Troubling Composition—Toward a Renewed Perspective

Similar to policy, composition can often start in private and is primarily guided by two factors: value and preservation. Before finding its way into a public sphere (in our case music education spaces), compositions, like policies, may be constructed upon presumed “truths” and are ultimately concerned with advancing, conserving, and preserving these as invaluable, inevitable or natural, and worthy of emulation and obedience. In order to move toward a renewed perspective wherein student-centered cultural production and composition are central to curricular policy and practice, it is important to locate the ways products (and processes) of composing become “institutionalized and canonized . . . fixed . . . regarded as traditional . . . valued and preserved” (Jorgensen, 1997, p. 25). For it is in private personal “belief templates” (Wallace, 2009, p. 43) about composition, composing, and composers wherein values are stenciled, etched, and preserved into policy and practice.

Composition, as has been articulated, is unarguably informed by a Eurocentric- driven narrative that has defined it, and the people consecrated to do it: composers. Such demarcations are abundantly acknowledged in our field as are their limitations (Hickey, 2012; Shouldice, 2014; Thompson, 2007; Woodford, 2002). So, when music teachers such as the ones presented earlier think and act counter to convenient knowledge by facilitating spaces for composing and other forms of student-centered sound and music creation it is not without significance.

Their dispositions, framing, and belief templates may illuminate ways for others to think and do differently in their own music classrooms as they too practice principles of policy know-how at the micro level. Not only did these teachers de-center music, but they also adopted an attitude that acknowledged their students’ “musical and compositional capacities” (Kaschub & Smith, 2021, pp. 67-68). While these may seem axiomatic, they are not, because music education policies and practices that have governed generations of music teachers and learners, especially in reference to composing, are based upon the value and preservation of two prescriptive and privatizing concepts: genius and notation. Indeed, these two factors can (and sometimes do) impede music teachers from promoting composition in their pedagogical philosophy and practice, as notions of genius and the privileged and perceived permanence of notation are engrained in the fabric of American education generally, and music education specifically.

Composing Colonialism: Implications and Limitations of Genius and Notation from Manifest Destiny to the the Mozart (neglect) Effect. As a founding and dominant figure in American public education policy professing an “ideology of democratic schooling” (Carpenter, 2013), Thomas Jefferson’s framing of learning and teaching, and of musical skills, are worthy of some attention. His educational policies were built upon a hierarchical pyramid favoring white males who “demonstrated the best and most promising genius and disposition” (p. 5). Jefferson sought “twenty of the best geniuses [to] be raked from the rubbish” (p. 5) and only those persons could be selected to attend regional grammar schools paid for by the public purse.

This elitism was coupled with racism. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson (1982/1787) viewed US enslaved blacks’ “imagination . . . dull, tasteless, and anomalous” (p. 146). He claimed: “In music they are more generally gifted than the whites, with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved” (p. 147).

One could pause to wonder whether or not, if Jefferson had lived long enough to be in attendance at New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924 for Paul Whiteman’s, An Experiment in Modern Music concert, if he, like the “great conductor and music educator of the day Walter Damrosch” would have agreed that Gershwin had “made a lady out of jazz” (Berrett, 2004, p. 217, frno)? Or what if he had lived to the year 2019 and sat and heard Terrance Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones—the Met’s first staged opera by an African-American composer (Cooper, 2019)? Or, in the year 2020, he had listened to the complex crossover compositions of Rhiannon Giddens as she “reconstructed] Black pain with the banjo” (Martin & Desoto, 2018)? Jefferson’s notion of genius supplements high-held belief templates around so-called great composers, and the combination represents a small but important fraction of a history that continues to inform musical practice and value today.

In his 1991 year-end review for Pulse! magazine, American music critic Allan Koznin responds to the question “Is classical music dying?” Koznin discusses in his feature article, “Changing of the Guard,” how classical music record companies were responding to the then-recent demise of some of its titans—Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein—and frantically working to reorganize labels and catalogue selections to include new blood. He notes: “The classical record business waltzed along happily for another year—some say it is concealing a bit of a limp, which may lead to a permanent disability some time down the road.” Koznin cites record companies’ fiscal limp as their near neglect of young talent. Is not one job of music educators to facilitate students’ musical and compositional capacities (i.e., new blood)?

