Music

Trust Curriculum Intent

Our mission is to provide a cradle to career education that allows our children to enjoy lives of choice and opportunity. By the age of 18, we want every child to have the option of university or a high quality alternative. 

Subject Curriculum Intent

Music at Brigshaw seeks to achieve a lifelong love for music and performance in our pupils.  When they leave us they understand and appreciate the beauty of music.  Our diverse and exciting curriculum explores the fundamental elements of music, allowing students to perform, compose and appraise music from a range of musical stimuli, chosen from across the musical canon and beyond.  

Students have the opportunity to engage with a variety of musical instruments, including the keyboard, guitar, drums and voice.  We challenge them to learn graded pieces, using both treble and bass clefs and they then go on to compose their own music using improvisation as a way to spark their imagination.  Music technology also plays an important role in the creative process. Our students learn how to use a Digital Audio Workstation, acquiring a new set of skills that is vital in this ever-increasing and changing digital music market. Finally, with encouragement, guidance and expert modelling, the students will go on to perform their work to others. From this they learn the gift of sharing music; something pupils at Brigshaw regularly enjoy and take part in.  We believe that music is for all, and inclusive teaching builds success into every lesson for all pupils whatever their musical aptitude. 

Curriculum Principles

• Reverse Planning in Music has shaped the curriculum journey that  our students undertake so that they experience a breadth of musical opportunities forging a lifelong appreciation of music, whether as a performer, composer or music theorist. These key musical pathways are embodied within the GCSE and A Level specifications and our students develop these strands in Year 7 continuing right through to Year 13.
• Powerful Knowledge is cultivated in music by giving the students the tools to appreciate how music is created and to reflect on how the musical elements can be used to great effect. In turn students can then begin to explore how music, in certain contexts, has the power to make social statements, question political landscapes and break down cultural barriers. For example our year 8 students explore the origins of blues music and how musicians overcame inequality by expressing themselves through music.
• Cultural Capital is an important part of the music curriculum as our students learn to appreciate, through regular performance experiences, the expectations of an audience member. They know how to conduct themselves at a live performance and how to listen intently to a recorded piece of music. Our students experience music from across different times and cultures, from Saint-Saint to Adele. A carefully selected repertoire gives each student a rich cultural experience that will spark an interest in the unfamiliar. 
• Substantive (“Know That”) knowledge happens through the sharing of expert knowledge and regular retrieval and discussion, to ensure that our students use music vocabulary to appraise music. Students are taught the main aspects of music theory so that they know that music notation is an important part of how music is recorded and shared with others. As the music curriculum explores music from across different genres and styles our students can acknowledge the identifiable features that are distinct to each.     
• Procedural and Disciplinary (“Know How”) Knowledge  takes place through the regular practice of an instrument, they know how to read music notation so that they can play a piece of music. The students know how to analyse a piece of music so that they can make interesting and thoughtful comments on the composition of the piece. As the students grow in confidence of their own musical ability they know how to use the key elements of music to create their own compositions.
• Cognitive Psychology is developed in practical music lessons through the use of clear, scaffolded tasks that depend upon expert modelling. Students are then taught how to practise effectively with the main strategies of repetition, chunking down, duet playing and whole class practice being used. Repertoire is carefully selected so that the difficulty of the pieces is gradually increased, building upon knowledge retrieval from earlier performances. Music theory is explored by looking at the same musical strands across each unit of work so that key musical knowledge and terms are referred to again and again.  

What will this look like at implementation?

Please use the links above to explore how our curriculum looks, for each year group, as a result of these guiding principles

How can you support students’ learning from home?

• When listening to a piece of music ask key questions such as what instruments can you hear playing? Is this a fast or slow piece? What style of music do you think this is?
• If you can take them to a live concert, or watch a recording of a live performance and encourage discussions about the music. 
• Talk to them about your favourite music styles or musicians - even play them some!
• Explore a new genre of music together, listen to something you have less experience of such as jazz or minimalism.

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