Source A: Again

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

The first word I heard at the orchestra rehearsal was “Again.” The conductor said it without anger, raised her hands and brought the same eight bars back into the room.

I had gone to collect my cousin and expected to wait through something resembling a concert. I thought the music would arrive ready-made, perhaps with an occasional wrong note. Instead, the hall gave me scraps: three seconds of strings, a solitary drumbeat, silence, then “Again.” Coats were folded across chair backs. Water bottles stood between music stands. Nothing looked finished.

After the fifth attempt, I checked the clock. After the seventh, I decided that repetition was proof that nothing was improving. The students seemed trapped inside the same short passage, pushing at it without moving forwards.

Then I began to notice what changed. A violinist rubbed her thumb before placing it differently on the bow. A clarinettist circled a note in pencil. The percussionist lifted his mallet but did not strike, leaving a space where there had previously been a heavy thump. These were small adjustments, almost invisible from my chair, but the players watched one another closely.

On the ninth attempt, the same passage had acquired edges. The lower instruments no longer hurried after the violins. The brass softened, and the missing drumbeat created a brief, expectant pause. Nothing dramatic had been added. The musicians had removed the parts that prevented the music from holding together.

A violin produced a sudden squeak. The player winced, marked the page and prepared to begin before the conductor had lifted her hands. I realised that failure was not outside the music; it was one of the ways the players found it. Every restart carried information into the next.

At the concert that evening, the eight bars passed in less than half a minute. The audience heard one clean movement, but I could hear the earlier versions beneath it: the thump, the rush, the squeak and the spaces gradually opened between them. “Again” no longer sounded like a complaint. It sounded like a tool. The applause was sudden; the work had not been.

Source B: The long move

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

At first, the chess tables in the square annoyed me. I passed them during my lunch break and saw people sitting in silence while everyone else hurried somewhere. Their stillness looked like a public performance of having time to waste.

One afternoon, an appointment was delayed, so I sat on the end of a nearby bench. Traffic lights changed, paper cups emptied and shadows moved across the paving; the two chess players did not. I checked the time on my phone twice before either of them touched a piece.

The younger player reached towards the centre of the board, stopped and placed his hand back in his lap. Nearly four minutes passed. Nothing happened, if nothing meant that no piece changed square. His eyes, however, made a restless map of the board. They travelled from one corner to another, returned to a black piece near his hand and moved away again.

Even I could see that the black piece was available to be taken. The whole board seemed to lean towards that capture. A few spectators had gathered, yet nobody advised him or complained about the delay. The other player waited with both hands resting flat on his knees.

At last, the younger player ignored the tempting piece and moved a pawn one square. It seemed disappointingly modest. Five moves later, his opponent’s king had no safe space. The choice I had dismissed had prepared every move that followed. There was no speech and no celebration, only a quiet refusal of the obvious move and, eventually, a result.

I stayed for the beginning of the next game. This time, when a player paused, I watched the slight movements: a finger tracing the edge of the table, eyes testing one route and then another, a hand advancing before being withdrawn. I stopped measuring the game by visible events.

My appointment message arrived while one player was thinking. Earlier, I would have welcomed the excuse to leave. Instead, I let the message wait until the move was finished. The square was no less busy than before, but I no longer believed that speed was the only evidence of purpose. Stillness was not the absence of a move. It was where the move was being made.

Compare the ways in which the writers present their changing attitudes towards activities that initially seem unproductive.

You should write about:

• each writer’s first judgement
• what causes that judgement to change
• how language and structure present the change.

Support your answer with detailed examples from both texts, including brief quotations.