ABRSM and Trinity College London are the two biggest music education bodies that provide Music Grade Exams in the UK. These exam boards offer assessments from Grade 1 \u2013 8, as well as Diploma, Licentiate and Fellowship Certificates.<\/p>\n
It is probably because I have never come across this way of standardizing musicians in other countries I have lived in, I find the concept of Grade exams quite perplexing.
\nThe necessity of preparing three pieces for long enough to be able to eventually play them, or practising scales by heart without understanding their purpose, makes me question the pedagogical value of the system.<\/p>\n
From experience I can say that students who care too much about passing Grade exams are missing the main goal of playing an instrument. They<\/span> are preocupied with collecting<\/span> Certificates for different reasons, but at the end of the day they are not capable of reading repertoire and interpreting any piece that they come across. This is mainly caused by their lack of basic technical skills that have delayed their progress for a long time because they had been too busy practising exam pieces. Not to mention that most of these students get completely bored with playing the same pieces because it takes them so long to learn.<\/p>\n Playing an instrument involves certain meticulous coordination of the brain, either to move a bow \u2013 for string players – or to blow into an instrument \u2013 for wind players. So why is it that important for musicians to get Grade exams done? Wouldn’t it be much more enjoyable to play diverse music and learn without the ‘pressure’ of exams? As a teacher, I give lessons to a variety of students, some of them very interested in doing exams and others prefer to just enjoy playing the clarinet. It is proved to me that students doing Grades tend to develop a very limited understanding of music.<\/p>\n I am aware that some orchestras and secondary schools require a certain ‘Grade standard’ to be able to join them. In this case, it would be more likely that they do auditions to listen to students than actually demand to be shown a Certificate.<\/p>\n In my opinion, the process of learning an instrument would be much more productive if the teacher sets some goals for the student, involving technique but also repertoire from the instrument’s literature. Then, joining an orchestra or ensemble would complement one-to-one lessons, in order to develop performance skills.<\/p>\n Personally, I still get some people asking me questions like ‘How many Grades have you done?’ ‘What Grade are you?’ etc. <\/i>After achieving a Masters level degree in music I can’t help but feeling a bit vexed about people’s definition of a musician.<\/p>\n This article embraces merely my opinion about this subject. I invite you to reflect: what do you consider more relevant, passing Grades or actually knowing how to play an instrument? ABRSM and Trinity College London are the two biggest music education bodies that provide Music Grade Exams in the UK. These exam boards offer assessments from Grade 1 \u2013 8, as well as Diploma, Licentiate and Fellowship Certificates. It is probably because I have never come across this way of standardizing musicians in other countries […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":555,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[12,75,81,170,171,172,173,174,175,176,231,270,314,315],"class_list":["post-327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","category-pedagogy","tag-abrsm","tag-clarinet-exams","tag-clarinet-grades","tag-grade-1-clarinet","tag-grade-2-clarinet","tag-grade-3-clarinet","tag-grade-4-clarinet","tag-grade-5-clarinet","tag-grade-6-clarinet","tag-grade-exams","tag-music-grade-exams","tag-preparing-clarinet-exams","tag-trinity-college","tag-trinity-college-london"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mariclari.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mariclari.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mariclari.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mariclari.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mariclari.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mariclari.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mariclari.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mariclari.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mariclari.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mariclari.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIf we focus on a wind instrument such as the clarinet we can notice that basic concepts like breathing, blowing, embouchure, posture and articulation – among others – must be under control before getting into high standards of performance.<\/p>\n
\nThe clarinet (or any other instrument’s) literature is extremely wide. Let’s try to acquaint ourselves with as much of it as we possibly can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"