Musical Composition in Primary and Lower Secondary Schools

In the national core curriculum, musical composition and other creative activities are expected to be taught to all students in all grades (FNAE, 2016a). This objective is linked to the wider aspiration of encouraging children to develop “a creative relationship with music” (FNAE, 2016a, p. 488, my emphasis) during their years in comprehensive schools. Offering children opportunities to compose their own music individually and/ or in collaboration with others is also considered beneficial for their overall growth and cognitive development as well as their intuitive and aesthetic thinking. Musical composition is for everyone as it supports the development of children’s creative thinking:

The pupils are guided in developing their thinking skills and perception by regularly providing them with opportunities for working with sound and music as well as for composing and other creative production. (FNAE, 2016a, p. 454)

Both in the core curricula for basic education and for upper secondary education, musical composition is conceptualized in the broadest sense of the word without limiting it to any specific method, technique, form, style, or genre. In other words, composition in Finnish education may refer to any creative music-making activity from writing songs or creating score-based music to arranging or improvising music; and from forming soundscapes or sound collages to building loops, riffs, and remixes. Composition activities can also take place within any musical style or genre, with or without the use of music education technology, such as digital audio workstations, digital instruments, modular platforms, or multi-track audio editors.

Understanding musical composition in this broad sense facilitates its practice in various pedagogical situations and contexts. Indeed, a primary school music teacher has multiple opportunities to incorporate musical composition and creative production as part of almost any classroom activity from learning the alphabet to celebrating special occasions throughout the academic year. Finnish teacher-educator and researcher Sari Muhonen (2013a) encourages teachers in primary classrooms to nurture students’ “everyday creativity, creativity with a small c” (ibid., p. 13), as a key ingredient of daily life. In her study on songcrafting, Muhonen (2016) shows how collaborative composition can open opportunities to support children’s musical agency and creative capabilities in the classroom.

By incorporating songcrafting into other school practices, composition and creative collaborations are viewed not as a separate task, but as an inherent part of all teaching and learning. This kind of creative music-making highlights the nature of composition as a musical exploration and a form of playing that does not necessarily always require dedicated time and space. Rather, as suggested by the Finnish teacher- educator Marja Ervasti (2013), composition can be adopted as a pedagogical practice that penetrates learning processes and takes place in a “surreptitious manner” (p. 113, my translation) and as brief experiments among other educational activities.

Another concrete and exciting example of the possibilities of composition in primary school education is provided by the Finnish music educator and researcher Hanna Nikkanen in her case study on composition activities within music ensemble² classes (Karjalainen-Vakeva & Nikkanen, 2013). The classes took place after school hours as an extracurricular activity, but were facilitated by the music teacher in the school premises. The children were instructed in playing the instruments (such as guitar, bass, ukuleles, and drums) and their ensembles were given opportunities to publicly perform in school events. The repertoire choices were made by the children themselves and many decided already from the outset to compose their own songs. A crucial factor impacting their eagerness to compose was the model set by previous ensembles: after witnessing groups performing their own material in a concert, the majority of the ensembles set up the following year not only took composing for granted, but were motivated by the possibility to compose their own repertoire.

The role of the teacher was to help the children identify and develop their creative ideas into complete songs by, for instance, introducing different ways to continue the melody line or chord progression. According to Nikkanen (ibid.), the annual concert offered extra motivation for the ensembles to finalize their compositions and provided the children with valuable opportunities to express something about themselves and hear each other’s stories in the form of musical compositions.

Muhonen (2013b) reminds us that an essential task of the music teacher is to create opportunities for creative music-making and not only notice, but seize the musical ideas coming from the students. Although opportunities to facilitate extensive composition projects may be limited, creative music-making and collective creative inquiries can have a central role in school instruction. In the Finnish school, this is enabled by the flexibility of the curriculum and the inclusion of integrated instruction and multidisciplinary learning modules as part of the school culture. In the core curriculum for basic education (FNAE, 2016a), the aim of integrated instruction is understood in terms of safeguarding “every pupil’s possibilities of examining wholes and engaging in exploratory work that is of interest to the pupils” (p. 33). In other words, students are helped to “see the relationships and interdependencies between the phenomena to be studied” (p. 32) by systematically including multidisciplinary learning modules as part of school instruction.

This multidisciplinary pedagogical approach provides a teacher with various opportunities for holistic instruction where music and musical composition can be integrated with other subjects and activities in pursuit of helping students to combine knowledge and skills in various fields in the communal building of knowledge. In this way musical composition in primary school education can also become a natural part of self-expression, learning, and communication in the form of creative explorations that are accessible to everyone. Importantly, however, in order to facilitate these processes, classroom teachers need to be equipped with adequate skills in composition pedagogy. I will return to this theme later in the chapter.

The Finnish music educator Mirja Karjalainen-Vakeva provides a detailed narrative on teaching composition in a lower secondary school as part of the eighth-grade optional music classes (Karjalainen-Vakeva & Nikkanen, 2013). The composition period conducted by Karjalainen-Vakeva was preceded by a student survey that provided the teacher with important information on students’ expectations, needs, musical tastes, experiences, and concerns regarding composing. By utilizing this information, Karjalainen-Vakeva was able to customize her teaching to the students’ needs and form the student-groups in ways that would best support the creative work. In her strategies for teaching composition Karjalainen-Vakeva drew heavily on principles and activities from drama pedagogy.

She reports to have used, for example, the concept of the contract, a mutual agreement negotiated as a group before embarking on the creative activities regarding the aims and conditions for working. The students were taught, and regularly reminded of, the principle of accepting (see, Johnstone 1999), and its role in establishing the fruitful conditions required for creative work, as well as the importance of listening and responding as cornerstones of positive interaction. The composition process began with small group musical improvisation activities during which the teacher circulated to assist the student groups with seizing and developing the impulses and initial ideas that arose from the group improvisation. Like Nikkanen, Karjalainen- Vakeva (Karjalainen-Vakeva & Nikkanen 2013) highlights the importance of the public performance as part of the composition process. She points out, however, that the aim of the performance is to support students’ learning processes and should therefore be pedagogically planned by the teacher to give students an opportunity to “safely stretch the boundaries of their comfort zones” (ibid., p. 73, my translation).