Students should be given a wide range of opportunities to further extend their composition skills. Study should include:
Students should also study appropriate models drawn from the anthology and elsewhere. Students should continue to practise composing to a given brief and specified time limit.
Area of study Instrumental music: Topic 1: Development and contrast
Students should investigate processes of musical development including motivic development (eg by inversion or fragmentation), variation techniques and how such processes can be applied to create varied musical structures (eg rondo, sonata form).
Area of study Instrumental music : Topic 2: Exploiting instruments
Students should investigate the concept of writing technically challenging music for acoustic instruments, how this can be exploited sensitively and practically, and how different levels of practical demand and different manners of instrumental writing can be coordinated effectively within a single piece.
Area of study Applied music: Topic 3: Music for film and television
Students should consider how music can be used to take the listener on a complex and musically satisfying emotional journey in parallel with the moving image on film and television (and therefore often independently of traditional music forms and structures). Neither close synchronisation of film and music nor the submission of video or DVD clips is required.
Area of study Applied music: Topic 4: Music, dance and theatre
Students should consider the relationships between music and dance in a variety of social and dramatic contexts, and how music can be used in the theatre (both vocally and instrumentally).