PME 811: Blog Entry 5 - Creation in the Music Classroom

Creation in the Music Classroom

There's a joke among certain circles of music teachers: "Creation in the music classroom - it's as old as the moldy carpet we're working on, and just as healthy." It always made me laugh... sad, worn-out laughter, but still. About ten years ago, several provinces decided that it was extremely important for school children to compose music. Sounds great, right? Kids get the opportunity to expand their ideas, examine their creative motivations, put it all down on paper and share in the performance of their peers' efforts. Lots of little Mozarts running around with a recorder in one hand and a sheaf of manuscript in the other. Sounds great. Doesn't work.

It's like teaching a fourth-grader how to build a bridge out of popsicle sticks and then being surprised when he's unable to build a real house. Music students learn the basics (hopefully - it depends on the school, the teacher, and the almighty schedule) like reading one line of music at a time, how to draw a sharp that doesn't look like a hashtag, when the stems go up and when they go down. They can name the notes using such helpful mnemonics as 'All Cows Eat Grass,' and if they're teacher is really unlucky they get a class set of soprano recorders to shrill out those notes in octaves that make dogs howl. These kids can totally write notes on a staff and then play them for you. They can come up with a title for this little hunk of music. They can even be forced to tell you what they were trying to express with their creation and they will certainly be proud of themselves if you tell them they should be.

Is it music? Yep.

Is this composition? Maybe.

Is it worthwhile? I don't think so.

Maybe I'm just a disillusioned high school teacher, but I've spoken to loads of teens who remember 'composing' music in elementary school and can't keep a straight face while telling me about it. Worse, they roll their eyes and scoff at all composers because - and here's the awful part - they think that all composition is just as mindless, purposeless, and ineffective as was their own process.

By the time they get to high school, get a 'real' instrument under their fingers (recorders are excellent instruments when played properly and sound lovely when playing music that was intended for them, like this) they have a much greater capacity to understand the intricacies of structure and emotion that composers can work into their music. Perhaps even more important, their own emotional spectrum has developed thousands of shades of colour to complicate that fourth-grade triptych of mad-sad-glad. By grade 12, a student who has been in music classes from grade 1 could be expected to start with an idea for a piece, choose instrumentation/ time signature/ structure and form/ key signature, write a compelling melody, write harmony for the melody, add phrasing and articulation, conduct a performance, and then evaluate whether their intention was realized. Depending on the student, you might even end up with a piece of music that could be taken seriously by a professional musician and prize competitions to that end take place every year across North America and Europe.

I dislike creativity for the sole purpose of creating content, particularly when the developmental level of students's skills is not yet ready for the content to be meaningful to them. That said, no one would argue that a student shouldn't write stories! It's a difference of fields.

I'm genuinely curious about these other fields. What do you think? Does creativity specifically to create content make sense in your field? Do you do it as a teacher just to satisfy the curriculum document or do you find it meaningful for students? Is it a creative outlet for them or just a way to evaluate understanding at a higher taxonomical level?