Interrogating Myths at Work in Composing: Revising Response-abilities

While there is no universally agreed definition of composition, most teachers and researchers distinguish between various types of practices. There are contemporary classical composers whose compositional creativity is guided by principles of genre mastery, genre traditions, and artistic originality. In contrast, there are turntablist (DJ) composers whose practice calls into question conventional understandings of the interplay between innovative sampling, audiences, and constructed socio-spatial principles.

Then there are audio or sound designers and film or game music composers who work in industries where priority is given to team collaboration and technological innovation. For the most part, however, the diversity of these sites, discourses and practices of composition is anchored in cultural appropriations (for professional enactments and ends), co-optations (often for economic enactments and ends) and ideologies (for neoliberalized educational enactments and ends).

Myth-making is reinforced by public images promoting gendered, classed, and racialized notions of those who are considered, for instance, famous scientists and mathematicians, composers, and conductors. Myths are of great significance in music education. They create binaries, separating us with “yes-no” relations: yes, you are musical, you are creative, you have talent to compose, you measure up, or no, you do not. Myths also generate a version of humanism grounded in a domination by one sector of society “in accordance with its god-given civilizing mission” (Taylor & Hughes, 2016, p. 8). Myths about musical creativity tell a story and function to divide us into mutually opposed groupings of those who can and cannot compose.

When we think of a composer, we think of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the famous composer and child prodigy; a classic instance of “genius” This myth and metaphor of genius is directly at odds with the notion of child makers. Children, as makers in music, are often “hidden”—only “becoming composers” once well up the mythical and metaphoric ladder. Similarly, most people think they are not composers or “not really very creative or musical” as sociologist Lucy Green (1988) argued over 30 years ago:

Classical music has in fact maintained a hegemonic position of cultural superiority ever since the Enlightenment. Ideology immanently ratifies and maintains the dominance of an elite musical institution that, along with its reified products, is made to seem superior: and it does so by propagating the appearance that there is a musical mass which, along with its profane products, is not really very musical. (p. 2)

In the face of widening inequality and hegemonic positioning of cultural superiority, these views of dominance, division, and difference between us (as students, teachers) and them (as composers) manifests in significant ways in how we conceptualize and enact composition teaching.

In her PhD thesis on attitudes toward and practices of composing in schools in England, Birmingham-based composer and music educator Kirsty Devaney (2018) notes that 92.8% of teachers surveyed believed that some people have a natural aptitude for composing. Her work also revealed other associated myths and metaphors including that the term “composition” rarely if ever relates to the work of students and teachers, and that composing is a profession or job that is unrelated to other acts of musical creativities such as song writing, DJing, or experimenting with music creation apps.

This separation, Devaney (2018) notes, can in some part be explained by the term’s association with Western art music composition. It is part of the mythology that Lydia Goehr (1994) writes about in her seminal book The imaginary museum of musical works, where she critiques the composition, performance, and reception of classical music and how the concept of a “musical work” fully crystallized around 1800, and subsequently defined the norms, expectations, and behavioral patterns that have come to characterize classical musical practice.

In addition to myths about who or what counts as composition, there are also associated myths about the processes of becoming and being a composer. While “natural aptitude” and the notion of the child genius shape a particular narrative around being able to compose or not, the teaching of composition can take on what Philpott (2020, p. 51) calls a “conservationist creative process.” This type of approach situates creativity against a backdrop of selected traditions and cultures, where individual expression is confined within pre-planned structures and languages. This can manifest in technical approaches to teaching composition, the notion of a “toolbox” of techniques that need to be mastered, and a focus on replication or stylistic imitation as compositional learning (Devaney, 2018). As Philpott (2020) argues, the conservationist approach to composition raises significant questions: “Whose culture? Whose traditions? Whose creativity?” (p. 55).

Dismantling these myths, particularly for teachers of composing in school settings, is a complex business. Images, language, and material environments keep these myths active and powerful. However, transdisciplinary and improvisational creativities offer different ways to use images, language, and environments to trouble the myths and forge new ways of being and doing. They offer a different relationship with materials and environments that generate different conceptualizations of a composer. The composer is no longer seen as alone, arising from seemingly nowhere, with a brilliant mind/ear and a toolkit of techniques at the ready, but instead is reconceptualized as a maker, making with materials, bodies, and sounds. This reconceptualization challenges not only how we think of composers and the composition process, but also how composers learn to become, the role of teachers in this process, and the relationships that are involved.

Reflecting on what makes a “creative musician” or a composer involves commitment to looking anew at things as they are, giving form to the idea that traditions are continually changing. Reflecting on what makes for “creative teaching” in relation to “creative learning” is only part of understanding and developing innovative practices in higher music education.

Music teachers must be creative teachers and make a conscious effort to develop both compositional and improvisational expertise. This means seeing risk-taking and learning through mistakes as effective educational practices that create improvisatory spaces and freedom for creativity. It requires a new form of relational expertise, where composing is repositioned as entangled in community partnerships, in the very broadest of senses. Ensuring that these partnerships lead to well-designed and collaborative practices may depend upon identifying who has the power over decision-making in composition.