"Question 3 is based on the final movement
Con Moto, from Ross Edwards'
Symphony No. 3, "Master Magna" written in 2000..." - was that the one? I managed all of 1/2 a mark for that question... <shudder>! But the essay question "Select
ONE MUSICAL FEATURE from the four listed below and discuss its use in works you have studied from the mandatory topic...
PITCH, DURATION, EXPERIMENTATION, UNITY" - that made the HSC essay question look like it belonged in an English paper or something
Anyway, I diverge from the topic
Maybe there was actually a problem with the discs this year... maybe we can claim misadventure
I know that we ended up having almost 30 minutes to do the essay (and I used every single second!) because the CD kept playing up... I'm nearly certain that we missed the 5th playing - I was ticking them off, "Here is the fourth playing...", then suddenly "here is the sixth and final playing..." - "WHAT THE?!" I can tell you, there were some rather weird facial expressions going around between the two of us students and the two supervisors...
As for "cheating" with perfect pitch... well, sometimes I do feel a bit guilty coz the other person in my class doesn't have it, and she always has problems with melodic dictation and sight-singing, which I usually get full marks on...(well, excepting that FUBAR trial dictation!
) But I don't really have full perfect pitch. I've been accused of it after I managed to recall a piece of music from an exam 6 weeks earlier and sing it at the correct pitch, but really...
I didn't find the essay question too weird, once I made the decision to actually write about a piece that we hadn't actually studied. None of my pieces really fit (in my mind) the question... I was looking more at traditional forms and instrumentation. I ended up using a piece written by a friend and former musicianship teacher, which was a modernised suite for orchestra. Fit quite nicely
Meh, anyway, I'm starting to blabber on again
Cya