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 12

Music across cultures, traditions and time

Students explore how music reflects and communicates cultural, historical and regional identities in ONE chosen context from the list below:

  • Music of a style
  • Music of a region
  • Music of a culture
  • Music of a tradition
  • Music of a religion
  • Music of a historical period.

Students perform, compose, listen, analyse and respond to selected repertoire and its stylistic, expressive and structural characteristics. Students learn to recognise musical features and practices and investigate how these shape meaning and significance. They consider how these features and practices may be reinterpreted or adapted to generate and develop musical ideas. Students apply and adapt conventions with stylistic and expressive awareness to shape personal interpretations in performance.

Performing
  • Refine technical control to perform with fluency

  • Improvise using motifs, rhythmic patterns and harmonic ideas drawn from the selected cultural or historical context

  • Shape a stylistic and personal interpretation using performance techniques, phrasing, articulation and expressive elements

  • Apply composer, performer and audience perspectives to make performance choices that enhance communication, including staging and ensemble configurations

Listening, analysing and responding
  • Analyse musical features that characterise stylistic, cultural or historical traditions

  • Use aural skills to identify and describe tonal centres, harmonic progressions, rhythmic groupings and phrasing

  • Analyse how instrumentation and timbral qualities reflect regional, cultural or historical identities

  • Interpret and analyse Notational language relevant to the selected repertoire

  • Explain the role of Compositional language in maintaining, transforming and reinterpreting musical traditions using appropriate music terminology

  • Explain the role of improvisation in shaping form and expression

  • Compare interpretations of repertoire to evaluate how stylistic and expressive features are shaped by performance choices

Creating and composing
  • Experiment with a range of approaches to shaping musical ideas and expression, including transformation, technological manipulation and collaborative processes

  • Develop and extend musical ideas using Compositional language, structures and materials appropriate to the selected context

  • Evaluate and refine musical ideas to shape stylistic identity, structural coherence and expressive outcomes

  • Document ideas, reflections and refinements as part of the compositional process

Related files