IB Music SL Internal Assessment Example

You select three genuinely contrasting works across genre, instrumentation, and historical style, which gives the portfolio a strong sense of range.

Your evidence is purposefully balanced and clearly linked to the practical tasks, especially where the chosen sources directly inform later creative decisions.

You support the selection with scores, annotations, and contextual material, showing that the evidence is chosen for musical relevance rather than convenience.

A few contextual justifications rely too heavily on personal interest or familiarity rather than on the musical and stylistic reasons the works are especially suitable.

Some links between the stimulus and the selected context could be made more analytically explicit to strengthen the logic of the portfolio.

A small amount of the justification could be tightened so that the rationale for selection reads as consistently purposeful rather than occasionally descriptive.

You provide substantial score-based research across all three works, with frequent references to specific musical features and locations in the sources.

You often move beyond listing features and begin to describe musical and extra-musical findings in a way that supports the exploration.

Your research includes several purposeful contextual connections, such as liturgical function, chamber listening, and Varèse’s idea of organized sound.

Some terminology is inconsistent or imprecise, which weakens the authority of the analysis in places.

A few harmonic and textural observations need closer checking against the score, because uncertain or inaccurate labels reduce the reliability of the research.

At points the writing remains descriptive rather than fully explanatory, so the strongest findings are not always developed with equal precision.