Assessment Type 2: Musical Literacy (30%)

Students complete three musical literacy tasks.

As a set, the musical literacy tasks should enable students to:

• manipulate musical elements
• apply and refine their musical literacy skills, including aural perception and notation
• deconstruct and analyse musical works and/or styles
• synthesise their findings.

At least one task should be a practical application of students’ skills in manipulating elements of music using standard notation, in a composition or arrangement of approximately 2 minutes. This could be, for example, a harmonisation or melodic extension task.

The remaining musical literacy tasks could include (but are not restricted to), for example:

• a comparative analysis of two or more works
• an analysis of style, structure, and musical elements of one or more works
• a creative application of students’ skills in aural recognition, musical techniques, and score reading across at least two styles or genres
• a composition, arrangement, or harmonisation of a melody taken from an existing work (of approximately 2 minutes in standard and/or graphic notation)
• adding an extension to a core harmony
• an analysis of the musical aspects of the performance of others.

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

As a set, the three responses should be to the equivalent in multimodal form of a maximum of 15 minutes presented orally, or 2400 words.

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

• understanding music
• creating music
• responding to music.