Cultivating a Purpose-Driven Composition Pedagogy in General Music

Through creating, manipulating, organizing, mixing, and remixing sounds, students engage in artistic endeavors that can support their development of musical skills, social awareness, and creative practice. When students compose, they are involved in the creative process from the inside out, generating ideas and moving through cycles of revision as they explore ways of sharing a musical message with the world. There are many ways music educators can and do incorporate composition into the general music classroom, including songwriting, digital creation, short notation-based prompts, and long project-based engagements, among others. Each of these pathways implies a belief about the purpose of composition in the larger ecology of students’ musical experiences in school.

The performance-driven curricular structure of K-12 music education in the United States has often resulted in the use of composition as a tool for students to improve or demonstrate a functional understanding of Western classical notational literacy, particularly around note values, pitches, and scales (Burnard, 2012; Hess, 2015). In these cases, composition may be an exercise in music theory, a tool to assess student understanding of skills such as rhythm reading, dynamic markings, and notation with little acknowledgment of student knowledge, experience, and exploration beyond the confines of the music classroom. Composition in this context can become a precursor in a linear progression toward predetermined goals of functional literacy in the Western classical domain, with contextualized musical creation saved for those who may be perceived to hold an advanced level of musicianship (Viig, 2015). Composition can thus become viewed by students as a school activity disconnected from personal experience rather than an opportunity to create and explore in and through music (Crow, 2008). Such experiences have the potential to not only send a message of what matters, but inevitably who matters in the music classroom.

Composition, however, can also be a space for the development of critical literacy, where students explore social relations and personal inquiry through their creative work. When the purpose of composition converges to include discipline-specific functional skills (or what I refer to throughout this chapter as musical craftsmanship) alongside criticality and creativity, these endeavors can be opportunities for students to build musical skills while challenging narratives, considering multiple perspectives, and exploring their conceptions and understandings of themselves and others. As they share their work, students’ compositions can provoke, invite, and render new meanings, helping them develop their own voice alongside and in community with others.

In an educational environment predicated on high-stakes testing, “teacher-proof” curricula, and a fragmentation of disciplines, music educators often find engaging with this type of criticality to be challenging (Benedict, 2012). This challenge is often amplified in the environ of general music; a context that, while broad, often lacks cohesion and clarity (Abril, 2016). Teaching and learning within general music education can be designed, however, to help students engage in a critical manner, encouraging them to build upon their own inquiries as they embrace opportunities to develop discipline- specific skills in tandem with broader critical understandings.

In this chapter, I consider what critical and creative compositional practices might look like when operationalized in the music classroom. Drawing from scholars who speak to critical literacy in the music classroom (Benedict, 2012; Gould, 2009), creative practices in composition (Hickey, 2012; Kaschub & Smith, 2009; Upitis, 2019), and connections between music creation and social consciousness (Bylica, 2020; Kaschub, 2009), I present a purpose-driven pedagogy of classroom composition. Within this pedagogy, I explore how criticality can strike a balance with musical craftsmanship as students enter compositional processes with the aim of simultaneously exploring musical skills while also engaging in musical creation as a form of social response. I then place these ideas within the realm of general music at multiple levels, offering ideas that argue for a notion of these classes as spaces where dispositions that are critical, creative, and artistic can be cultivated.