Music Listening and the Compositional Process

Having considered the role and musical capacities of the music listener and the creative nature of music listening itself, let us consider music listening as a generative experience that directly contributes to and influences other generative musical experiences— in this case, composition. More than ever before, the accessibility and affordability of technology has expanded music listeners’ (and composers’) soundscapes beyond their immediate personal socio-cultural environs.

Many of our students bring vibrant prior music listening experiences into our classrooms and ensembles, and as educators, we can continue to expand all students’ musical horizons as they craft their musical and personal identities, musical preferences, and affective sensitivities. How might music teachers capitalize on their students’ personal playlists as they guide students’ compositional activity? What are the rationales teachers might promote as they help student composers realize the inherent connections between listening and their compositional processes and products?

Prior Listening. Prior music listening experiences are essential in stocking personal cognitive and musical reservoirs with compositional possibilities. Attentive music listening encounters provide an array of soundscapes, stylistic idioms, melodic and rhythmic ideas, and potential musical tools for arranging sounds that provoke artistic, musical, and affective impressions. Students might not be fully aware, however, of specific trends surrounding their personal soundscapes. Enculturation and the transmission of expectations regarding sound organization and aesthetic norms determine what listeners “know” about music and its elemental interactions, even if listeners are not yet aware of the role their own socio-cultural contexts play in defining their music listening habits.

This information is deeply connected to the memory of listeners’ prior musical experiences which are embodied in their body-mind-spirit-feelingful selves. Student composers should be encouraged to reflect on their personal soundscapes and listening habits, for they directly influence the decisions they make about their own compositions. To that end, students might identify musical works, sounds, patterns, and genres that have particular meaning to them, and subsequently explore “what about these musical sounds” embodies that meaning.

Wiggins and Medvinsky (2013) referred to music listening—in and outside of school music programs—as laying the groundwork for music composition, serving as concrete prior knowledges and prior experiences upon which students can draw and inform their own compositions. The authors wrote, “To be able to conceive of original material, learners need to have a solid understanding of the framework and possibilities before they are asked to engage in the process” (p.116). Music listeners create meaning of their present musical encounters in light of their past musical experiences. These “old” and “new” musical sounds and the personal meanings students ascribe to them form the deep reservoirs of musical and expressive possibilities that are transformed into personal expressions made manifest within students’ musical compositions.

Emotional Inspiration. Composers listen to an array of musical styles and genres that serve as musical and emotional inspirations. Strand (2013) noted that, similar to any creative activity, composition requires inspiration. When composers listen to music, they are reminded of the many other composers who have created musical and affective impressions that connect and communicate with others in meaningful ways. Therefore, listening to music is an act that inspires composers to enlist music as a medium to convey thoughts, feelings, experiences, and creativity.

Other inspirations might take the form of a poem, event, person/character, artwork, natural scene, or another piece of music (Kennedy, 2002; Kerchner, 2016; Koops, 2013). Listening to someone else’s music can serve as a “force” that drives creative thinking (Webster, 2002, p. 28) and inspires problem-solving that seeks resolution. As student composers embark on their compositional projects, they are faced with a “problem”: How do I organize and relate musical sounds so that they convey the musical and affective impressions that I wish to communicate? In the prior section, music listening was positioned as foundational in creating cognitive “prior musical experiences” that composers use to frame their subsequent works. However, music listening is effective when used as a consultative agent throughout the compositional process.

Student composers can explore others’ compositions for solutions that inform specific compositional “problems” they are facing during the compositional process. Students might consult their listening library, maybe even their peers’ listening playlists, in order to glean sounds and idiomatic figures that fulfill musical and affective purposes within their own compositions. Kennedy (2002) found her choral student composers to benefit from listening to compositions (including their peers’ compositions) as a way to build their repertoire of ideas and impressions that ultimately affected the nature of their compositional products. Furthermore, she found that music listening acted as an “aural tutor of form, theory, and harmony” (p. 103).

