Okay, there's this one piece of music I could do with knowing. It was on the AQA June 2006 listening paper on the orchestral landmarks. The question was the usual "which classical period and give 2 reasons" sort.

The piece was by Tchaikovsky and I'll do my best to describe the extract.

Firstly, the tempo was around 120 and starts with a full orchestra playing a descending melody with scalic sequences and the beginning of the first phrase looks a little like this.



After it's done that again, it goes into a quieter section where you get WW instruments with the melody and strings doing scale based countermelodies underneath. It's like call and response. This continues and then gets loader toward the original phrases again.

I'm no good at describing things well but hopefully you can go off what I've got down there.

Last movement of the fourth symphony.

Thanks

Much appreciated.

Fourth Symphony (his best, IMO), last movement. As for period, see my query on "Ask the Chief Examiner". I don't know what names for periods are considered acceptable, either for AB exams or for GCSE. I would just call it "Romantic", which is not "Classical" (Haydn to Beethoven) in my scheme of things, but "classical" presumably means something different in this context.

I've just got a Piano/Voice student whose asked me to assist her with aspects of the listening paper and her Compositions. I think she's more concerned about composing. So she's going to get a mixture of Theory as applied to Composing. Dance rhythms and how to recognise them and compose with them. A brief history of Western music 1550- the present day including orchestration, and Composers of the Period. Infact the only thing I can't cover is Bhangra. I intend to supplement the work the school does not replace it. I've already recorded her first piece as a potential submission, and am continuinally setting work for her.

When describing music go for the obvious, the Orchestration, the dynamics, the size of the Orchestra. You said wood wind. Name individual instruments. Learn to Identify them. You said full Orchestra did this include brass and percussion. Any unusual instruments like piccolos at the top bass-drums Low brass?

As you can tell so much about the period of a piece by the way the orchestra is used, start to identify individual instruments, so for example if you were describing the begining of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony you could talk about the blend between Oboe and Clarinet.

If a piece is sung in Latin it's church music, and things like that!