Trimester 3 Study Guide

What to review

This section tests your ability to work with musical information quickly and accurately — no ambiguity in the answers, just whether you know your stuff or you don’t. Review:

• Scale structure — degree names and numbers in major and minor; modes and their relationship to parent major scales; the difference between relative and parallel
• Chord function and secondary harmony — identifying diatonic chords by function and writing the dominant seventh chord that resolves to any of them, in lead-sheet symbols
• Voice motion — all four types, and the distinction between the ones that are errors and the ones that aren’t
• Cadences — the progressions, the names, and what each one does to the listener’s sense of closure
• Voice leading — the rules that governed SATB writing, what problems they were designed to prevent, and how to identify and fix a violation

How to study it

These aren’t concepts to memorize — they’re skills to practice. The difference: if you need to look something up to answer, you don’t know it yet.

What to review

Three written responses, each asking you to make an argument about Romantic music using your investigation as evidence. Review the following areas — not as a list of facts, but as things you can actually talk about:

• Romantic harmonic language — the techniques composers used to go beyond the diatonic system, what each one sounds like, and what it does expressively that purely diatonic writing cannot
• Sound as expression — how register, timbre, texture, dynamics, tempo, articulation, and rubato shape meaning in Romantic music; what the composer writes and what the performer decides
• Romantic vs. Classical — what Romantic composers rejected, complicated, or expanded from the Classical tradition, and why; what values drove those choices

How to study it

Your investigation is your evidence for all three responses. Before the exam, know your piece well enough to describe a specific passage — not the piece in general — using precise musical vocabulary.

What to review

• Acoustic principles and Western harmony — how physics relates to the way tonal music developed; how Romantic composers worked within and against that tradition
• The history of dissonance — the rules about which intervals and motions were avoided in Western counterpoint, the reasoning behind them, and how that tradition evolved over time
• Stereo recording — what a stereo waveform shows, how microphone placement affects what you hear in each channel, and how to read an imbalance

What this asks

A longer written response — 8 to 12 sentences — looking back across the whole year, not just this term. You’ll use the IB Areas of Inquiry as a lens.

• AOI 1 — Music for sociocultural and political expression
• AOI 2 — Music as a listening experience
• AOI 3 — Music for entertainment and recreation
• AOI 4 — Music technology

How to study it

The prompt asks you to reflect on your development as a musician and as a DP Music student. Responses that earn high marks are grounded in specific work you actually did — pieces, recordings, arrangements, analyses, performances — and use musical vocabulary precisely.

What to review

Twelve terms drawn from across all three trimesters — harmony, rhythm, texture, historical practice, and technology. One point each.

The terms come from concepts we’ve used throughout the year: how music is organized harmonically, how it moves in time, how it’s structured across voices, how historical and non-Western traditions organize pitch differently, and how recordings capture sound.

How to study it

Don’t memorize definitions. If you can only recite a phrase you looked up, that’s not understanding — and a regurgitated definition earns less than one that’s clearly in your own words.