June 04 2019
Rivers hosts ABRSM Music Exams
This week 46 music students, amongst whom 30 Rivers students, take their ABRSM Music Exams at Rivers International School. Rivers is one of two locations in The Netherlands to offer this opportunity. The other exam location is in The Hague.
ABRSM is the UK’s largest music education body, one of its largest music publishers and the world’s leading provider of music exams, holding over 650,000 assessments in more than 90 countries every year. Their exams and the related lesson plans are aimed at encouraging and stimulating all-round musicianship, focussing on a range of interlocking skills – performance, technique, notation, and listening and musical perception – as well as knowledge, understanding and creativity.*
Teacher Simon de Jong, in charge of Music at Rivers, sees that the ABRSM exams motivate the students, and their parents, to go that extra mile and study harder. “More than in The Netherlands, the Anglo-Saxon world has a tradition of music exams and competitions. The exam results can eventually even count as credits in higher education.”
Both exams and lesson plans from the ABRSM are used worldwide. Similar exams take place all over the world and are all examined by accredited examiners using the same criteria. De Jong: “There are a few students from New Zealand that take there exams here now. When they go back to New Zealand in a couple of years they can easily continue their music education there using the same method. This global system reinforces the idea of music as a universal language.”
