Rockschool goes classical: RSL Awards Classical Piano

TL: Why would Rockschool create a classical piano syllabus, and why now?

TB-H: We have been planning to do this for around a year. Over the summer lockdown, because we moved into digital exams very quickly, we had so many candidates and teachers who came to us asking to do a classical exam that we made the decision that we would accept classical music repertoire as ‘free choice pieces’ for some of our exams. We put that in process really because we knew that actually, come the autumn, we would be able to offer a full classical approach. The reason we particularly wanted to do it was that we felt that music has changed, and that we needed to adapt to the change in the way that musical learning was happening. Classical music was starting to speak to some of the reasons why Norton originally founded Rockschool in the first place.

NY: The agenda always for RSL Awards has been to give students academic credit for playing the music they love. We have had people from all over the world talking to us about wanting a new approach to classical music. Classical musicians are playing more diverse music now – there are so many different currents of activity going on.

On one level, what we're doing now is to use RSL Classical as a way of enabling classical musicians to have a syllabus with exactly the same academic credit and value to other boards but with music that they know and love. Our syllabus includes some of the most loved classical pieces, because we know that if you love the music you're playing, you'll try harder and you'll work harder. So we are taking that quite populist approach to it. But we were also keen to reflect another part of our history, which is representing diverse communities around the world that play music and compose music. We've been working with the Musicians’ Union on this for some time. We did a lot of research, in the British Library and various other archives, and have found a whole plethora of really brilliant pieces written not by white males.

This has led us to use classical piano as a new benchmark of diversity for all of our future syllabuses. In the future, at least 50 per cent of our syllabuses won't be composed of music by white males. So we're making a change not in terms of our historic practice – we have always wanted to reflect diversity – but we are now systematising it in a new way, to ensure that it happens. Our exams happen all over the world, in China, and Africa and America. This is a global agenda.

TL: How does student choice enter into this?

TB-H: There are ten pieces in each of the Classical Piano grade books, and we also have something called ‘free choice piece criteria’, which means that students can choose to supplement the material we put in the books with pieces that they might be working on outside of their grade study. We pre-benchmark a lot of repertoire, and we publish criteria so that students and teachers can make a choice. If they want to play a piece that isn't in our syllabus, as long as it hits our criteria, they can do that. We offer a free service where we will confirm whether a particular piece will hit the criteria. This also extends to composed pieces. If a student or a student and teacher together have composed a piece, we're not marking them on the composition, we're marking them on their performance skills, but they can use their own pieces.

NY: We don't do lists, so you don't have to choose one tune out of a particular group, and one tune out of another. We want to encourage students to follow their musical interests and enthusiasms. A guitar player might be a blues enthusiast, as opposed to someone who wants to play only funk, and we've applied that principle in the piano syllabus. There are certain classical traditions that can be followed, from Debut up to Grade 8. If you love playing Mozart, you will be able to play Classical era pieces throughout.

TL: What other elements distinguish this syllabus from its rivals from other boards?

TB-H: One of the founding things about RSL Awards is that everything you need in order to do your exam is in one book – the scales, the text, the examples of sight reading – which is a slightly different approach. There are nice walkthroughs and introductions to the pieces as well. Also, with every digital purchase of one of these books, there is a piece of technology built into it called Replay, which is an interactive sheet music player. You can speed up, slow down, loop, transpose, and so on. You can listen to the piece played on a different instrument.

Everything we are doing with this syllabus is built with tech in mind, and we designed the syllabus from the very beginning with digital assessment built in.

TL: What are the benchmarks in terms of progression?

JH: As in our existing piano grades, students prepare key centres grade by grade – one sharp and one flat at Grade 1, two of each at Grade 2, and so forth. There is a little bit more variety in the repertoire, but the technical areas are focused in this way. One thing we have been questioned on is our inclusion of pentatonic scales, which is a unique thing to us. We are really keen on those because they promote a different fingering approach, and this gives more flexibility of technique.

One of the cool elements of our classical syllabus is that we've kept the improvisation test from our contemporary syllabus as an option, for candidates who would like to dabble in improvisation in rock and pop styles. They can opt for this rather than a sight-reading test. The classical syllabus enables candidates to jump across to the contemporary syllabus if they want to, at any stage – and they are free to swap between the two syllabuses as they progress through the grades.

TB-H: In our research we realised that young people don't pigeon-hole themselves as either contemporary or classical any more. The eclecticism of the way in which people listen to music these days, through streaming technology, is completely different to previous generations. Further to this – our assessment criteria allow students to embellish and move away from the written music if they want to interpret a piece in their own particular way. We find this much more in pop music, where's there's more of an expectation of that. But because we use unified assessment criteria across the board – music is music as far as we're concerned – if someone wanted to augment a performance within a particular style, then they can do that, and if it was stylistically appropriate, they would be rewarded.

TL: Would you elaborate on the research that went into ensuring a diverse syllabus?

JH: We outsourced the repertoire selection to various consultants, and a high degree of benchmarking was undertaken throughout. We had a very strong desire to ensure that representation was consistent across the board, so we were looking at female and Black, Asian and ethnic minority composers, in some cases sourcing from some quite unusual places. For example, we included a work by Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, found in a set of sonatas for clavichord that a French musician and historian had unearthed. The manuscript has been untraceable, but they exist in a recording on Spotify, so we transcribed the piece from those recordings. Another composer that we are very excited about is Zenobia Powell Perry and her lovely collection Piano Potpourri, and we managed to track down the published scores in this case. What was wonderful about these was that we found pieces within that collection that aligned perfectly to our technical specifications, for example ‘Orrin and Echo’ at grade 1 is based around a G major pentatonic scale.

TL: What's next? Will there be more classical syllabuses?

NY: There's always lots to do! In the next two years we will expand the classical offering into guitar, strings and woodwind, and between classical piano and the woodwind and string instruments, we will be able to offer classical exams to around 90 per cent of the kids who take ABRSM classical exams. To be honest, this can be done with around five or six classical instruments. The classical offer will cover the majority of learners globally who are playing classical instruments.

We also have very active plans for brass syllabuses coming through next year. There are trumpet, trombone and saxophone syllabuses that we have been planning for a long time, and our digital theory exams are just going live.

The Covid-19 period has been hugely challenging for us, but it has forced us to innovate and it has been hugely productive. Inventing online video exams, as well as the classical exams, has been a brilliant achievement by the team; I'm very proud of them.

For more information, visit www.rslawards.com