Mechanical Drawing, Composition, and Music Education

I want to conclude with another reference to my high school days. I kept every major artwork I ever created in my art classes. Those artworks reflected who I was at the time and also reflected the times I was living through. One work of mine from those days was a photographic essay. I had taken my camera to a Vietnam War protest at the University of Buffalo and took pictures of the students around me, resisting police brutality and tear gas. Back in my safe suburban school, I painstakingly cut the photos I developed into shapes fitting the shapes of the 50 United States. I then glued each photo into a collage of a map of the United States. That artwork meant a great deal to me.

As mentioned previously in this chapter, I also created mechanical drawings in high school in a vocational education class. I saved none of them, even though I took pleasure in learning in such a rule-bound environment. So, what was the difference? Both my artworks and my mechanical drawings required precision and technique. The mechanical drawings of gears required meticulous precision, as did the fastidious cutting of photographic states. Both mechanical drawing and visual art required a knowledge of technique (e.g., ways of labeling aspects of a mechanical drawing correctly and ways of developing a photograph correctly). But there was one essential difference. In my mechanical drawing class, I followed someone else’s rules. In my art classes, I followed my own. In addition to the precision and technique my art teachers taught me, I also needed to develop my own muse, which was something that mechanical drawing did not do. The art teacher’s job was to create a stimulating environment that encouraged students to create something that no one had seen before. The mechanical drawing teacher’s job was to encourage all students to draw something the same way in according to preestablished conventions.

It is not difficult to translate this analogy to music education. In many music ensembles and classes, students are taught music selected by the teacher and performed in accordance with musical conventions and the teacher’s expectations. Music performance requires precision (e.g., correct rhythms) and technique (e.g., proper embouchure), whether it is music given to students by the teacher or music created by the students themselves. In many music classes and ensembles, the music performed follows someone else’s rules. Dare I call this form of music education “mechanical music”? The learning that occurs in many music classes is not dependent on students’ desires but rather on those of the teacher. What is missing is the fostering of the students’ muse. They do not own the music they perform.

While in junior and senior high school, I wrote songs for my fledgling rock band. Not once did I think of myself as a composer, perhaps because the word “composer” carries a lot of baggage. “Composer” too often connotes the use of standard notation, performance in formal concert halls, and an orientation of antiquated seriousness, as exemplified in the phrase “dead white composers.”

The word “composition” may well be inhibiting the interest that students exhibit in learning to create their own music. Perhaps music teachers should stop trying to teach their students to “compose.” The word “songwriting” may be more appropriate, given that many young people consider all music to be songs. But not all compositions are songs. Another possibility is that music teachers could discuss with their students performing a combination of music created by someone else, along with music that they create themselves: the music no one has heard yet. Music teachers may well find that “the music no one has heard yet” will be of greater interest to students than their interest in performing cover songs.

Performance will continue to be the heart of music classes and ensembles. But the students in those classes and ensembles are also capable of creating some ofthe music they perform. As exemplified in the three opening vignettes, the music students create themselves is more meaningful to them than the music created by others. Consider the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1779/2003), a philosopher who influenced the revolutions in the United States and France and an important French composer. He wrote 240 years ago that “to understand music, it is not sufficient to be able to play or sing; we must learn to compose at the same time, or we shall never be masters of this science.” The students performing music made by themselves and their classmates will be passionate in their music-making. An audience hearing music that is not only performed by students but also created by them will respond enthusiastically. The teachers fostering their students’ compositional ability will be the first lucky listeners of the music no one has heard yet.

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