Mentoring Young Composer. Collaborative Pathways for Developing Musicianship

Early in my career as a music educator, I was hired to teach a music enrichment class for gifted musicians as a high school elective. Participating students were identified as “talented,” and came from all walks of musical life. There were country music singers; classically trained pianists; students from band, choir, and orchestra programs; and even rock-and-roll guitar players.

I met with these students in small groups once a week, and school administrators provided me with four primary areas of instruction that were to be included in the “talented” music curriculum: development of performance skills, music theory instruction, study of music history, and experience in music composition. For me, the first three areas seemed manageable. However, when considering how to approach teaching composition, I was terrified. I had absolutely no training in how to teach composition and was completely unsure about where to begin. The students in my classes came from widely varying levels of musical ability and knowledge. Some read and understood music notation, some read guitar tablature, some learned by ear and didn’t read notation at all.

I was fortunate to be able to work with the students in small groups, which allowed time for some individual instruction. I also had piano keyboards available for each student. My first efforts in providing composition instruction often involved asking students for very specific details in their compositions—requiring a specific number of measures, asking for demonstration of musical details such as dynamic contrast, ABA form, etc.

These prescriptive requirements left little room for student creativity. After many years of trying different approaches, some successful and some not, I began to allow the students much greater freedom in their choices and simply tried to offer suggestions to guide the process. I identified a few strategies that seemed to work. Even more importantly, I discovered reasons that the composition projects in these classes were a critical part of the students’ musical development.

First, though the students came from different areas and levels of musicianship, all seemed to be incredibly engaged in finding ways to realize and document the musical ideas and the sounds in their heads. Most students felt a sense of ownership of their music compositions and experienced pride in their accomplishments, especially when musical ideas were shared or performed. Finally, it was clear that the students developed improved levels of musicianship through the process of imagining and constructing their music compositions. The experience of music composition seemed to effectively support learning in those “other” areas of instruction that I was responsible for. I learned how to “teach” composition in a public school setting by trial and error, and by simply mentoring the students as they explored their musical ideas.

Today, there are many remarkable publications and resources available that document successful composition programs and delineate teaching strategies that will work in varied music education settings. There is clearly a powerful push, in our many music education circles, to increase opportunities for creative thinking in music through music composition. My goal for this chapter is to explore some of those strategies for teaching composition and identify simple guiding principles that will support the process of mentoring young composers as they develop their musicianship through composition experiences.

Development of Accessible Pathways to Composition in K-12 Schools. Participation in music composition activities provides an important and necessary opportunity for children to think musically and construct musical meaning. We can identify many resources that support the importance of music composition as an essential part of the music curriculum for every age. In a philosophical discussion of the role of composition and creativity for children, Margaret Barrett (2003) described music composition as a meaning-making process, critical to the musical, social, and emotional life of children, sharing, “If education, and by extension music education, is the development of children’s capacity to construct their worlds in meaningful ways, then a view of composition as a form of meaning-making seems a worthy enterprise” (p. 115). Constructing meaning in any subject area surely is a primary goal of education.

Jackie Wiggins (2007) examined compositional process in music and identified a critical need for children to have opportunities for music expression through composition, saying, “Since all people are capable of inventing musical ideas, it would seem that all music learners should, at some time in their education, have opportunities to explore this capability as part of their learning” (p. 465). Wiggins also believes that students who compose are working “in an environment that fosters ownership and agency” (p. 466). This idea of ownership and agency is important in student identity and engagement with music and is often visible in students that participate in the composition process. One goal of all music educators should be to help students experience this sense of agency and ownership in music. Music composition experiences lead our students to explore creativity by sharing their musical ideas and help them to make meaningful connections to the musical concepts that we want them to learn.