Our Performing Arts program inspires creativity, confidence, and collaboration through music and drama. From Years 8 to 12, students can explore their passions through electives like Unleash Your Sound, Compose Your Future, Character Lab, and Exploring Drama. In the senior years, pathways include VCE Music, VCE Drama, VET options, and the VCE Vocational Major, providing opportunities for students to refine their skills and pursue their artistic aspirations.
Learn more about pathways and post-school options here.
Compose Your Future is a project-based music class where you choose the direction of your learning, grounded in the Elements of Music. Whether you're passionate about performing, composing or analysing music, you'll develop the skills needed to create a final project that reflects your interests and goals.
Throughout the course, you will research your chosen focus and complete a music theory and aural assessment to demonstrate growth in the foundational skills that support all musicians. Your final summative assessment will showcase your learning in your chosen pathway. You may perform work, present a recorded or digital composition, or complete an in-depth analysis of a piece of music. By the end of the course, you will have created a project that represents your musical strengths and future aspirations. By the end of this course, you will be well suited to take VCE Music or I.B. Music, depending on your focus.
Music Makers is a hands-on, low-stakes music class centred on creativity, curiosity and exploration.
This is your opportunity to experiment and explore different ways of making music, whether that's performing, developing your skills on an instrument, singing, creating digital music or learning music production. You can work independently or collaborate with others as you discover new interests and make music out of them. Your final summative assessment will be a presentation of your musical journey. This could take the form of a live performance, a digital music project, a creative work or a presentation that shares what you've explored, created and learned. The focus is on play, experimentation and celebrating your development as a musician.
Scope
VCE Music is based on active engagement in all aspects of music. Students develop and refine musicianship skills and knowledge and develop a critical awareness of their relationship with music as listeners, performers, creators and music makers. Students explore, reflect on and respond to the music they listen to, create and perform. They analyse and evaluate live and recorded performances, and learn to incorporate, adapt and interpret musical practices from diverse cultures, times and locations into their own learning about music as both a social and cultural practice. Students study and practise ways of effectively communicating and expressing musical ideas to an audience as performers and composers and respond to musical works as an audience. The developed knowledge and skills provide a practical foundation for students to compose, arrange, interpret, reimagine, improvise, recreate and critique music in an informed manner. In this study students are offered a range of pathways that acknowledge and support a variety of student backgrounds and music learning contexts, including formal and informal.
Rationale
Music is a unique and abstract aural art form that reflects and expresses human experience across all cultures. It fosters imagination, emotion, and intellectual exploration, while helping students understand continuity, change, and cultural context. Through active participation, students develop musicianship and explore how music connects with other art forms, technology, and fields of endeavour.
Performance: Students develop practical music skills by singing or playing in solo and ensemble settings, using musical elements to express meaning and emotion.
Creating: Students compose and arrange original music by experimenting with sound and exploring musical ideas.
Responding: Students analyse and interpret music from various styles and cultures, gaining insight into how music is structured and shaped by context and intention.
Resources
Please note some resources on this website may only be accessible via your Preshil Gmail account due to subscription restrictions.