Creating: Composition or Arranging
Creating asks you to compose or arrange a piece that realises a stated intention, submitted with a recording, a score or lead sheet, and a short written rationale. It is internally assessed and externally moderated. The examiner looks for craft: a clear idea, developed and scored idiomatically, not a loop repeated for three minutes.
Rules that shape the piece
- State a intention: stimulus, intended performers, audience or occasion. The music must audibly fulfil it.
- Develop material: sequence, inversion, augmentation, diminution, fragmentation, re-harmonisation, textural change.
- Plan the structure and harmony before writing: a harmonic scheme, a rhythmic identity, a climax and a close.
- Write idiomatically for the chosen forces; respect range, breathing, bowing and hand span.
- Arranging means transformation - new instrumentation, metre, texture, harmony or style - with the source credited. A transcription is not an arrangement.
- Notation: legible score with clefs, key and time signatures, tempo and dynamic markings. DAW-based work still needs a score and an audible balance between parts.
Worked example
A three-minute piano trio built on a four-note folk motif. Reasoning: the motif is stated by the violin, sequenced up a step by the piano, inverted in the cello, then augmented to close the work; harmony moves i–VI–III–VII, with the texture thinning at the climax so the final statement is bare. The rationale explains how this development embodies the intention of “transformation of a borrowed tune”, so the written statement and the recording agree.
Traps
- A rationale claiming an intention the music does not deliver.
- Ostinato repetition with no transformation.
- Unplayable or unidiomatic writing for the forces.
- A score with missing clefs, key signatures or performance directions.
- A flat MIDI rendering with no dynamic shaping.
- Submitting a transcription and calling it an arrangement.