Compositions as Models for Students’ Creations

Assignment 1: El Cimarron—Hans Werner Henze. The assignment is based on the composition El Cimarron by the German composer Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012), which is a piece for voice, guitar, flute, and percussion (Oberschmidt & Schlabitz, 2014, pp. 48-54). The setting of the piece is the Cuban War of Independence told from the perspective of a veteran, telling the story of his life. As students engage with a modern tonal language, they are encouraged to break free from their own normalized notions about music and expand their experiential space.

The first task is to read a part of the text that is called Slavery. The pupils read a comment about the composition that says that the content and the music merge to a unity. They are asked to discuss what kind of music they expect, based on this comment. After that they listen to Henze’s composition and compare it with their expectations.

In the next task the pupils are confronted with the text that they are asked to set into music. The text has the title The Escape. In the first step they are asked to work with the text and to read it carefully, divide it into sections, collect ideas and associations to these sections.

The author identifies potential problems and gives advice on what teacher interventions might be needed. One hint is to advise the students to compose an introduction, interludes, and an outro to avoid only illustrating the words in the text.

After the students presented their own pieces, Jurgen Oberschmidt suggests they compare these with Henze’s solution by writing reviews of their classmates’ pieces. Even though this task centers on a political piece by Henze, it is not connected with Henze’s visions of cultural education and community music (see the section in this chapter, “Historical Perspective on Composing in Schools in Germany”).

Assignment 2: Les Quatre Coins—Erik Satie. This assignment is the end of a unit plan about Erik Satie’s Les quatre coins (Brassel, 2012, p. 18). In this piece for piano Satie sets a movement game to music, which is based on a cat, chasing four mice that are in four corners. Every mouse is symbolized by one tone. The children analyze the composition and try to understand what happens in the game. Therefore, they learn the names of different tones and how these tones in different octaves are notated in a piano score. This shows how the tasks are often closely interwoven with teaching various other competencies, therefore composing for the sake ofcomposing is not the only goal.

The children get the task to change Satie’s composition (see Opportunity 1) or to compose a different story by using only five tones (see Opportunity 2). So, the results can’t be compared with Satie’s original composition, although they are based on his piece.

Opportunity 1. The students are asked to change Satie’s storyline. First, they are asked to expand the section where the cat is teased by the mice, which is very short in the original composition. Afterward, they can expand the end of the composition by telling what happened to the other mice or they can change the end and are given three possibilities. But they can also think about their own ideas for a different end and realize them. The three possible ends that are suggested are the following: 1) The cat tries to catch a mouse again and again without succeeding. 2) The mice free their friend that was caught by the cat. 3) The mice put the cat to flight.

Opportunity 2. The pupils are asked to compose a piece for piano or another instrument by using only five different notes that are given (E, F, B, C, D). First, they are asked to invent a story that includes five roles, for example a policeman who hunts four bank robbers or a tamer in a circus who tames four tigers. They are asked to construct the different steps of the story. Afterward, the task is to invent adequate musical movements that match the actions and to arrange them in a musical form. In the last task the students are asked to notate the score and to present their piece.

Reflection 3. In this group of tasks, the connection to the Response tradition (see section in this chapter, “Historical Perspective on Composing in Schools in Germany”) becomes obvious. The biggest difference is that it is not the composer of the reference work who works with the students, but the composer is, in a sense, represented by the teacher. The students are asked to create their own music inspired by music of other composers. The role of the reference composition is very different. In Assignment 1 the students set a part of the text in music which was also used by the composer. They listen to the original composition afterward. In the second assignment the children use the same material and they continue the composition or compose an extension after having analyzed the composition.

One aspect that may need to be critically considered is the comparison of the student compositions with the original composition, as suggested in the first assignment. This could give the impression that the original composition is the sample solution that the students can reach more or less. It creates a competition with the composer of the reference music. As a result, there is a danger that the students’ compositions will be taken less seriously and be devalued.

The tasks presented in this section are certainly only a very small and exemplary selection. However, they served to illustrate how either traces of New Music are directly reflected in them or how single elements of New Music are being used (e.g., being metrically free; using experimental sounds). The reduction, which is necessary in pedagogical contexts, can easily result in rather embarrassing compositions, which can neither meet the demands of the students nor the demands of the teachers. However, some tasks could be presented in which this balancing act between artistic demand and simultaneous reduction succeeded very well.