Can Children Really Compose?

While few would doubt that all children can create drawings, and paintings, and stories, and play act, and dance, there may be some who question whether children can actually create music. Perhaps this is due to the false assumption that composition requires a knowledge of music notation and music theory. It wasn’t until the 1940s that children’s original music was taken seriously as an object of research. Two series of studies in the 1940s held promise for understanding children as authentic composers. In one series of studies, educator Gladys Moorhead and composer Donald Pond published a series of four monographs from 1941 to 1951 describing the music made by children, HA to 8^XA years old, performing freely on available classroom instruments in the Pillsbury School in Santa Barbara, California (Moorhead & Pond, 1942/1978). Moorhead created an environment in which young children could explore a variety of classroom instruments, and Pond notated the students’ creations. Their collaboration resulted in the detailed documentation of the rhythms, melodic patterns, chants, movements, and instrument choices used in the children’s creations.

In the same time period, psychologist Dorothea Doig published a series of three articles (Doig, 1941, 1942a, & 1942b) regarding the musical characteristics of songs composed by the students she worked with in the Saturday Morning Music Classes at the Cleveland (Ohio) Museum of Art. The classes were designed to give children “a better understanding of the arts through familiarity with available materials and by encouraging them to express themselves in music” (Doig, 1941, p. 265). The ages of the children studied ranged from six to 16 years old. Doig noted the musical characteristics of the songs created by the children, such as scalar or chordal melody, phrase structure, mode, and cadences. She also made note of differences between younger and older children in the use of these structures.

Apparently, neither Moorhead and Pond nor Doig were aware of each other’s contemporaneous work. The Santa Barbara and Cleveland researchers made use of mixed methods, including frequency counts of various musical aspects used, as well as rich musical examples of the children’s compositions. The verbal descriptions of children’s creations and activities were especially striking:

Both younger and older children showed a strong tendency to prefer scalewise melodies, but older children used three types of melodies, namely, scalewise, chordal, and combinations of the two, while younger children scarcely used any except scalewise melodies (Doig, 1942a, p. 354-355).

Dance, as expressive movement, goes on continuously. A child does not move with the restricted decorum of an adult. His progress across a room is primarily an energetic propulsion of his body weight, a long flow with the head, arms and legs used in free balancing postural change (Moorhead & Pond, 1978/1942, p. 36).

These research results could have led to an understanding of the children’s development of musical syntax and the genesis of a research-based pedagogy for teaching children to compose. Sadly, this line of research was never pursued further in the authors’ lifetimes. Perhaps the exigencies of World War II intervened, or possibly the community of music educators was not ready to embrace students as potential composers.

In the 1960s and ’70s, American educator Ronald Thomas’s Manhattanville Music Curriculum Project (1970) and Canadian composer’s R. Murray Schafer’s (1979) soundscapes provided curricular approaches for teaching children to compose, primarily through the use of found sounds and other non-traditional means. Neither approach was research-based but both had their proponents in their day. Unfortunately, they fell short by expecting students to make the abstract mental leap between tapping and clapping, “oooohs” and “aaaahs” and the musical sounds familiar to children.

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that the formal study of children’s original music was continued. Kratus (1985) studied music composed by children between the ages of five and 13 who had had no prior composition experience. This research analyzed music composed by children between the ages of five and 13. He reported that between the ages of five and 11, children’s compositions become more highly structured in term of pitch range, tonality, meter, and use of melodic and rhythmic patterns, and that 13-year- olds’s compositions were less highly structured that those of 11-year-olds. One year later, Swanwick and Tillman (1986) found that the compositions of over 700 children between the ages of three and 15 developed in an invariant eight-step spiral of development of increasing sophistication. In 1987, Brian Loane’s research reported in great depth the musical characteristics of music composed by 11- to 14-year-olds. These studies, describing the characteristics of music composed by children, built upon the work of Moorhead and Pond and Doig 40 years previously.

In the late 1980s, research in children’s composition turned from an examination of children’s compositional products (compositions) toward children’s compositional processes (the act of composing). DeLorenzo (1989) examined the qualitative processes of sixth grade students composing in small groups. She found that highly involved problem solvers considered the expressive potential of musical sounds, whereas less involved problem solvers rarely considered musical concern. In the same year, Kratus (1989) studied the quantitative processes of nine- to 11-year-old students exploring, developing, repeating, and being silent while composing. He reported that repetition while composing is necessary for composing replicable music. Both Delorenzo and Kratus suggested that sixth graders or 11-year-olds are capable of composing in a manner similar to reports of adult composers’ compositional processes. Like Moorhead and Pond (1978/1942) and Doig (1941a, 1941b, & 1942) 47 years earlier, these authors were unaware of each other’s work prior to publication.

Since the 1980’s, research on children’s composition (as product and process) has broadened and been embraced by an ever-expanding group of scholars from around the world. To provide the reader with an understanding of the breadth of the research on children’s composing since the 1980s, here is a sampling of the research: Myung- Sook Auh and Robert Walker (1999) on factors contributing to children’s compositional ability; Pamela Burnard (1999) on children’s bodily intentions while composing; Louis Daignault (1996) on children’s computer-aided composition; Coral Davies (1992) on structural characteristics of music by five- to seven-year-olds; Michele Kaschub (1997) on composer-guided composition with sixth graders and high school choir students; Kathryn Strand (2009) on action research for teaching children to compose; Jackie Wiggins (1994) on children’s strategies while composing with peers; and Sarah Wilson and Roger Wales (1995) on the melodic and rhythmic characteristics of music by seven- and nine-year-olds. The large and growing body of research on children’s composition provides ample evidence that children can authentically compose music. Given that young students can compose music as well as perform it, one may ask why so many music educators do not encourage their students to compose.