The IB Contemporary Music

Maker (CMM) is a brand-new addition to the IB Music course, with the first cohort of students around the world submitting their work in March 2023, including five of our students from Year 13 Higher Level Music.

What is it all about?

Will Hyland, Assistant Head of Arts in Senior School, tells us more.

The CMM project involves students collaborating with someone from outside of a musical context or industry and working on a project together. This could involve creating music for a film with a filmmaker, designing music for a dance show with a choreographer or creating music to accompany an art installation with an artist. It is meant to be a non-professional project and many of our students have collaborated with fellow IB students within Year 13.

To introduce the project, students composed music and worked with Kate Edwards, who directed one of Tanglin’s theatre productions The Visit in November 2022. They then attended a two-day workshop at SJI in Singapore and brainstormed with students from several international schools on ideas for their projects.

Year 13 began with students finalising their CMM Project and creating the music with their collaborator. The assessed end product of the project is a 15-minute video documentary that the students create and share with the IB for feedback and grading. This allowed them to incorporate some filmmaking and editing skills within the music course. Students must discuss four areas of their project: the rationale, process, final product, and a reflection of their work.

Curriculum innovation

This project feels like a major innovation in curriculum design and assessment. Collaboration is often discussed at length with students and staff, and is seen as an important skill, but 30% of a student’s IB Music grade will now be based on how effective they are at:

• finding a collaborator

• managing a project

• documenting a project and seeing it through to the end.

Not only are these skills very important in the creative industries, where you may, for example, be composing music on a Monday, performing a concert on a Tuesday, leading a workshop on a Wednesday and collaborating with several people, but with the rise of AI/Chat GPT, these skills such as collaboration and communication may become the more important skills to assess and distinguish between students rather than knowledge recall.

Collaborating across projects

Three of our students have created music for IB Film students, which can be used for their film coursework. This allowed students to share their skills with one another in a similar feel to the professional workplace. One student has created music for an arcade game in conjunction with an IB Computer Science student for their coursework and another student has created music for an IB Art Installation, which will be accessible via headphones during the IB Art Exhibition in Term 3.

The projects went on display in The Institute (Level 11 at the Centenary Building) as part of the Student Research conference that took place in March 2023. Feedback from the students has been excellent. Here are a couple of their positive comments:

“I love being able to apply my music skills, to new concepts such as filmmaking.”

“I feel this project is giving me the skills that universities and employers are looking for, being able to work on a project for several months and stay motivated and be willing to take risks with it.” ■