Personalities of Young Composers

Students offer surprises with their compositional ideas and over time I have considered students, both K-12 and university level, from a variety of composing personality types. It is important to understand students’ compositional perspective when providing creative opportunities. Overall, the expression or intuitive recognition of children’s feelings holds the greatest importance when beginning with composing. Part of a music educator’s work is learning about interest held by students for writing music of their own.

Consistently asking students questions about their thinking may create new ideas and new development, the ideas of which can be examined, shifted, reimagined, and built upon throughout your process. And yet, reflections on observations of music educators’ understanding of what children are experiencing during creating and composition remains limited. While it is through their abundant communication that my conceptualization of idea selection and development has been assembled and developed over time, to both students and educators, my gratitude is highlighted (see Figure 12.1).

Figure 12.1. Crawford conceptual framework of musical productivity: Types of young composers

The Crawford Conceptual Framework of Musical Productivity: Types of Young Composers (Crawford, 2016) considers student productivity. Students 1) with little or no interest in composing, 2) who may enjoy composing projects but exhibit no further inclination to compose, 3) who exhibit ability to compose after having been invited to do so, 4) who compose with greater interest, or where there was none prior, when student finds a particular instrument (acoustic or technology) appealing, and 5) who possesses a natural ability to compose may be grouped to support clearer thinking for teachers. An aspect of awareness of young composer characterization is that each of these young composer “types” appear at the same time, in the same class, and compositional teaching and learning still happens.

In other words, during compositional work, a place is created for everyone in the room no matter who is in the room. All student personality types work together. As well, students’ ability for writing text or lyrics may be unseen, and when visibility is created, there comes a realization that everyone has different areas of expression and realization may be brand new. As an example of 3), 4), or 5) in the framework above, suddenly, one group has the text for a remarkable new song related to social justice.

Educators may be able to add to this framework from earned experience. As an example, students may use music they find on the internet for a piece they are creating even though they are aware they are to create original music. What about the student who never discusses in my surveys their private lesson experience and composes music similar to genres from the pieces they learn through private lessons? That may be yet another group.