Summarizing Key Points of Departure for Rethinking Music Composition Pedagogy

What are the generative points of departure here? What are our provocations for you, the reader, for rethinking music composition pedagogy that positively re-affirms or rethinks the roles and response-abilities of both teachers and students?

First, we need to ask what constitutes a “music composition” and music composition pedagogies that are culturally diverse and appropriate for early years, primary, and secondary, and further, into higher music education. This remains ambiguous yet particularly relevant to nurturing young composers, who are often hidden, not considered “real” composers. Are they only considered composers when they are able to notate? Does an improvised sonic exploration count? The language is confusing, and it is common for slippage to occur between the terms “teacher creativity,” “student creativity,” “compositional creativity,” and “creative composition.”

In this chapter, we begin “plugging in” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 4) to a continuous process of “making and unmaking” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013, p. 262), allowing us to dis-assemble and re-assemble classroom narratives on composing. We know that programs that aim to foster, promote, and teach music composition (and compositional creativity) can involve re-imagining new creative ecologies in composing as manifest in creative professional contexts and classroom contexts. Programs that bridge the gap between education and real-world creative industries, where composers take risks, engage in imaginative activity, and do things differently, are the most successful (Kinsella & Fautley, 2020; Daubney & Tunmer, 2020; Philpott, 2020).

Second, we need to remind ourselves of the ongoing debates about composition pedagogies such as: (a) where the disciplinary specificity creates a binary opposition between performers and composers; (b) when creating “what if” questions is vital to engaging students by activating diverse creativities; and (c) how teachers and learners co-construct pedagogy involving collaboration. The act of teaching can be a collaboration between ideas, values, cultures, and collective histories that inform, shape, and redefine the domain of the 21st-century musician and what might be done differently in the future.

The core of composition teaching is acts of making, where materials (physical or sonic), forms, prior experiences, and bodies are set in motion with each other, creating the potential to make new or to make differently. This requires both students and teachers to be makers. They must pay attention to what has been set in motion, what potential emerges as a result, and to be able to respond (sensorially, musically, physically) to this potential in the act of making.

Composing involves a multiplicity of creative authorship practices, modalities, and claims of authority that can be institutionally bound up in the place and space that authorize the particular practice of composing. Some artist-scholars use a more im- provisational, open-ended approach in their composing, while others use a more structured style. Evidence from our research with children, student teachers, and teachers illustrates that a shift toward repositioning composition as making with, rooted in transdisciplinary, posthumanist, and improvisational ways of being, both challenges the myths around composition and composers, and generates different ways of making with children.

For many years the primary and secondary school sectors have employed visiting composers and professional musicians to work in educational partnerships with teachers in schools. The industry knowledge of professional composers (both the “know-how” of composing and “know-what” of composing) provides insights for both learners and teachers about the ability to learn from failure, and about becoming “prod-users” of disciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge, rather than consumers of teacher knowledge.

They challenge intention-directed pedagogies, with their linear routes to declarative and assessable outcomes that are predictable in advance, by creating collaborative explorations of what is possible. In educational research there is a small, but growing, body of research that identifies the pedagogical potential of partnerships led by composers or artists (Burnard & Swann, 2010; Triantafyllaki & Burnard, 2010).