each time they see it – either in full or in part. As many of these scores can be viewed dynamically as it plays, it’s even easier to integrate the visual and aural. As discussed in my previous blog on composition, the use of piano roll and score editors are really helpful in supporting students with rudimentary notation-reading skills to connect what they are playing with how it looks on a score.

Homework

As highlighted, there’s a lot of terminology listed in the specifications. Homework tasks where students are asked to learn key vocabulary is useful when it is used alongside practical tasks where students have to use the language to refine their own work. Essentially, remembering the key terms becomes easier when it is used to describe or evaluate what they are doing. Ensure students keep a running log of how they are developing their performances and compositions where you can monitor their use of increasingly sophisticated language. Ensure they maintain a listening diary where they are listening to an increasingly broad range of musical styles and become increasingly specialised in their use of technical language. Finally, online resources such as musictheory.net are useful ways of setting up personalised routes for your students to understand the theory of music while the @OpenStudioJazz Shorts are really useful for more advanced students.

Summary

While AQA go as far as to call this Component Understanding Music, the other boards talk in terms of Appraising, or Listening and Appraising. As at Key Stage Three the most meaningful way to prepare students for the externally-assessed unit is to ensure that every music lesson is as active and practical as possible. When they are creating music, make sure there’s a clear objective for them to develop their understanding of how it has been – and is being – put together. When setting those objectives, plan sessions that recognise there’s a hierarchy to the concepts they need to understand and, in my experience, this can be unlocked by framing questions around: How is this put together? How is it being communicated? Why does it sound the way it does?

Dan Francis, September 2024. Copyright © 2024 Music Education Solutions Limited. All Rights Reserved.

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