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Last Updated: 02 Dec 2024

How to join

To take EMP, students from EMP schools must pass the EMP selection exercise at Secondary 2. Learn more about the selection process.

Selection Exercise

Interested Primary 6 students are encouraged to seek admission into EMP schools by selecting them as their top choices. Students must attend and pass the selection exercise conducted by the school at Secondary 2.

The EMP selection exercise requires some experience and competence in:

  • Instrumental performance or singing (for example, learning an instrument in school CCA or school-based Music programme). Student must be able to display basic fluency and sound fundamental techniques.
  • Listening and evaluating music.

Components of the selection exercise are:

Listening Test

Listen to 8–10 short musical extracts, taken from local and global musical traditions, and respond to 25 MCQ questions.

  • Melody (for example, accidentals, articulation, contour, intervals, melodic devices, phrase structure and mood)
  • Tonality (major and minor keys up to 3 sharps and flats, pentatonic mode)
  • Harmony (chords, I, IV, V, vi in Roman numerals in chord symbols)
  • Rhythm (for example, dotted rhythms, syncopations, triplets, rhythmic devices)
  • Time Signature (simple and compound duple, triple and quadruple)
  • Tempo
  • Instrumentation or tone colour (description of tone colours of musical instruments, families of instruments, and how they are played)
  • Texture (for example, call and response, monophony, unison, homophony, polyphony, heterophony), and functions of musical layers
  • Dynamics and Expression (for example, loud/soft, performing decisions)
  • Form or Structure (for example, Binary, Ternary, Rondo, Theme and Variations, 12-Bar Blues, Popular song structures)
  • Notation (Staff notation)
Audition

Perform 2 contrasting solo pieces on an instrument (for example, piano, trumpet, rebab, erhu, sitar) or voice, lasting no longer than 5 minutes in total.
Compositions / Songs (Optional)

Applicants who have composed music could upload their scores and/or recordings as part of their online application.

Interview

Share musical aspirations and interests with a panel of music teachers.

Find out what the programme is and where to take it.