The Music no One has Header Yet

The purpose of this chapter is to provide music educators potential answers to the question, “Why learn to compose?” and its corollary, “Why teach composition?” It is understandable that in most performing arts education, the re-creation of the art form through performance takes precedence over the original creation of the art form. In most schools, performing music, acting, and dancing take priority over composing music, playwriting, and choreographing. Yet, the future of performing arts is dependent on composers, playwrights, and choreographers. As Stephens (2013) writes, “Without creation, there would be no re-creation by performers, or recreation for audiences” (p. 85). Is there a place in a predominantly performance-based music education to foster students’ original music-making? In this essay, I wish to make the case that creation and re-creation are not mutually exclusive musical behaviors in music education. Rather they are jointly reinforcing, leading to a more significant and sustainable form of music education. First, I present three brief narratives.

1. When I was a teenager and throughout my 20s, I played bass guitar in a series of amateur rock bands. From the time I was 13, the bands I performed in played cover songs as well as original songs by my bandmates and me in high school gymnasiums, church basements, dive bars, and even bowling alleys. Our audiences preferred to listen to cover songs like Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimmie Some Lovin’,” and Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” We played those songs, but we also played our original songs that the audiences had never heard. Today, I ask myself why we performed those original songs, knowing that paying customers and our employers would rather hear us play familiar songs that they knew well. After much thought, I think that the reason is that the original songs expressed who we were, not only as creative musicians but as sentient beings. We took pleasure in performing cover songs, but we felt 100 times more satisfaction in performing the music we had created ourselves. Our very essence was in every phrase, lyric, harmony, and rhythm. We felt those vibrations in our blood and bones. It was music no one had heard yet

2. Over 30 years later, I was a professor at Michigan State University and founded the Michigan Honors Composition concert, a statewide competition to identify and promote the best music composed by K-12 and special education students. The winners performed on a concert at the state’s annual music education conference, which was held in Grand Rapids. One year, an eighth grader living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan submitted a beautifully complex piece for percussion ensemble, titled, “Who Knows?” Her piece was accepted, and her music teacher arranged to transport the 12- member percussion ensemble and chaperones to Grand Rapids for the concert. The trip took over eight hours each way in the dead of winter, and the student performers and their chaperones had to stay overnight in hotels. At the concert, the young composer conducted the piece dressed in a tuxedo and smiling. The music lasted four minutes, and the audience applauded wildly. After the performance, the girl’s mother gave me a pillow on which her daughter had embroidered the words, “Who Knows?” I have it today in a place of honor in my home office. The tuxedo and pillow showed how much this performance meant to the composer. Furthermore, a middle school instrumental music teacher cared enough to arrange for such an extensive trip with her students whose parents provided financing for transportation and housing to perform a four-minute piece that no one in the audience had ever heard before.

3. Several years ago, I invited a talented music educator from Oakland, Michigan, to Zoom his sixth-grade music class into my general music methods class. His classes fostered his students’ creativity, and I thought that my students would benefit by learning from his students’ experiences. Under his guidance, the students composed their own music, which they performed and recorded. Their recordings were sold as CDs, and the proceeds were given to Detroit-area schools that could otherwise not afford to purchase classroom instruments. My students and his students questioned each other about their musical experiences. The sixth graders spoke enthusiastically about their joy in creating their own music and sharing it with others for a good cause. For them, that is what music education was all about, and they were proud of their creative accomplishments. Then, one of the sixth graders asked my college students, “How cool is it to make up and perform your own music every day?” There was a lengthy, awkward silence, and none of my students had an answer, knowing that their collegiate music study had nothing to do with creating their own music. Their education was all about performing cover songs.

Three elements that underscore these (true) narratives are pride, joy, and passion: pride in being able to create something personally meaningful that had not existed before, joy in sharing these creations with others, and passion in the desire to overcome whatever obstacles necessary. These concepts may be summarized as a kind of personal and collective musical ownership. We rarely see words like “pride,” “joy,” or “passion” in curriculum documents. But why else would young people choose to make music: to win a trophy? to please a teacher? If that is the case, what happens when the trophies stop coming and the teacher is no longer present? The human impulse to create music that no one has heard before comes from a place more profound than a curriculum guide.

Looking toward the future, music educators may examine the relative merits of preserving the glorious and established musical works of the past or fostering the creative but uncertain musical potential of the future. To what extent is the purpose of music education (a) to teach students to perform renditions of previously composed music, whether those “cover songs” are folk songs for elementary students, or band, choir, and orchestra arrangements written by professionals for older students, or even popular music, or (b) to foster the creative muse that exists in all students and that defines them as musically creative beings? There may be space in this diverse (but, unfortunately, not diverse enough) field of practice to accomplish both ends. In many school music programs, option “a” is leaving little room for option “b,” as noted by Williams (2011).

In this chapter, the author attempts to define “composition,” examine various anthropological and psychological explanations for why humans compose music, answer the question, “Can children compose?,” outline the obstacles to teaching composition, explain the means to overcome these obstacles, and reframe the teaching of music.