How to pass ABRSM Music Theory Grade 5

Claire Furney

• 4 min read
How to pass ABRSM Music Theory Grade 5
Photo by blocks / Unsplash

After starting up piano lessons again (adult returner), it felt important to start getting up to speed with some basic music theory. I started to go through a course but soon got bored and didn't finish it. A few months ago, I started again, and somehow found a motivating path through what can be pretty dry, hence a note here of what worked for me.

TL;DR

  1. The basics: OU An Introduction to Music Theory
  2. The 'fundamentals': University of Edinburgh: The Fundamentals of Music Theory
  3. ABRSM / Trinity specific: mymusictheory.com - free content, all grades starting from Grade 1 (each grade builds on knowledge from the previous grades)
  4. Online practice exams (again all grades, starting from Grade 1) and past papers (most recent book of 4 tests is enough, this time just for Grade 5).

Step 1 Italian terms

I'd been asked by my piano teacher one too many times what an Italian term meant and hadn't known - dolce, leggiero, adagio (is that the fast or slow one - too many tempo terms beginning with 'a'). I took one of the books I was playing from - Clementi Op 36 - and wrote down and looked up every Italian term I could find. This led to the discovery of the Naxos online music site including dictionary complete with music samples to demonstrate each term.

I was initially planning to stop there, can't remember now what triggered a continuation, however ...

Step 2 Short introductory course

I stumbled up an Open University course - An introduction to music theory. This was a great course - covered off all the basics but short enough to finish within a week before momentum dwindled.

Step 3 Short book

I found a book in the library - The Little Book of Music Theory. It was readable, covered similar ground to the OU course, but with a few differences. It was useful to solidify some of the concepts.

Step 4 ABRSM Discovering Music

About this time, I got some of the ABRSM Grade workbooks and started working my way through from Grade 1. It was useful to start trying to answer questions rather than just reading and thinking I was understanding.

Step 5 THE BEST "Fundamentals" Course

I haven't actually finished this course yet, but it is fantastic. It is The Fundamentals of Music Theory from the University of Edinburgh. As they say in the introduction: it is fundamental, but not basic in any way, these are difficult concepts; it is about music, but only a subset of western classical music from around 1600 to 1900; and even though it is "theory", there is nothing particularly scientific about these concepts.

Its mainly video based, within the first few videos they talk about different musical modes and play some examples on different instruments - so refreshing to start at a different place to the other books / courses so far. Before you know it you are knee deep in some fairly head wrenching stuff. I'm very glad I had a basic understanding first and that I hadn't launched straight into this one. As they say, you often need to hear different explanations of the same concept until one rings true for you and makes sense. But there was so much that suddenly started making more sense as I made my way through it.

They also link off to some cool extra videos e.g. The Orchestra of Enlightenment on The Harmonic Series.

Step 6 Craft docs

You definitely need to be making some notes. Some of mine:

Step 7 mymusictheory.com

This site basically became my bible for learning all about what I'd need to know specifically for the ABRSM exam. There is a comprehensive "what level am I" test which is very useful. There are various paid resources, but there are also A LOT of free pages - with an index for each grade, again perfect bite-sized chunks of text with examples, and exercises for each concept. I initially started with Grade 4, but eventually went back to Grade 3 and then all the way to Grade 1 and back up through everything (some twice now) up to Grade 5.

Yet again, despite multiple courses covering similar content, Victoria answered several questions I hadn't got to the bottom of previously. I'll definitely be turning to some of the paid content if I carry on with more theory after getting this one out of the way.

Step 8 Anki SRS

I realised there are quite a few Italian, French and German terms which could easily come up on the paper, but which I didn't know, so downloaded a deck (or this one) into Anki, supplemented with any extra I came across and just drilled the ones I didn't know in.

Step 9 ABRSM online mock tests and past papers

As I went through the ABRSM workbooks, and latterly the mymusictheory.com content, I did the online mock exams on the ABRSM website. These are essential. They are EXACTLY the same format as the ones in the real exam. I also bought 2 books of past papers - 2023 and 2022 for Grade 5, but actually 1 book (4 papers) was enough. Every mock test, I'm getting only two or three wrong usually silly mistakes and occasionally I misunderstood the question, which is why doing a handful of the mock papers is absolutely necessary.

Step 10 The exam

See: Taking an online ABRSM Music Theory Exam

Honourable mentions

  • piano lit
  • all stars orchestral instruments
  • ABRSM app
  • Figured base YT