What Is (a) Composition?

To understand the value of composition in students’ music education, it is necessary to recognize what composition is. The word “composition” can refer to the process of creating music or the resulting product of those actions. Composition as a process is the act of making music that no one had heard yet. Bits and pieces of music are explored— some are rejected, and some are developed and extended, but the music is not in a replicable form. It is under construction. At this point in the act of composing, the bits and pieces of emerging music would not be called “a composition,” because the composer did not think of the song as a completed product. Composition as a product reflects closure on a compositional problem. This definition describes a composition as a relatively fixed idea of a musical product. That idea can exist only in the mind of the composer, and does not require a physical manifestation, such as notation or a recording.

To effectively guide students’ composition, educators should be clear on what constitutes music creativity. All humanly made sounds are not musical. Nor are they creative. The sound of a hammer hitting a nail or a basketball dribbling down a court may be rhythmic, percussive, and humanly created, but they are not musical. Two concepts that can elucidate the difference between musical sounds and other sounds are “inten- tionality” and “orientation.”

Intentionality. Music compositions are planned; they are not random or accidental. A composition has been planned to sound the way that it does, and the sounds are intentionally designated as music (Kratus, 1991). Furthermore, the sounds heard in the performance of a composition bear a strong relationship to the sounds imagined by the composer. Certain forms of improvisation by novices or younger children, as discussed below, do not possess intentionality. All music compositions do possess intentionality.

There are some special instances in music in which this notion of intentionality requires further explanation. Aleatoric music contains sounds that occur in sequence or combination by chance, but they are planned to occur by chance, designated as such by the composer. The chance element in the music is intentional.

The tones and timbres of music can be as varied as human imagination, but they are planned tones and timbres. Even sounds that primarily occur in non-musical contexts can be used by composers as intentional elements in a composition. The canon at the end of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and the audience noises in the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band serve musical functions, because the composers intended for those sounds to be heard as music. Someone playing a riff with a pen on a desk is creating music, because the sounds are intended to be musical. Someone nervously and unconsciously tapping a pen on the desk is not creating music, even though the resulting sounds in the two instances are similar. Musical sounds are intended to be heard as music—they are “tones for us,” regardless of their origin or sophistication (Sparshott, 1987). Music is intentionally created to be heard as music, and the composer intentionally plans the music to sound the way it does.

Orientation. The concept of orientation relates to the conscious or unconscious goal of a person engaged in a creative act. Adults generally assume that the result of a creative act is the creation of some product. In fact, some definitions of “creativity” require the production of a tangible product. But this is not always the case, especially with novices and younger children. An example from visual art may clarify. A preschool child engaged in the act of painting often does so for the joy of the act of painting. The creation of colors and shapes and the movement of the brush on the paper are what draw the child’s attention. Once the painting is created, the child’s attention may wander to another painting or to something else. The created object loses its value. Adults, on the other hand, tend to value paintings as objects, as products, as the things that have been created. A parent is likely to tape a young child’s finger painting to the refrigerator as a created object, but for the child the value is in the making, not in the thing that is made. Young children tend to think of painting as the act of painting, as a process or an action, rather than as the act of creating a painting, a product.

One can think of these differences in creativity as a process orientation or a product orientation (Kratus, 1995). With a process orientation one does an activity for the sake of engaging in the activity. With a product orientation one does an activity for the sake of achieving some particular, if unspecified, result. One can improvise with either a process or product orientation. Adults tend to be oriented to improvisation as a product, that is, as something to be shared with others and that conveys some musical sense (i.e., is non-random). Young children tend to be oriented to improvisation as a process and engage in improvisation for the pure joy of making musical sounds in the moment.

A product orientation requires three capabilities in the creator. First is the ability to audiate (hear inwardly with meaning), so that the physical actions required to make the musical sounds match the mental images of those sounds. That means that music created with a product orientation has intentionality; the sounds heard in the music match the creator’s intent.

Second is an understanding of musical syntax, which is musical structure (e.g., pulse, tempo, meter, tonality, phrasing). This understanding need not be formalized or verbal. It is learned, as is linguistic syntax, primarily through experience within a practice.

The first and second abilities enable a third: audience awareness. Those who can audiate (hear inwardly) and have an understanding of musical syntax and an awareness of an audience can choose to create an improvisation for an audience (product orientation) or can choose to improvise for their own pleasure (process orientation). Those people without those capabilities can only improvise with a process orientation. The act of composition requires both intentionality and a product orientation.

Peter Webster (1987) developed a comprehensive model of creative thinking in music. According to the model, the nature of the creative process depends upon certain enabling skills (e.g., musical aptitudes, conceptual understanding, craftsmanship, and aesthetic sensitivity) and enabling conditions (e.g., motivation, subconscious imagery, supportive environment, and various personality traits). Webster believes that the creative process alternates between two types of thought: divergent thinking, the generation of multiple ideas or possible solutions, and convergent thinking: the selection of a single, “best” solution based on the evaluation of known possibilities. This model presupposes that the composer is working with intentionality and has a product orientation. After understanding what composition is, one may wonder why humans compose music.