Out now, Rock Your GCSE Music, bought to you by Rhinegold Education in association with Rockschool, is a set of easy-to-follow resources specifically designed to help you get the most out of your GCSE Music course and achieve your full potential in the exam. This brand new series provides eight complete half-term projects, which support theory, performance, composition, and listening, all through the medium of great music.
Rock Your GCSE Music consists of eight performing projects plus activities for listening, appraising and composing. The featured songs cover fifty years of rock classics and a wide variety of styles. They enable students to explore the language of music and different music techniques while encouraging the use of this knowledge in their own compositions. The featured tracks are: Jailhouse Rock, We Can Work It Out, Clocks, Lean On Me, Ruby, Live And Let Die, Rolling In The Deep and No Woman, No Cry.
Consisting of three distinct books, the Student Handbook, the Teacher’s Book and Ensemble Pieces, Rock Your GCSE Music is aimed at the performing element of the GCSE course and can be used with any exam board., as well as being a valuable resource for BTEC projects. The series editor is the widely respected Andrew S. Coxon, a senior GCSE music examiner with over forty years’ music education experience.
The Student Handbook provides fascinating background and context to the songs and artists, plus expert tips and advice on how to perform the songs both individually and in groups. The Teacher’s Book provides detailed lesson plans, composition and listening activities, and includes specially-composed music for aural training. The Ensemble Pieces book presents the full band scores and comes with two CD-ROMs containing all the individual parts (including tab for guitarists) and high-quality backing tracks with minus-one options – ideal for students to practise and perform with. The CD-ROMs also include additional parts for other instruments – flute, trumpet, clarinet, saxophone and keyboard – offering you the flexibility to tailor the pieces to your group.
Rockschool’s CEO commented: We are delighted to have collaborated with Rhinegold on this series of innovative books. Teachers and young rock and pop musicians can use these materials with great confidence in their exams. Andrew Coxon’s lesson plans are a model of their kind and the songs are great to perform, particularly in groups.
Rockschool provided consultancy for the project during concept development, collaborating with Rhinegold’s Managing Editor Emma Cooper and advised on the content for the Student Handbook as well as the supplementary online content. Music teacher Liz Olner commented that Rock Your GCSE Music is “a very impressive – and much needed – series!”
Rockschool staff have also recently worked with Rhinegold on their GCSE Performance Pieces series, which provides repertoire for students’ individual GCSE Music performance exams. Executive Director Jeremy Ward compiled the Piano repertoire book and the Chief Examiners for Music (Noam Lederman) and Performing Arts (Alison Pyne) worked on Drum and Voice books, respectively. Senior examiner Brian Ashworth compiled the Guitar book, while our bass specialist Stuart Clayton, compiled the Bass book.
For further information and to purchase the books please go to www.musicroom.com/se/id_no/01061888/details.html
Rockschool’s new (2012) Guitar, Bass and Drum syllabus is also available from www.musicroom.com/Rockschool and all good music shops.