Student composers, therefore, benefit from listening to an array of diverse musics, because they serve as concrete models for their own compositions. Music teachers can expand students’ musical models by bringing music listening examples that are obvious in their demonstration of specific forms, moods, programmatic narrative, chord progressions, melodic contour, rhythms, dynamics, articulations, and tempi. Similarly, teachers can invite students to listen to examples of compositions that effectively and less effectively demonstrate artistry and affective connection to listeners. This comparative conversation might also include the topic of listening subjectivity and personal interpretation of compositional effectiveness.

Teachers cannot assume that students will automatically understand composers’ tools and strategies for creating a work simply by listening to their music. Intentional critical listening calls on teachers to draw students’ attention to specific characteristics in the music listening example, followed by students and teacher describing the processes the composer utilized. Asking questions before and after students listen to musical excerpts can facilitate the discussion of how composers create musical relationships in order to convey a programmatic theme, create emotional moments in the music, and organize sounds amidst expressive qualities, essentially determining how the composer’s organizational scheme “works” for the listener.

Emotional Affirmation. Composers listen to an array of musical styles and genres that serve as musical and emotional affirmations. The process of creating music demands composers to explore musical possibilities and, ultimately, commit to ordering musical sounds, creating musical relationships, and employing compositional strategies for sharing musical and affective impressions with their audiences. Students’ problem-solving strategies are affirmed when they recognize that other composers have made similar organizational decisions, used similar compositional tools and strategies, or even used the same or similar sources of compositional inspiration.

Teachers and students can collaboratively research music that uses similar programs, styles, compositional tools, or affective impressions that are similar to inspirations that arise from the student composers’ work. Together they can discuss how a composer approached compositional tasks, while learning about the student composer’s intentions and approaches to a similar compositional “problem.”

Imagine a student composer whose composition was to include a loud, “disruptive” sound in the midst of an otherwise mellow melody. This student could listen to Haydn’s “Surprise Symphony” (Symphony no. 94 in G Major) in order to hear how that composer used dynamics, accents, and instrumentation to create a similar surprise and how it fit into the overall musical puzzle. Imagine another student composer for whom an historical event was an inspiration. Listening to Julie Giroux’s “To Walk with Wings” might provide the student composer with affirmation that others, too, have found historical accounts such as the evolution of flight and exploration of space, to be inspirational.

The composition would also model musical and emotional possibilities for developing a musical form and program based on the depiction of a fanfare, trial and error of flying machines, tragedies of space exploration failure, and resilience of the human spirit. Theoretical analyses and personal reflection on the music listening experience could provoke the student composer to further reflect on their own compositional action, i.e., reflection-on-action (Schon, 1992). This, in turn, could inform the composer’s level of personal satisfaction with the compositional effect they created, and potentially inspire and suggest ways for editing the current version of their composition.

Listening to Self-Composed Works. Composers listen to their own compositional products as they organize musical sounds into a larger composition. Composing is analogous to an intricate dance between the critically thinking brain and the intuitive musical self. On the one hand, composers enlist their musical and aural discrimination and critical thinking skills as they listen to their own compositions, in order to determine the effectiveness of their composition in communicating meaningful musical and affective impressions. On the other hand, composers listen to their compositions and enlist their intuitive musical sensitivities to assess the degree to which their vision for the composition is coming to musical fruition from an aesthetic perspective.

Listening to one’s own music and reflecting on its musical and emotional impacts leads to necessary revision, both intentional (Webster, 2012) and intuitive. “In-flight” decision-making (i.e., reflection-in-action, Schon, 1992) occurs as composers perform chunks of their compositions and edit something that does not quite fit aurally or emotionally in the moment, seeking to explore other “best” possibilities, before continuing the compositional process.

After a certain point in the compositional process, however, composers must step back from the real-time composing process and listen to the performance of larger segments of the composition and engage in reflection-on- action (Schon, 1992), i.e., what worked and what does not yet work musically and affectively. Reflection-on-action leads composers to pose questions such as, “Is this musical product what I want? If not, why?” This type of reflective thinking is important in taking inventory of “what is” within a composition, but it is not enough. Subsequent editorial action must be taken. Therefore, reflection-for-action (Killion and Todnem, 1991)—reflexive practice during which composers identify possible pathways forward in revising and expanding their compositions—completes the inherent listening-reflecting-editing cycle that defines the compositional process.

