Composing with Everyday Objects and Sounds

The first cluster of tasks that we present is comparable in the choice of material that is used for the composition. The tasks have in common that either everyday objects are used as instruments or everyday sounds are the basis for the composition.

Assignment 1: Sounds Becoming Musicю The assignment is suggested in a textbook for music lessons at the beginning of secondary school (grades five through seven, ages 10 to 13). It is proposed as the final project of a unit plan on the theme “Soundtrack of my everyday life” (Brassel, 2012, pp. 201-213). In this series of lessons, the students have to reflect on how music structures their day. Thus, they reflect on background music in different situations (e.g., shopping or sports), they learn about the ear, and there is a lesson about mobile phones and ringtones.

The assignment of the final project (Brassel, 2012, p. 213) is structured into three different tasks. First, the students see a graphic notation and are asked to describe what sounds they would expect if this piece of music was played with cell phones.

In the second task they are required to compose a one-minute piece of music using the ringtones of their cell phones only. They need to choose a suitable title for their piece. Finally, they are asked to notate the composition using a graphic notation.

The third task is to first show their graphic notations to their classmates and the classmates are asked to describe what they expect to hear. Then each group has to present their composition and their classmates are asked to describe what the composition expresses and what the title could be.

It is not specified whether the composition ought to be put together on the computer or with an app, or played live using the phones as instruments.

The composition uses sounds of everyday lives and cell phones are used as an instrument. Similar assignments often use cell phones as a recording device and the pupils walk around in their schools or in town to collect sounds. This clearly picks up a compositional technique that was used in the tradition of mu- sique concrete. Examples for this can be found internationally, for example in Maud Hickey’s (2012, p. 78) book Music outside the lines. When sounds are recorded with cell phones or other mobile devices the sounds are often manipulated with a software afterward.

Assignment 2: Cold. This assignment is taken from a book in which the author published different composition tasks that are all inspired by his love for contemporary art music (Schneider, 2017, pp. 69-71). The room has to be prepared before the students enter. The chairs ought to be put in a circle and a pair of stones and a piece of aluminum foil are placed under each chair.

Schneider suggests different actions for a warm-up. In the first warm-up the sounds “s” and “sh” are used and the students are asked to change the sound from a sharp s- sound to a more sonoric one, to “sh” and back without using a conductor, just by listening to each other. In the second warm-up the students have to create sounds to the topic “cold” by using their body and voice to create sounds. Afterward they are asked to pick up the aluminum foil without making any noise. One person starts by shaking the foil softly and this sound travels through the circle and increases in the process until it is “stormy” and goes back to complete silence. After that exercise, the students are asked to try different ways to create sounds with the stones. Everyone invents a short motive, which is presented in the circle.

After these warm-ups the students form groups. The task is to create a piece three to five minutes long on the topic “cold” and the students should be able to repeat the piece. They are asked to choose other instruments (e.g., piano, flute, guitars, strings, mouthpieces of brass instruments) in addition to the foil and the stones. The pieces are afterward presented in a way in which no interruption is necessary between pieces. The teacher decides the order of the presentations. In between the groups the teacher presents recordings of pieces that also have “cold” as a theme (e.g., Antonio Vivaldi, “Winter” from The Four Seasons, Hans Abrahamsen, “Schnee [Snow]”). The presentation is followed by a reflection and the students have the opportunity to change their composition before their final presentation.

There are many other examples for tasks in which everyday objects can be used along with music instruments or the voice. In a textbook for primary schools, for example, we can find a task where the students are asked to find scary sounds using all kinds of material (Kuntzel, 2012, p. 83) or they are asked to create a certain atmosphere by using their voice, their body, instruments, or other objects (Kuntzel, 2012, p. 43). Through the use of the experimental sounds, these tasks are informed by New Music practices (see Reflection 1).

Assignment3: An Exercise. This assignment was published on a website for composition pedagogy in Germany (www.kompaed.de). The assignment can be adapted to different learning levels and can be performed with different age groups (Schlothfeldt, 2018).

The assignment is structured in six steps. In the first step the students are asked to listen to one minute of silence. The task is to notate the sounds they hear during this minute either while listening or afterward from memory. How detailed the sound events are notated can vary depending on the students’ level of knowledge. It can range from graphic notations to precise rhythmic and melodic notations. All of them use a simple coordinate system as a score. The у-axis shows the different sounds that are heard, and the x-axis shows the progression over time. This score is the starting point for the piece to be created.

In the second step the elements on the score are realized on musical instruments, with the voice or imitated with other objects that are available. The students are asked to try to imitate the sounds they have heard. If necessary, the notation should be changed or modified in a way that it represents the slightly new sounds. In a third step the students can create new sounds with the instruments/objects they have chosen and notate them, so they can be used as further composition material.

Afterward, in the fourth step, they take all the elements they have notated so far and put them together in a new form. The piece can still be limited to one minute but it doesn’t have to be. However, the original sequence is discarded in this step and the events are rearranged.

In the fifth step the students shall reflect on their piece by analyzing it. They shall answer questions like: How many parts does the composition have? How are the different elements connected? Are there variations? After this reflection they can change the piece, if necessary.

In the final sixth step they have to present their piece, initially in the classroom, but a public presentation may follow.

This assignment uses everyday sounds but only as the basis for the composition, not as its material. The kind of notation is typical of similar tasks. In a book for primary school the same way of notating a piece is used in a composition assignment with the title “An interesting soup” in which the students are asked to find interesting spices for their musical soup (Kuntzel, 2012, p. 55). Hans Schneider (2017, p. 120) suggests putting the organized system in a long paper roll on the floor, so that the students can note the single elements on cards that they can rearrange easily.

Reflection 1. There are differences but also some interesting commonalities between the three assignments that were presented so far. In the first example everyday sounds were used and put together to a composition. The students choose what they want to express with the given material. In the second assignment everyday objects are used as instruments to compose music for a certain given atmosphere (the cold). In the third assignment, the random everyday sounds heard in one minute of silence are used as a starting point for a composition with musical instruments.

The idea to use everyday sounds and soundscaping as shown in Assignments 1 and 2 is connected to the tradition of musique concrete (e.g., Karlheinz Stockhausen). As mentioned in Section 3, this idea of using experimental sounds in the classroom was introduced by authors like Gertrud Meyer-Denkmann (1972 and 1977) in the 1970s. In the tradition of John Cage (and others) one of the goals is to make the students understand that every sound can be turned into music and that the listeners’ perspective is important. This is especially important in Assignment 3.

Another typical task that is closely connected to the mentioned ones is building new instruments out of everyday objects and composing with those instruments. Roszak (2014) and Schneider (2017, p. 43) offer a lot of good ideas for building experimental instruments. Building instruments is often practiced in schools because it is an interdisciplinary task; in addition, some schools have a lack of instruments, thus, they can use the created instruments as a resource. Furthermore, if these instruments are used in composition assignments, it leads to more experimental compositions, which is considered useful to avoid cliches.

This practice, inspired by the music avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s, is widespread in Germany and Austria even today. Music composition in the sense of sound experiments is still alive in music pedagogies, teaching methods, and school projects even if the aesthetic superstructure might be missing. In many cases, this is done without any theoretical foundation in a kind of pragmatic way. The orientation toward art-music practices seems not to be decisive but instead the success of an experimental approach to music composition lies in the fact that it does not need particular prerequisites like notation skills or skills in playing an instrument. Not much more is required than the willingness to participate. This is why these teaching methods appear to be suitable for music education in general schools. They are inclusive, one might say, however, the question arises as to whether this approach ensures the advanced development of musicianship.