I don't think anyone's posted this anywhere else but if they have - sorry for repeating

So it's just over six weeks until gcses start, which means revision. But for music especially I have absolutely no idea how to revise for it. The edexcel syllabus is completely based around set works, and the exam format is short answer questions on 8 of the 12 set works, and a long answer question on a choice of 2 set works. Revision for the long answer questions is easy enough (notes on each musical element and device etc used in each piece) but for the short answer questions, I have no idea. From the few sample papers I've seen, these questions can be on absolutely anything about the piece, things like identifying playing techniques, instruments playing at different points, how many parts are playing, identifying which section of the piece the extract is taken from, and lots of things which are really hard to pick out by listening to, but it seems unrealistic that we're expected to memorise every single detail of every bar of each piece, especially for the longer pieces like the Mozart Symphony and Rag Desh. Or are we?!
Has anyone got any advice on how to go about successful revision?
Thank you

Hi Ella, I would have said look at lots of past paper, but as it's a new syllabus that might not work. What you could do is have a look at http://www.edexcel.com/quals/gcse/gcse09/m...s/default.aspx#

The Teacher Support Materials link to "At a Glance Teacher's Guide" has quite a lot of info. about the exam and examples of questions and answers.

Also the Specification might be useful to download.

Maybe you could get some pointers from them

Apologies if you already have these documents but I've yet to come across a pupil who has a personal copy of the specification for their exams.

You've seen proper sample papers?! We've not been sent any! My Head of Music's on the warpath...

I'm revising by listening to the tracks a lot, and noting down every time I listen to them, short notes on the Harmony, Dynamics, Tonality, Texture, Instrumentation, Melody and Rhythm (we have a useful mnemonic for these key points - Hello, Dearie, Tell Trevor I'M Ready ). This is mainly to help with the long question, but is useful for key points for short questions too.

I don't think you need to know/memorise everything, especially the Rag Desh - there are so many Indian words in the Anthology, but our teacher compiled a shorter list and said they were unlikely to ask for the others. We've not done the Mozart yet (ridiculously unorganised - too much time spent on composition write up!)

The thing that I've found hardest (it came up in the mock) was saying whether, in the Miles Davis, the instrument was a tenor or alto sax. I know the alto is higher, but because of transposition it sounds lower than it is, and the tenor player also goes quite high. This may be a part of the recording I have to memorise.

Our school got sent some a few weeks ago I think?
I've made notes on all of those things for all the pieces and I'm learning them all pretty much off by heart, we've been doing tests once a week since christmas so they're almost embedded in my brain now. I've got no problem with the long answer questions but the short answer ones on the sample papers seem as if they can be about almost anything!
With identifying instruments, I just learned what's playing when and then I could recognise it as long as I could work out where in the piece the extract was from - does that help?

Sort of - I'm ok with this in other pieces, it's just All Blues where I find it hard to know where the extract comes from.

I'm very impressed with your 'one test a week since Christmas'. When did you finish learning all of the Set Works, was it around then?

Don't you get the anthology in the exam? I think we did, pretty sure it was edexcel too


EDIT: oh actually I think that was A-level

it must have been A-level, as this is a new GCSE and the old syllabus wasn't based on set pieces.

We finished them just in time for the mocks in november yeah, but we went over them all again afterwards, and had the test on the one we'd done that week