Structuring Composing Exercises and Projects

Like learning to sing, composing is a set of skills that must be developed with practice and patience. Early composing exercises can serve as ways to help students learn music theory and the human voice by developing a sense of vocal ranges, melodic and rhythmic phrasing, chord functions, musical form, voice-l eading, reading, and aural skills. Exercises can help them develop text ideas, such as discussing the meaning of a poem, practicing scansion, or musical ideas such as choosing a cadence for the end of two phrases, improvising a melody over a simple chord progression.

For each exercise, teachers should help students to develop intentions to articulate what the text or musical gesture means to them. No exercise should be given simply for technical purposes but should always seek convey a physical sensation, idea, or emotion. This means that teachers should always ask, “Why did you make that choice?” or “To what end did you choose to . . .?” until thinking why and to what end becomes second nature. Each of these exercises is also designed to help students learn or practice at least one of the topics of social and emotional learning. An introduction to the exercise will be followed by a brief description of the SEL benefit that a teacher should focus upon.

Holistic qualities of performing and visual arts can help students to link “What I want to convey” with “How I want to convey it.” One way to communicate an expressive intention is through the choreographer Rudolf von Laban’s four categories of speed, weight, direction, and flow to help them uncover aspects of choral works (Brooks, 1993). As Libby Larsen (2007) describes, speed refers to the rapidity of movement with opposites of “quick” versus “sustained” Larsen wrote that composing should mean finding a balance between types of movement and stillness. Weight refers to the quality of heaviness or buoyancy, direction refers to whether the movement is in a direct path or follows an oblique/indirect path, and flow refers to the relative freedom or quality of being bound in movement.

In order to complete exercises, teachers should help students create a lexicon of descriptive holistic terms and lists of these terms should be visible for them to use in analysis and composition. The teacher may have students brainstorm words describing different qualities of flow, for example, like “dragging” “lugubrious,” “spritely,” “flowing” and “erratic” They can then use the terms to decide upon the intent for flow in repertoire they are singing. If learning Morten Lauridsen’s “Dirait-on” (1994), for example, they might decide that the melody and accompaniment of the opening verse are hesitant, restrained, and wave-like in comparison to the chorus that floats freely. Considering the holistic qualities helps students to question why and how a composer makes artistic choices. Further, greater vocabulary will help students to articulate their own creative intent and support self-awareness.

Exercises and projects can take place in a number of contexts. Novice composers can benefit from teacher-led practice with the full ensemble, followed by homework exercises for guided practice. Students can be organized into pairs or small groups to reflect on how they made creative choices, listen to each other’s homework, and provide feedback to each other. They can be grouped to practice improvisations or complete longer projects, to discuss meaningful texts and reflect on compositional products. There will be students who prefer not to talk about their emotions and interpretations with peers. Deeply meaningful texts can hit students close to the heart and their emotional/social growth might be best supported by speaking to a trusted individual. These students would benefit from sharing with the teacher or a single friend through voice memos, a journal, or an in-person conversation. Whenever discussing texts, it is a good idea to provide options.

Longer composition tasks should be given as individual projects. Aspects of the process may be completed in groups or paired discussion, but the creative work of a young composer should involve sitting with their own ideas, testing out musical gestures, and arriving at their own musical decisions. Their individual work is part of developing responsible decision-making skills.

There are many composition tools available to students. They can compose with paper and pencil at the keyboard, guitar, or a melody instrument or work with friends to develop a live performance. They can use score notation programs with record features to help with transcriptions or DAW² track notation and video programs to create layers of sound. Any tool that a composer uses provides affordances, things that it can help the composer do, and also limitations, things that are difficult or impossible. For example, writing on staff notation at the keyboard allows for students to play chords and melody as well as sing to hear themselves, as well as seeing how melodies, harmonies, and accompaniment fit vertically. However, they may find this form of transcription inordinately time-consuming or may not have keyboard skills to play what they can hear with their inner ears. Conversely, the loops in track programs make beats and chord progressions easy to create but students may not have the knowledge to name the chord progressions they hear in packaged form nor the skill to build more complex musical forms. The teacher should think carefully about the tools to teach and provide for each composing exercise for the affordances and limitations that it brings.

The teacher should always add an element of reflection for students to consider how they make creative decisions, the criteria they bring to bear in determining more or less successful explorations, and the relative success of compositional products toward their artistic intent. Paper and electronic journals can be as useful as in-person discussions and allow students to share their reflections during the creative process with the teacher. Students can also use journals to write down ideas about their interpretations and intent for texts, and to map out creative musical ideas involving scansion, melody, form, chord progressions, and voicing.

Students must hear what they create, and preferably with live voices, in order to be able to evaluate their creative efforts. Teachers should record and store student performances of compositions for reflection and feedback. Young composers should be encouraged to revise and rework creations after teacher, peer, and self-feedback, allowing for the mental “cooking” thought processes to bear fruit (Stroope, 2007).

Performance and recording can become cumbersome; a single composition project with a choir of 75 students could take a year to read and record! Instead of full-choir performances of individual works, teachers can assign chamber groups to rehearse and perform each other’s creations, giving projects for specific voice groupings so everyone can create and perform. Project groups will allow post-performance reflection so individuals can learn how their creation works for the voices in their chamber group and how the arrangement of consonants and vowels supports or deters from their artistic intent because of either rhythm or vocal range. It will be best for project groups to work together for several projects so students can develop a supportive community for each other.