The short answer is that it gives a lot of bang for your buck: you can explore many musical concepts through a unit on variations in a relatively short space of time. These include meaty compositional techniques that can feed into all sorts of projects later on in KS3 and at GCSE. Ultimately, learning how variations work provides an understanding of different ways in which a musical idea can be developed, which has been a preoccupation of composers in all styles since the Renaissance.
