Teaching Materials

Unfamiliar listening in the new GCSE specifications

The new GCSE music specifications have ensured that all four boards now expect students to be confident listening to and appraising unfamiliar music. With three of the boards providing students with...

Teaching Materials

AQA, OCR, Edexcel & Eduqas: a Jazz Primer, Part 2

In part one of this two-part jazz resource (Music Teacher, March 2017), we traced how jazz evolved from humble beginnings as a folk music into being the mainstream popular music of its day. By 1945,...

Teaching Materials

OCR AoS4: Religious music of the Baroque period

In this resource, I give advice on how to tackle the background to the topic, recommend some online resources, and provide a ‘way in’ to the music itself, including specific works that could be...

Teaching Materials

OCR AoS5: Conventions of Pop

Of all the Areas of Study for the 9-1 OCR GCSE, AoS5 on Conventions of Pop is likely to be the one where students already have at least some familiarity with the music. However, although they may...

Teaching Materials

Edexcel AS and A level AoS5: Debussy's Estampes

Students are studying Debussy's Estampes and the other set works in preparation for a summer Edexcel exam paper either at AS or A Level. A previous Music Teacher resource (January 2017) has already...

Teaching Materials

AQA, OCR, Edexcel & Eduqas: a Jazz Primer, part 1

Jazz is an important area of study for A level across several of the boards. This first part traces jazz history from its ‘raggedy’ beginnings in the 1890s through to the gloss and sophistication of...

Teaching Materials

AQA GCSE AoS2: The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

‘It was 20 years ago today…’ sang the Beatles on the opening track of their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. And it is now actually 50 years ago that they first sang these words. So it's a...

Teaching Materials

Edexcel AS & A level Music AoS4: Courtney Pine's Back in the Day

Courtney Pine's album Back in the Day was released in 2000, and is one of the set works that both AS and A Level students have to study as part of Edexcel's Area of Study 4: Popular Music and Jazz.

Teaching Materials

IB SL/HL 2017-19: Kodály's Dances of Galánta

It's an odd pairing at first glance: Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 (covered in its own Music Teacher resource, February 2016) with Kodály's Dances of Galánta. And yet these prescribed works for...

Teaching Materials

Radiohead in the classroom

In this resource, we take a closer look at some of the musical devices used by Radiohead and consider ways in which we can use them in teaching and learning in the classroom.

Teaching Materials

Edexcel AS and A level Music: Appraising - an introduction

The new AS and A level qualifications from Edexcel are set up in a very similar structure to the legacy course - which many of us are still teaching to our Year 13 students. We still have three...

Teaching Materials

OCR AoS6: Innovations of the 20th Century, part 2

Having covered late-Romantic symphonic styles, Impressionism, Expressionism, atonality and serialism in Part 1 of this resource (Music Teacher, December 2016), we resume our exploration of this vast...

Teaching Materials