Music

Ethos and Aims

Music is for everyone at LVC. Our ambition is to foster a lifelong interest and engagement in music. We aim to create an inspiring learning environment to develop creativity, communication, collaboration and a sense of community. In music classes students perform, listen to, review and evaluate a wide range of music including the works of the great composers and musicians. All our students learn to sing and to use their voices, to create music on their own and with others, to play instruments, to use technology appropriately, so, if they wish, they can progress to the next level of musical excellence. We recognise that the path to excellence in music is highly personalised and that students get inspiration from other musicians and their work. This could be their peers or a previous cohort or from listening to and performing music from great composers and musicians.

Through the depth built into the curriculum, students are empowered with an element of choice so that they can pursue their own interests. For example students who take instrumental lessons regularly bring in their instruments to play in curriculum lessons. Tasks often have an element of choice. For example, students can choose an instrument and in many composition tasks students can choose the style they work in. There is a bank of resources on the classroom wall to support with more independent practical work (e.g. keyboard frames, chord charts). All students know where these are and use them every day.

We believe that creativity requires great discipline and a growing mastery of skills and concepts. So we teach notation and music theory, but sound comes before symbol and we don’t focus on this in isolation. The curriculum map below shows the music theory concepts which are covered in each unit and these concepts are taught in an integrated way through listening, composing and performing. We place importance on developing knowledge and subject specific vocabulary because this helps students to articulate their learning and help them feel like more confident musicians.

At Key Stage 3 LVC follows the music national curriculum. All students in Years 7 and 8 study music for 1 hour a week. At the end of Year 8 students make a choice of which arts subjects they wish to study in further depth. Students in Year 9 receive 3 hours of arts lessons across the 2 week timetable. This offers students the opportunity to deepen their musical knowledge and understanding with challenging projects, before selecting their GCSE options

At Key Stage 4 LVC offers students the OCR (9-1) GCSE Music – J536. The specification can be downloaded from the OCR website: https://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/219378-specification-accredited-gcse-music-j536.pdf.