Composing Music to Stories or Poems

The first three assignments focused on the use of everyday sounds or objects as material for the composition. In the following group of assignments, the starting points for a composition are stories or poems.

Assignment 1: Sound Scene with the Voice. In this assignment the students compose a piece on the basis of a comic or a picture story (Brassel, 2012, p. 105), which has a storyline but less text than fairy tales for example, which are also used in assignments especially for primary school.

The first assignment that is presented here is based on a Peanuts comic with Snoopy, which can be found online (https://images.app.goo.gl/hC98AWBBq8zihj996). The project is included in a textbook for secondary school (grade five to seven) and is part of a unit plan which is called: “Discover your voice" The assignment follows a lesson about Cathy Berberian’s famous piece Stripsody. The assignment is to transfer the Peanuts comic to a choral piece.

The students are asked to use the various expressive possibilities of the voice for this purpose. The process is divided into three tasks. In the first one, the students are required to get familiar with the comic. Then, they are asked to decide for which parts of the story they want to use words, and which parts they want to represent without words. As a tool they get a collection of ideas like: repeat syllables, words or group of words; speak rhythmically; sing without text. The third task is to decide on the final arrangement and form and to record the result.

A similar task is given to smaller children in a different book and is called “Sound puzzle” (Kotzian, 2014, pp. 12-15). Instead of a comic, Kotzian offers short picture stories about funny incidents (e.g., falling over a dog carrying a birthday cake). Because the assignment is meant for children at the beginning of primary school the task is first led by the teacher and the children choose a second story to compose the music themselves. They can also use their voice or instruments.

Assignment 2: In the Fog. Another text form that is often used for composition assignments is poems. This assignment is taken from a book about composing with small children in preschool or primary school (Reitinger, 2008, pp. 256-258).

The text was written based on a poem by the German poet Eduard Moricke. The poem consists of only four lines and the content is the following: the world is still sleeping in the fog and all the sounds are still dreaming. As soon as the fog lifts you can hear a lot. First of all, the text is presented in single verses and the task is to put it together in the right order. The group is asked to talk about the meaning of the poem and to collect associations, thoughts and ideas about the content. The teacher hides the instruments under a big cloth, which symbolizes the fog. It is taken away and each child has to choose an instrument and to experiment with it. The task is to produce “foggy sounds” or sounds connected to the associations that were collected before.

After exploring the sounds, the children are asked to create a “chain of sounds” in a group improvisation. One child has to conduct the improvisation by moving the white cloth, which symbolizes the fog. The other children have to react to the movement. They can discuss the meaning of certain movements and connect certain parameters with certain movements.

In the next task the children are asked to invent music which symbolizes things, animals, or people that could appear when the fog disappears. They are asked to present their results and the other children are asked to guess what appears out of the fog. In the next step, the children are asked to invent music that matches the form of the poem. The task is to make clear when the fog starts to disappear. After the presentation the children have to discuss how the others made the change clear.

The next task is to speak the poem and to find a rhythm. Afterward, this rhythm has to be transferred into a melody, using mallets or piano. The children can experiment with different scales like pentatonic, diatonic, or chromatic scales. For the presentation, one half of the group is asked to play the “chain of sounds” while the other children are asked to play their melodies as solos one after the other. The last task is to agree on an arrangement and to put all invented elements together.

Hans Schneider (2017, pp. 93-99) also suggests different poems to put them into music. He uses Dadaist poems, which are more suitable for an older age group, because the text and the form is more experimental and abstract than the poem in Reitinger’ s assignment.

Reflection 2. Setting texts and poems to music is a popular way to introduce students to composing at all ages. It is used both for finding adequate sounds to atmospheres and contents and for finding a form. Since a text has already a certain progression, the students do not have to invent a form and so they are given the possibility to focus on how such a progression can be represented musically. Depending on the text, these assignments can be used in all age groups. In setting Dadaist poems to music, a higher level of abstraction is required, and thus it is adequate for older age groups. The texts used for younger children are easier to grasp. In addition to narrations and poems, picture stories, comics, or illustrations to the text are often used. A picture story or a comic has another advantage, because the course of the story is still clear, but there are no words that can influence the composition.

Even though this type of assignment is less obviously linked to means of New Music, the results are still experimental, because the instructions often lead to results that are tonally and metrically free and can be described as a series of sound events.

Some question to what extent the result has an artistic quality, especially if the task neither attends to the text nor can stand on its own, detached from the text. Rather, the presented assignments try to ensure that the result is a piece of music that can stand on its own even without knowledge of the underlying story. Overall, it makes sense to orient the composition process to a text in educational contexts. In addition to texts, paintings or graphics are often chosen as starting points for compositions. This approach is helpful because students can orient on what they see as they select and organize sounds. The interpretation of graphic scores also is used as a starting point, since these offer creative freedom to the performers (Schneider, 2017, pp. 113-135). The advantage of images and scores over texts is that it is easier to detach from the template, because a painting may be less concrete than a storyline. Mostly, pictures from the 20th or 21st century are used, because they are already characterized by a high abstraction (Voit, 2018b).