As student composers listen to their compositions, they may also wish to consider guidelines for reflecting on their “in-process” work. Kaschub and Smith (2016) suggested the acronym “M.U.S.T.S.” (i.e., Motion-stasis, Unity-variety, Sound-silence, Tension-release, and Stability-i nstability) as considerations in building relationships between the musical features. Students should be encouraged to critically listen for and reflect on the M.U.S.T.S. word-pairs as they occur in their compositions. Reflective questions might include, “To what extent is each component of a word pair present?” and “How might I change the balance between word pair(s) in order to provoke sensation and then feeling?”

Hickey (2012) crafted the acronym “SCAMPER”: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Magnify/Modify/Minify, Put to other use, Eliminate, Reverse/Rearrange (p. 46) as a device for student composers as they puzzle how to use their shorter compositional ideas to form larger compositional chunks. For example, a student composer might have created a melodic or rhythmic idea, yet they do not yet know the various options for using it to expand their composition. The student could explore placing the musical idea elsewhere within the composition, combining it with other musical ideas, varying an aspect of the idea, changing the rhythmic duration of the idea, giving the idea a different function within the composition, eliminating the idea completely (not likely if the student is really attached to the idea!), or using the reverse order of the pitches or rhythms of the idea.

The SCAMPER and M.U.S.T.S. strategies cannot work, however, without the student composer employing critical listening, critical thinking, and reflective thinking skills. The composer must listen in order to determine the efficacy of how the musical puzzle pieces occur within the larger compositional context, and then editing according to whether or not the composition decisions are musically and affectively compelling. The SCAMPER strategy and M.U.S.T.S. word-pairs provide student composers with ample suggestions for editing and expanding, but they must constantly listen to their compositional edits to determine if they align with their compositional vision, or if additional edits are needed.

Listening to Others, Inviting Others to Listen. Composers listen to others for feedback and constructive criticism and think critically about how to facilitate others to listen to their creative products. Until this point of the chapter, listening to music has been the focus of the discussion. We shift direction now to another crucial form of listening that also provides valuable information to composers. It involves listening to others—performers and listeners (e.g., critics, peers, and teachers)—about their perceptions and responses to the composers’ compositions. Listening to others, truly listening and being open to how other people experience the compositions, encourages another layer of the composers’ continued reflection and revision. Inviting critical dialog can seem daunting, especially since composers’ work involves personal attachment, investment of time, dedication, and creativity. Criticism, even if it is presented in a constructive manner, can cause angst as student composers listen to others’ opinions.

Initiating discussion and asking key questions that solicit observational feedback are skills for student composers to develop, but this requires teacher modeling and student practice. While it is ultimately up to the composers to determine which bits of criticism to receive and act on, listening and responding to musical consumers seems a valuable habit to develop, so that the composers can better teach, conduct, discuss, and connect their musical ideas to other people.

What questions might student composers pose to spark conversational feedback? Composers will want to learn if the concept they hold for their composition coincides with the listeners’ and performers’ reception of the musical work. In other words, did the general musical scheme for their work—the basic musical and affective impressions for the composition—have the effect that the composer intended? Asking others what worked or did not yet work in light of the composer’s intent can foster the reframing and recrafting of musical ideas to achieve what was originally intended by the composer. This conversation can also inform the performers’ interpretation of the composer’s work.

Composers might ask performers questions regarding the level of difficulty experienced in performing the music, the accessibility of the composition in relation to the instrumentation or voicing, and the level of engagement required to maintain performers’ interest in performing the composition (think about the bass drum player performing one measure in a 15-minute composition). For songs, student composers will want to listen to the performance of the composition and subsequently ask the performers about the extent to which the melody “sings” within the vocal timbre and range. Student composers will want to listen to the performer’s ease of singing the text setting in relation to open vowels and their placement within specific pitch ranges. Performers could provide information about the clarity of the notation used in the score of the composition. How might the score be more effectively notated so that performers can interpret the composer’s intent?