Reaction to 2025 Leaving Certificate Music (Higher Level) by Ciara Coleman, Music teacher at The Institute of Education.
- The inclusion of Irish artists in the listening section will be nicely familiar but the questions were challenging.
This paper rewarded students who had worked hard to get to get to grips with the key musical themes and features of their set works, while also challenging them to perhaps listen more deeply to certain elements they may not have considered before. The questions on set works were nicely spread across the full work in most cases, rather than honing in on one particular section alone.
Question 1 (which carries the most weight) was on Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. This question gave students ample opportunity to show what they had learnt across the entire work, with the Introduction, Exposition and Recapitulation all featured. Questions on theme, section and cadence identification will all have been expected, while the dictation tested their knowledge of the famous Love Theme as it appears in the Recapitulation. The question on Gerald Barry’s Piano Quartet No 1 was very manageable where students were asked to identify instruments, time signatures and composition techniques across the B1 and C5 sections. Students who had focused on these basic musical elements in their study would have picked up marks easily enough here.
Question 3 introduces a peculiar twist on conventional question that might have caught an incautious student. In contrast to previous years where students had to identify a specific chord progression, students had to tick a box to indicate where the chord change had occurred in Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. While this was a good test of listening skills, some students may have attempted to fill the boxes with chords rather than simply ticking the box as required since this would be a moral typical task in this context.
Question 4 featured Movement 1 of Bach’s Jesu der du meine Seele with a focus on features of Baroque music, order of polyphonic vocal entry, and a nice opportunity to explain a Tierce de Picardie. There were no surprises here. The Irish music question tested student knowledge of sean nós, slip jigs and fusion, with the question on form analysis encouraging students to listen on a deeper level to the music being played. There was a good choice of topics on the essay question and most students should have been able to find one topic to focus on from their study.
Interestingly, the unprepared aural skills question had an exclusively Irish focus, with Hozier, The Cranberries, Dermot Kennedy and Cian Ducrot all featured. While students will certainly have appreciated the familiarity of songs like Cherry Wine and Linger, they had to work hard for their marks here, with some challenging questions on metre, texture, and accompaniment.
After a short break the students return to the exam centre for the composition paper. While there six questions to choose from the majority of students will have opted for Question 1 and Question 5 on this paper and at first glance, there will have been sighs of relief, since both questions were written in a major tonality. Question 1 featured a melody in G major and 4/4 time with a relatively straightforward two quaver anacrusis. The challenge here was to recognise the unique features embedded in the given opening and to develop these in subsequent phrases. In this case, in addition to the anacrusis, students needed to recognise the use of features such as syncopation, the range of an 11th, and the use of repeated notes, among others.
Question 5 requires students to provide backing chords and a bass line to a given tune. Students will have been happy with the manageable key of D major, and they will also have been relieved that the cadences were easy to spot. Some students will have been challenged by the use of a compound time signature (6/8) since these have been less common for this question in recent years. The given bass line, while reassuringly triadic, was somewhat disjointed in places, which again may have caused initial concern for some students. However, students will have picked up the majority of their marks for choosing appropriate chords and progressions, as well as inserting correct bass notes for each chord, and regular practice of these types of questions will have paid off here.
Students will definitely feel that there was enough novel on this paper that they will have been pushed to adapt – that not everything feel neatly into their comfort zones. But there was an abundance of good clear opportunities to earn marks and display understanding that it will definitely feel like a positive resolution to their senior cycle.