I've heard contradictory reports about the Quick Study. The exam regulations do not say you cannot mark the Quick Study paper, but then I am pretty sure the graded exam regulations don't say so either, but it definitely says it on the sight-reading when you get there. I find that really odd, if I am going to prepare a piece for a short notice performance then the most important thing I am going to do with it is write stuff on it. I'll write technical elements such as position changes and sub-divisions of beats in tricky rhythms but also musical elements, reminders of phrasing, places where I might rit, editorial dynamics if required. It would seem very bizarre to test this skill without letting you do something that surely every musician would do. If you really are not allowed to mark the copy then it favours the person with the quick memory rather than the person who is most able to deliver a musical performance. Are you really required to do this without a pencil? I estimate I'd do more than 3 times as well if allowed to make marks on the paper.

No, you're not allowed to write on it.

I shall go and blow my brains out, then.

Disclaimer - I know nothing about diplomas, but as someone who sightreads an awful lot for my job, I never write on music I'm about to sightread and I really can't think why I would want to .

Another disclaimer - I've done a diploma, but ATCL doesn't involve sightreading.

I've found over the years that there are many, many occasions where you don't get any choice : here's the music, play it now

Okay - wrong terminology - sorry, but my point still stands. Even if I was doing a quick study, I would still not feel the need to write on the music.

They are two different skills though. Genuine sight reading is (roughly speaking!) about producing what you can see and trying to keep up with the orchestra while you do so and ideally putting in the right notes and dynamics and articulation as you go past, quick study is how musically can you perform this in 5 minutes. 5 minutes is an awful lot of preparation time to expect the same sort of outcome you'd get with a 30 second lead-in time or if you turned over the page in orchestra and there it was looking at you in 6 flats in 7th position. If someone gives me preparation time then the way I personally would spend my preparation time is around 30% marking the score so my brain knows what to do then 70% making my hands do it. In my way of doing things that is the first stage of preparation and it's as weird as giving 5 minutes of preparation time during which you are not allowed to use the instrument.

Ideally I would start my diploma with the quick study and ask if I already failed (since you can't have it at all if you fail the quick study) and if I have failed then just leave.

It isn't really. All ABRSM diploma takers will probably agree that the five minutes is used up well before one thinks one has tackled all of the issues on the page!

Indeed they are. I was just making the point that I've never felt the need to write on the music in either scenario, so it's clearly not something that "every musician would do".

Maybe every string player? I agree that wind players are not as heavy on the pencil work, I rarely write on my recorder music in the same way I scribble all over the viola stuff as there are so many choices of how exactly to play each note, having found the best option I tend to mark what I chose so I can get my head down and practice doing it. I'm a writing down person, though. I can remember anything so long as I have written it down. I don't have to keep the thing I wrote it on, but the process of writing it helps. I wonder if I would be allowed to write fingerings down on a piece of paper then throw it away.

I can vouch for the fact you cannot write anything on the page. And frankly you don't have time to do that if you're looking through the music for all the pitfalls and trying out bits and pieces. 5 minutes goes past in a twinkling.

Your adrenalin helps you out, and the practice that you've done beforehand. Remember that someone will keep their eye on you to make sure you're preparing in an organised fashion.

I deliberately didn't do the QS first, because I knew that I would settle down a bit during the other part of the exam, and if I had made a mess of the QS (which was quite likely, in my opinion) I would have been thinking about it all during the rest of the exam.

If I'm sight-reading or quick-studying (which ever you like to call it - is there really a difference ) then I don't write on the music. There isn't time, and anyway, this isn't what they're testing.

I wonder how they would react to bringing a clear sheet in to the exam, putting it over the music and writing on that? As a harpist I am always writing pedal markings in to music. In orchestral sightreading I have been found counting my 23 bars rest with pencil in hand while scribbling pedals in for the next entry but one... Also marking which hand should play which notes because the stems are so often put going the wrong way. If a piece of quick study music has been carefully edited by a harpist I would probably work at it 'at the instrument', but if it is the product of any non-harpist I would almost certainly find 5 minutes with a pencil more use.

I'm with the others - there really wasn't time, at least for me. You must be extremely fast if you consider 5 min. to be a lot of preparation time. I found QS to be essentially a sight-reading test except that there was a chance to read through once and try out some of the difficult bits.

why? If you went on to pass the recital and viva voce that would still stand and you would only have to resit the quick study part to complete the diploma. Unless of course you think that having failed it first time you would never pass it.

