Performance or Composition Project: Realising and Documenting the Work
What the project demands
Whether you perform or compose, the project is assessed on the realisation of an artistic intention and on your documentation of the process. Understand the three strands: intention (what you set out to communicate), development (how the work evolved through rehearsal, drafting, feedback and revision), and evaluation (a candid judgement of the outcome against the intention).
Concepts to command
- Interpretive decisions: tempo, articulation, dynamics, ornamentation, balance, tone colour.
- Stylistic fidelity: idiomatic phrasing, period conventions, genre-appropriate timbre.
- Compositional craft: motivic development, harmonic function, texture, form, instrumentation, register.
- Process evidence: rehearsal logs, annotated scores, drafts, recordings, feedback records.
- Reflective evaluation: specific, evidence-based, honest about weaknesses.
Traps in questions
A common trap is confusing effort with achievement: a log full of hours rehearsed says nothing about musical decisions. Another is describing the piece or performance without evaluating it. Questions may ask you to justify an interpretive choice; answer with musical reasoning ("I took the second subject slower to expose the chromatic inner voice"), not personal preference alone. In composition prompts, watch for the requirement to demonstrate development of material rather than a string of unrelated ideas. Also be alert to questions about audience and context: a work's effect depends on performance setting, and examiners reward awareness of this.
Worked example and rule of thumb
Suppose you arrange a folk melody for string quartet. A weak annotation says "I added harmony." A strong one says: "I harmonised the melody in parallel thirds in the violins, then broke the pattern at bar 17 with a pedal in the cello to mark the textual shift from lament to resolve." The rule of thumb: every process entry should name a decision, its musical reason, and its effect. If an entry lacks one of the three, revise it.