Musical analysis
MUSICAL ANALYSIS WRITING GUIDE
THE CRITERIA
In writing your essay, the only thing you really need to do is fulfill the marking criteria. Let’s look closely at what the criteria says.
The student evaluates music by thoroughly deconstructing the repertoire, and determining the manipulation of, and relationships between, identified musical elements and compositional devices, communicating detailed and substantiated judgments about how these relate to context and genre and the expressed style.
That’s a bit wordy isn’t it? Sometimes educational language is a bit more complicated than it needs to be. Let’s try and simplify it.
The two most important words here are deconstruction and evaluation, in fact, that’s the only two things required of your essay. You need to deconstruct the repertoire and then evaluated it.
To DECONSTRUCT means to identify:
• musical elements and how they’ve been used by the artist (pitch, rhythm, timbre etc) • compositional devices (repetition, sequence, inversion, randomness, serialism, etc)
You should also identify if/how these two things relate to each other (for instance, maybe each time the music repeats the artist plays more
THE CRITERIA
In writing your essay, the only thing you really need to do is fulfill the marking criteria. Let’s look closely at what the criteria says.
The student evaluates music by thoroughly deconstructing the repertoire, and determining the manipulation of, and relationships between, identified musical elements and compositional devices, communicating detailed and substantiated judgments about how these relate to context and genre and the expressed style.
That’s a bit wordy isn’t it? Sometimes educational language is a bit more complicated than it needs to be. Let’s try and simplify it.
The two most important words here are deconstruction and evaluation, in fact, that’s the only two things required of your essay. You need to deconstruct the repertoire and then evaluated it.
To DECONSTRUCT means to identify:
• musical elements and how they’ve been used by the artist (pitch, rhythm, timbre etc) • compositional devices (repetition, sequence, inversion, randomness, serialism, etc)
You should also identify if/how these two things relate to each other (for instance, maybe each time the music repeats the artist plays more