Fine, but - having thought about my earlier message a bit more - I actually don't see why it should be difficult to tell GCSE students that they need to learn notation, but that they also need to be aware that some (indeed possibly most, depending on the range of the curriculum) of the music that's being presented to them in that notation was originally either notated differently or not at all.

Indeed, exam questions could be framed in such a way that some of the marks are gained for 'demonstrating such an awareness' (to adopt National Curriculum-type phrasing).

I wasn't taught anything about musical traditions from other parts of the world (except Bartok and Kodaly's folksong-collecting expeditions) until I left school and went to university, but I did as a teenager read and play a lot of pop/rock music notated as melody plus very-approximate-two-hands-piano-rendering of the guitar and bass parts - sometimes with tablature symbols above the stave too, which I largely ignored because I thought about everything very pianistically at that age. I think it would have been beneficial if someone had set me off thinking critically about how what I was seeing actually related to 'the real music'. I did in the end begin to work this out for myself, but without wishing to sound immodest I doubt that every child my age would have done so without some prompting by a teacher.

Maybe the answer is to follow the example set in the sphere of "classical" languages?   There are exams specifically titled "Latin" and "Classical Greek" for those able and keen to get to grips with them...  and another one called "Classical Literature in Translation" for those interested in the culture of ancient civilisations and the ideas behind that culture...  not necessarily requiring an ability to read the literature in the original.

Obviously the exact titles of exams are slightly "loaded" vocabulary...  but you could have "Music" (ie includes notating it), and "Music Appreciation" (no knowledge of notation needed).  This would, in any case, reflect the forked road currently lying ahead of those keen to go to tertiary level.  Quite a few of my classmates on a Univ BMus course - whilst they could produce fine essays about Adorno, Burney, or Nietzsche - had the greatest difficulty harmonising a German chorale melody, and taking down a piece of 4-part harmony in dictation sent them into tailspin. However, they got through the obligatory "Practical Music" module on the performance of something or other for which they'd practiced assiduously.  (Helping-out with Harmony homework was "a very good way to meet girls", and even the most dedicated proponents of Boulez suddenly found an aptitude for Riemenschneider with this ulterior motive in mind).

However, I was quite the opposite... although "Complete This Opening Of A Scarlatti Sonata in 32 bars..." gave me no problems at all, no amount of practicing would ever see me acceptably through a Beethoven Sonata.  I looked up at the double-bar line during the exam to see Erik Levi banging his head on the desk  "If we give you a pass, will you agree not to play the rest of it?"

It's a rather moot point whether an ability with notation should get you a GCSE in Music if you can't actually make any music yourself?  The crumhorn may be all very well,  but no-one ever asks you to bring it to parties.

Actually, Reiner, I've suddenly remembered that when I started secondary school the AHRB examining board did indeed have two different GCSEs almost exactly as you describe: Music (which included performance, aural tests, score study etc. etc.) and History & Appreciation of Music (for which I actually don't think you had to be able to read music, although this hadn't really occurred to me at the time since I already could read music by then).

I don't know whether some schools did the 'H&A' qualification instead of the 'Music' one; my own school offered History & Appreciation as an optional extra before starting on the GCSE courses, so that I in fact took the History & Appreciation GCSE at the end of my third year, aged 14, and then started the two-year teaching course which led to my main Music GCSE.

Thanks, I should have known that I dare say. This brings up another question: if notation is going to be taught in schools, should this (where feasible) be principally through the medium of notation software (and its convenient ability to play back the music thus notated) or not?

That is what I would intuitively have thought, although for me it's hard to decide, given that we're probably in transition between a culture which locates "principles" in the kind of way you demonstrate with the 2p coin and one where the computer is more "basic" than a pencil and paper, a "post-literate" kind of culture or whatever one wants to call it. But we're always in transition between one kind of culture and another (or between one kind and many kinds), and the principles of education are thus almost by definition going to be one step behind, are going in other words to be "conservative" in the sense of promulgating the previous generation's values.

er, I'm not sure where I'm going with this thought so I'll leave it at that for now.

Sibelius performs the same feat as Finale, and to return for a moment to my own difficulties with reading notation, it has certainly come on leaps and bounds since I've been using the programme - it's probably worth mentioning that I what brain I possess was never particularly well-wired for mathematics, either. 

I'm not sure where you're going with that thought either (I admit I've had a similar thought several times myself - and indeed have been doing since I first read any Hegel at the age of 17 - but I'm somehow surprised to hear it coming from you).

You did say something along similar lines earlier in the thread, which also made me raise my eyebrows without entirely disagreeing:

Both thoughts seem to be suggesting that there is some sort of ideal of a creative present unbeholden to the established canons of earlier generations, but that it's in the nature of education to take one back to the latter.

Because you're normally more of an idealist than that?