Well folks, I worked out the mystery today after being led on a bit of a wild goose chase with Exercise 8 in the Level 1 Violin Technical Work Book.
My edition of the Technical Work Book is the 2001 publication. With each grade I have going through, I make sure I know the technical work inside out and back to front, as I need to be able to teach it to my students. I learned the technical work book in the 1995 Technical Work Book, which is why I personally haven’t sat examinations with the 2001 book.
Exercise 8 in the 2001 edition I had looked A-Okay to me, until I tee’d it up with the choices in the AMEB Manual of Syllabuses. It says:-
Prepare (a), (b) and (c) each with a different bowing. Candiate to choose strings
(a) and (b) examiner to choose Major or Minor
N.B Omit bar 5 from (a), (b) and (c) for examination performance.
It was the “note” that got me. Why on earth would you omit bar 5? 3 out of the 4 of my students currently studying this grade have the same Technical Work Book as me, but it only occurred to me today glancing at my 4th student’s book that perhaps their edition may be later, as they had only just purchased it. Turns out that there are two versions of the 2001 edition. One has (in (a) the first 5 notes ascending then descending commencing on E Flat up to B Flat. The edition the AMEB are talking about with the error has 5 notes ascending, then the top note repeated, then descending again. If you have the edition with the repeated notes at the top, don’t play them. If you have the same edition as me, with no repeated top note, just ignore the N.B found in the Manual of Syllabuses.
And all this time I thought the AMEB office were COMPLETELY bonkers!
Thought I’d post this up just in case any other teachers had the same Technical Work Book as me and were as baffled by the instructions in the Manual of Syllabuses too.
