The Importance of Composition and Performance. Expanding Venues for Performance of Student Composition

Composition should be a vital component of every child’s musical education. Just as a language arts curriculum encompasses listening, reading, writing, and speaking, so too must a complete music curriculum include not only performing and responding to music, but also composing and improvising—activities in which the students learn to create their own music. As students use the art of music to express their own ideas and emotions, they gain increasing musical mastery and understanding, and they acquire powerful tools of self-expression. Imagine if we learned as children to read, but not to write essays, stories, poems, or correspondence.

We would not be fluent in our language. The same is true of music. When students compose, they enter the creative source of music and learn to appreciate the intentionality of music, the idea that composers are expressing meaning in their work. In addition to the intrinsic value of musical self-expression, this awareness increases students’ abilities as performers and listeners because they learn to better understand the communicative vector of music (Deutsch, 2009).

Most compositions are meant to be performed. From the earliest stages in PreK and elementary school, music classes should include the performance of student- created music. Developed in this context, the performance of student composition and improvisation becomes a normal means of musical communication and the walls between composer, performer, and listener are transcended. Within the safety of a supportive classroom, performances of early experiments in composition and improvisation, generated by groups and individuals, help students to feel empowered as creators expressing their own musical ideas, even if quite simple at first, just as their first attempts at creative writing empower them as young authors.

Even at the introductory level, as students make aesthetic choices, they join the ranks of composers. They learn that they are adding to the body of art in the world and should be told that they are making the world a more beautiful place. At the appropriate stages, the audience may be expanded by inviting other classes and/or parents, which provides a somewhat more formal setting for performance.

Expanding Venues for Performance of Student Composition. As students make progress and gain more experience in composition, teachers should encourage them by offering wider opportunities for performance. One of the most effective ways of inspiring students to create compositions and to persevere to completion is to provide venues for performance. Scheduled performances set tangible goalposts for students. They reinforce the communicative purpose of composition because they provide a pathway from the loneliness of composition to the shared aesthetic response of a community of listeners. Even professional composers often emphasize the important role that deadlines and performance commitments play in encouraging task completion.

Elementary, middle, and high schools are all appropriate settings for student composition concerts or “young composer festivals.” Close mentoring and instruction help students to make the most progress, but simply announcing a date and setting for a young composer festival is often enough to motivate students to create pieces. Planning for a young composer festival attracts the attention of the students with the strongest interest in composition and helps to build a community of young composers. If students are being mentored to develop their own unique musical ideas, the concerts will be extraordinarily varied, with music ranging among pop songs, jazz combos, “classical” solos and chamber works, and even avant-garde experimental works.

Because the students are expressing their own feelings and ideas in the music, there is often a higher level of passion and emotional intensity than is usual in school concerts. A random sequence of composition titles from a festival of my fifth- and sixth-grade students from a single year hints at the diversity and emotional force of the works: Invention 4.1; Gone for Good; Jazz Pizzazz; My Dream World; Tessellations; Dance of the Butterfly; Bittersweet; The Workshop of Daedalus.

When parents, teachers, and administrators attend the concerts, they are often surprised by the high quality of many of the compositions. A frequent result is that parents and educational administrators become stronger proponents of school composition programs. The compositions can be revealing. Sometimes they seem to confirm the personality of the composer to their parents and friends, as when a perennially cheerful student creates a piece that hops along happily. But sometimes they open a new window into the audience’s perception, as when a competitive athlete composes a tender piece, or a shy student composes a piece of thundering passion. As one parent wrote to me in an email after a young composer festival: “We, the parents, have learned more about our children through their work [in composition]” (A. He, personal communication, March 26, 2010).

The most highly motivated students are eager to expand their horizons beyond the school walls, which is why higher-level festivals are so important. Teachers can guide them to existing state, regional, and national programs and competitions. If their state or region lacks such programs, educators can adopt some of the ideas that follow in this chapter to create them.

Competitions. Composition competitions have a long history, dating back in the West at least as far as ancient Greece, where composer-performers competed alongside thespians and athletes in festivals such as the Pythian Games, which began in the sixth century BCE (Mathiesen, 2001). For the most ambitious composers, competitions are often important in the trajectory of their careers. From 1803 through 1968, France sponsored the Prix de Rome, which included prizes for the “best” compositions (Gilbert, 2001). (It is amusing to look at the list of winners and see such a long catalog of composers who mostly are unknown at present.) In today’s music world, an internet search leads to hundreds of composition competitions. Contests such as the BMI Student Composer Awards and the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards attract many of the most aspiring young composers in order to build their academic and professional careers. The ladder continues to rise all the way to the Pulitzer Prizes and Grawemeyer Awards.

I personally have recommended competitions to several of my most motivated students (including several winners who have pursued careers in composition), and I have helped to create, administer, and judge competitions. However, I have ambivalent feelings about them, especially when considering the purpose of composition education in general. The goal of including composition in music education is to empower all students to make music creatively, not merely to launch the compositional careers of a tiny fraction of students. Many critics of competition in education have published compelling arguments (Abramo, 2017; Kohn, 1992). As James R. Austin (1990) wrote in Music Educators Journal, “Competition, by definition, always produces few winners and many losers; one person’s success requires another person’s failure” (p.23).

When the NYSSMA young composer program began in 1990, my colleagues and I were acutely aware of this problem. One of our goals was to recognize and reward outstanding students by inviting them to present their works and participate in workshops at our state conference, which has an inherently competitive element. But we also were determined to serve the needs of a large number of students and teachers. The idea of issuing a call for compositions and then accepting 12 “winners” and rejecting 150 “losers” appalled us. As a result, we developed a composition evaluation program by enlisting a team of composers and teachers to write detailed, supportive feedback to all students and teachers who submit compositions. I helped to develop a similar evaluation program for the NAfME competitions, in which hundreds of students receive written evaluations every year. State and national programs and festivals have an unavoidable factor of competition, but we have tried to mitigate the negative effects by serving a broad base of students and teachers. These evaluation programs are discussed in detail later in the chapter.

On the other hand, selecting outstanding students for participation in higher level festivals through an inevitably competitive process has positive points. In Developing Talent in Young People, Lauren A. Sosniak (1985) wrote about successful young concert pianists who were studied for four years in a well-known research project headed by Benjamin S. Bloom:

Recitals, competitions, and adjudications were also powerful means of developing actual competence and feelings of efficacy for music-making abilities. These events gave students and teachers something very specific to work for and also provided a means of evaluating one’s progress over time. They also brought the children’s solitary work into a public arena. All the fanfare that went along with these activities helped the children view their work as something that was real and important in the larger world. (p.488)

At state or national conferences, it is important to bring the selected students together in workshops, seminars, and reflection sessions with supportive mentors so that they develop a sense of community and a realization that they are not merely competitors. As the students discuss their work processes with each other, the competitive barriers tend to weaken. This aligns with a point Joseph Abramo (2017) makes in an article that is highly critical of competition:

How do educators avoid a retreat into hoarding and isolation and retain the positive aspect of convening and comparing that competition festivals provide while addressing some of the problems created by measurement and competition? Educators might exploit the opportunity to participate in the public space of competitions, but transform the practice in important ways where the term “competition” is no longer appropriate. In this new conception of competition, students and educators explicitly describe and show to other students and educators what they learned and what they struggled with through the process of preparing a performance. (p.165)

A key goal of conference sessions and workshops for young composers is to help the students think of each other as colleagues rather than competitors.