Teaching students to compose music

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K-12 music teachers have little trouble teaching students to read and notate music, perform on an instrument, evaluate a musical performance, or achieve competence in most of the other nine music standards that underpin music education in Vermont and the nation.

But nearly 20 years after the standards revolution swept the country -- and 17 after Vermont’s Framework of Standards and Learning Opportunities was put in place -- one music standard still leaves many of them flummoxed, according to research conducted by professor Patricia Riley, who directs UVM’s music education program: teaching students to compose.__Since she arrived at the University of Vermont five years ago, Riley has sought to make the future music teachers in her care as comfortable with content standard #4 – “composing and arranging music within specified guidelines” -- as they are with its eight companions.

The goal isn’t to nurture a crop of pre-pubescent Stravinsky’s (although that would be a fine outcome) but something more accessible and inclusive.

Learning to create music “makes you a better listener and performer,” Riley says. The standards “all work together to create a well rounded person who understands music.”

Riley employs two major strategies to help the students in her General Music Education class learn to teach others to compose. All are required to cover composition as part of their student teaching duties. Riley also asks them to pick up pen and music paper -- or computer keyboard and mouse -- and tackle the business of composition themselves, using skills they’re learned in their music theory courses.

Both strategies were on display recently at a special concert at UVM’s Recital Hall for two classes of third graders from the Integrated Arts Academy in Burlington, formerly H.O. Wheeler Elementary School. About 20 UVM students performed a piece written by Andy Gagnon, a sophomore from Hardwick, Vt., called “Susan and Her Friends Take Flight.”

The UVM students then helped small groups of third graders create with their own group compositions.

Gagnon’s sonic comedy, as he describes it, is meant to entertain, but also to teach. To convey the idea of musical timbre, it employs over 20 different instruments, ranging from bassoon, trumpet, flute, and alto sax to tom-tom, tambourine, chimes, glockenspiel, sleigh bells, and tabla. In an introduction to the performance, Gagnon asked different instrumentalists to play the same note for the children, to attune them to the timbral variety that was to come.

The piece also conveys ideas about musical form. “Susan” is grouped into five movements, which students could think of as small songs within a larger song, Gagnon explained in his introduction.

The third graders were rapt as they listened to the 30-minute performance, which features spoken narration at the opening of the piece and between movements.

The composition tells the story of a UVM music student named Susan (the story is rooted in the real life adventures of Gagnon and his friends, the composer says), who is so buoyed with confidence after scoring a 96 on a percussion test that she’s able to fly.

Susan and her classmates, who pick up the skill by osmosis, open the window of their percussion classroom and -- with the blessing of instructor Jeff Salisbury -- take flight, circling the globe with stops in Africa, the Middle East, the Arctic, and other locales to play music either inspired by the setting or reflecting the musical traditions of the region.

The piece’s narrators, junior voice majors Holly Mugsford and Lindsey Soboleski, added zest to the performance by waltzing across the stage in masks and other garb meant to convey the local color.

After the performance, the UVM students divided the third graders into groups of five or six, spread them out around the Recital Hall, and helped them create a group composition using instruments a beginner could sound good on, from metal xylophones to various drums and shakers. Judging from smiling faces, animated ideas about what their parts could be, and generally coherent and pleasant sounding results, the teaching sessions were a success.

Teachers facing the prospect of a composition lesson in music class tend to think, “Oh, my gosh; harmony, voice-leading. How am I going to teach all that?” says Riley, who published her research on music educators’ discomfort with the composition standard in the journal Visions of Research in Music Education.

The process can be much simpler, she says, with teachers communicating broad ideas about music -- melodies can be smooth or jagged, short or long, high or low in pitch, for instance. Measures are spaces that contain a certain number of beats. The more technical aspects of composition can be covered in the upper grades, when students have self-selected for advanced learning and teachers have textbooks to guide them.

“The underlying principles are easy to grasp,” Riley says. “You just need a framework to work within.”