Assessment Type 1: Musical Literacy (30%)

Students undertake three musical literacy tasks.

Together, the musical literacy tasks should enable students to:

• demonstrate understanding of musical elements, styles, influences, and techniques
• apply musical literacy skills
• analyse and discuss musical works and their presentation
• develop their understanding of the relationship between musical notation and sound, in exploring and experimenting with music.

One task should enable students to demonstrate their compositional skills through the creation of an original melody or a song with lyrics and chords, using a form of standard music notation appropriate to the style. Students explain the intent of their composition and provide evidence of the skills and techniques they used, in a composer’s statement.

Other musical literacy tasks could include but are not restricted to, for example:

• a comparison of two or more works
• an analysis and discussion of style, technique, and musical elements of one or two works
• a reflection on and critique of one or more works presented in a live music performance.

In their responses, students synthesise their findings and express their musical ideas in multimodal, oral, and/or written form.

Together, the musical literacy tasks should be a maximum of 12 minutes if oral, 2000 words if written, or the equivalent in multimodal form.

The original melody or song should be a maximum of 32–48 bars.

For this assessment type, students provide evidence of their learning primarily in relation to the following assessment design criteria:

• understanding music
• exploring and experimenting with music
• responding to music.