Musical Links Investigations (teachers)

Greetings DP Music colleagues!
I return to you after a wonderfully intense May 2014 exam session. I have just finished moderating Musical Links Investigations and would like to share my insights with you. The focus of this post will be the Musical Links Investigation. Pragmatically, this post will better serve southern hemisphere teachers, but there is also benefit for all DP Music teachers.

I would like to strongly encourage teachers to focus on musical analysis (as opposed to musical description) and encouraging candidates to fully explore their selected media in their investigations.

Musical Analysis
Candidates need to quickly move beyond describing the musical events that occur in the selected pieces and into actual analysis. This analysis is easily facilitated if candidates analyse the music through their links, as opposed to discussing the two (or more) pieces individually and then addressing the links.
If a link was ‘melodic construction’, candidates should simultaneously present specific melodic examples (ideally notated music) from piece one and piece two and would analyse the two examples using specific musical terminology (e.g., discussing the usage of minor third intervals, inversions of themes, etc.).

Selected Media
Candidates should fully develop their selected media. It is not enough for a candidate to take an essay and insert the contents of the essay into a Powerpoint/Keynote presentation, website, or print article format. The selected format should be fully explored. If a candidate decides to make a children’s storybook, there should be illustrations. If a candidate decides to make a website, the site should be more than just text on different webpages. A website should links to the songs, links to other websites, etc.

Have a great June!