Skip to content

A NSW Government website

Welcome to the NSW Curriculum website

NSW Curriculum
NSW Education Standards Authority

11–12Music 1 11–12 Syllabus (2025)

Implementation from 2027
Expand for detailed implementation advice

Content

Year 11

Music in focus

Students perform, compose, listen, analyse and respond to music from a style, composer, genre, cultural tradition, performance practice or compositional approach. Through the study of selected repertoire students learn about the ways musical techniques, structures and expressive devices communicate meaning. They apply listening, analytical, creative and performance skills to examine how musical ideas are constructed and conveyed, engaging with context, technique and expression.

Performing
  • Use vocal or instrumental techniques that reflect the stylistic and expressive features of the selected musical style, tradition or practice

  • Explore and expand on musical material relevant to the selected repertoire

  • Make interpretative decisions informed by stylistic analysis, performance directions and contextual understanding

  • Adjust performance approaches through analysis of recordings, reflection and feedback

Listening, analysing and responding
  • Analyse musical features and stylistic conventions in selected repertoire

  • Use aural skills to identify melodic, harmonic, tonal, metric and rhythmic features

  • Interpret Notational language relevant to the selected repertoire

  • Examine how technologies, context and performance media influence stylistic development and musical meaning

  • Evaluate treatments of musical material including the ways expressive devices and interpretative practices shape, characterise and inform meaning

  • Justify observations and interpretative insights

Creating and composing
  • Create original material or arrange existing repertoire

  • Generate and refine musical ideas using improvisation and experimentation

  • Document ideas as part of the compositional process

Related files