It seems to me that the QS is neither a test of sight reading abilities, nor of performance under constraints.

- If they are testing sight reading, then 5 minutes is too much time. They should allow ONE minute, to look at the music - not allow play through of any music, nor marking of the score in any form. In this case, the skill being tested is the ability to accurately perform a piece of music on the go, never having seen the score before

- If you get 5 minutes prep for QS, AND you also get to play through the score, then its no longer sight reading- so what is it that they are really testing? They may as well allow 10 minutes, allow you to mark the score, add your own dynamics , play through pieces of it and then test how well you are able to interpret a piece of music that you have never seen before, given a short time frame.

23 bars rest is a luxury violins often do not have! Please don't think I'm implying harpists have it easy though. far from it.

I had to do some orchestral sightreading last week...without a pencil. 16 pages with hardly a bar's rest of a piece I didn't know.

As far as I'm aware, you'd never expect to mark any kind of sight-reading/quick study for exam or audition purposes.

Try the viola section! When the violins are resting and cellos are playing, we play with the cellos. When cellos are resting and the violins are playing, we play along with the violins.

5 minutes may seem like an awkward amount of time, but I at least have encountered it in "real life" many times (more often than 1 min or 10 min situations)

Surely the quick study is designed to see what musical impression you can give of a page(?) of music that's of a certain technical standard, in a short time frame? I'd have thought by dip level you should be pretty au fait with notes and (ahem) rhythms, key etc so it's just seeing how you identify and tackle the tricky parts in that time, and manage to make a performance of it rather than just a technical reading.

Maybe, if you're used to writing squiggles on a page that help direct your interpretation (I kind of do that, but it's usually to help focus), it's a good idea to practise not writing them down - see if you can perform the music expressively, whatever your instrument's particlar peculiarities are? Even though you have a preferred way of doing something, you can still teach yourself another way, and you would feel better prepared on the day. Maybe get some grade 6-ish pieces that you don't already know and try performing them without your safety net of writing on them? That will give an idea of how it feels.

I'd have thought post grade 8 you can play with some expression fairly instinctively?

The page notes I normally make are fingering choices. I'm not sure what your instrument is so maybe this is stuff you know, maybe not, but for many instruments there are a variety of ways of tackling the same notes. On something like a flute, unless you are using trill fingering then when you see a top C on a page you finger top C, you don't have (well, don't tend to use in everyday sight-reading) a variety of different options. That leaves more freedom to move directly to the musical elements.

A stringed instrument, with a few exceptions, can play each note with any finger and can be on a choice of strings. If I see on the music that I will have to be in 1/2 position here then I need to work out how is the most logical way of progressing into that position so there is not a speedbump while I enter the position more awkwardly. I can sight-read my position changes, but it leaves much more fluency for a difficult passage if I try the different options, but then having tried 4 different ways of shifting in different places I want to cement which one I chose, otherwise I risk going for the one which is my first instinct rather than the one which was musically the best. I like to quickly get the technical out of the way so I can move on to the musical.

I'm doing more studies in positions I don't like very much and listening to more modern music to help with my quick study. I'm probably worrying over nothing, most people tell me I will be fine (based on actually listening to me, not just being reassuring) but then the AB magazine arrived this week with an article on how hard the quick study is and I went back to wanting to blow my brains out. Still considering Trinity too, not to avoid the QS but because the AB diploma dates are a nightmare for me. It's the first time in 9 years that I've been free on ANY of the diploma dates!

I specifically asked whether I could mark the QS, and was told that I couldn't. It stands to reason - you're not given an individual part, rather the QS that you are given is in a book, which is clearly intended for reuse. There are other pieces on adjacent pages, so it wouldn't be right for a candidate to be faced with someone else's scribbles, say, on the left hand page, when you're playing the piece on the right hand page. The pages need to be kept nice and clean.

One other thing - the examiners will not tell you instantly if you've failed the QS to give you the opportunity to leave early. They'll stay tight-lipped and you'll have to take the full exam anyway. Which is a good thing, in my opinion.

I think it all depends on a person's comfort level. For instance, I deal with flats better than sharps- anythiing over four sharps gives me the jitters

Has anyone ever tried to unravel Ravel's Ondine from Gaspard de la nuit? With SEVEN sharps and time signature changes every other bar, imagine getting something similar for your QS It would be a good idea to just pack up and go home and hope that next time around you get a piece in C major? Well...there's always somethiing called hope.