How can “young talent” be fostered in spaces where belief templates about genius (and even talent) taints conceptions of accessibility and agency to music and musicmaking? Resonance theorist Hartmut Rosa (2020) critiques the so-called power of art, noting “the belief that the creation of a work of art requires ‘breath’ of a muse, of genius, of spirit, of God” (p. 281) effectively nullifies one’s relationship with their creative self, making them either a docile non-agentic conformist slave to the whims of a genie, or one who does not see that art is a product of being alive and in touch with the world around them along with the development of skill, craft, and technique. As Joanna eloquently expressed: “Give the students the opportunity to create themselves.”

Notation. Similar to debilitating notions of genius, concepts around notation can also play a role in how musical and compositional capacities are understood and approached. Script (i.e., the written word) has historically served the interests of a select privileged few.⁴ From Manifest Destiny to the Mozart Effect, education policies, practices, and particularly “how-to” texts or manuals have been at the forefront of civilizing and codifying an Other; a “smartening them up” for participation and “success” in a so-called field of practice within “civilized” industrialized society. Indeed, “the arts and particularly music have been central to European colonizing and evangelizing projects throughout history” (Recharte, 2019, p. 71).

In his controversial book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, Leonard Shlain (1999) contends, “One pernicious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook” (p. 25) as it promotes a linear, sequential, reductionist, and abstract view of the world. Shlain argues that, when script entered into early societies it did so as a means of mass communication and also asserted (author)itarian control. As a result, power imbalances became more prevalent as ways of knowing and being in the world guided by holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete perspectives were diminished and dismissed.

Considering composition from this perspective a few limitations come to light. Take, for example, AP and undergraduate music theory courses. These are typically the first places where students are formally introduced to “the great composers” and offered opportunities to abstract, dissect, analyze, and revere the “great works” of the canon.

Typically, music students are not encouraged to compose their own pieces in these courses. Unfortunately, music theory courses can also be one of the first places where students are informally, indirectly introduced to a belief template that distances them from composing, as they are led to understand that until they know and follow the rules of “the great composers,” composing original music should wait. Recall Dr. S’s remark about “breaking the rules”: “By the time you get there you’ve internalized that you don’t have any creativity”—“there,” being after such courses. This entangled estrangement is evident in music theory professor Steven Laitz’s (2012) preface to The Complete Musician, Music students often suffer through their theory and aural skills courses, viewing them as not particularly relevant—perhaps even painful—sidelines of their musical studies. This is a shame since an unsatisfying experience early on usually has an adverse effect on students’ attitudes. (Laitz, 2012, p. xii)

What often goes unrecognized in specialized discourse of musical training is what Walter Piston prefaces in his classic harmony text:

We must realize that musical theory is not a set of directions for composing music. It is rather the collected and systematized deductions gathered by observing the practice of composers over a long time, and it attempts to set forth what is or has been their common practice. It tells not how music will be written in the future, but how music has been written in the past. (Piston, 1978/1941, p. xix, italics added)

That Piston acknowledged this well over five decades ago, and still students “often suffer,” speaks to the convenient knowledge strongholds abundant in fallacies like genius, notation, and other “terms and concepts, like talent, musical, musicianship, and appreciation” (Recharte, 2019, p. 69). Recognizing that said “fundamentals” are nothing other than codes, “collected and systematized deductions” designed to manipulate sonic material within a very specific set of tones and within a culturally contrived temperament system, could help ward off students’ and teachers’ feelings of alienation from their composer/creative selves, while also dissuading them from measuring their creative ideas toward an Idealized perfection of harmony. Much of the talk in composer-speak is about finding one’s “own voice.”

One struggle with finding one’s own compositional voice could stem from a constant comparison of that voice to voices of the dead past “great composers” that have been deemed perfect. Curtailing unhealthy comparisons and unrealistic expectations could offer relief and help students attune their ears to hear and listen and be more present in their lived and un-idealized soundworlds.

We do well, like the music teachers highlighted in this chapter, to actively confront our belief templates by grappling with questions such as: What do such views around genius and notation preserve? Could it be that such thinking reifies, even glorifies hegemonic and patriarchal Eurocentric ideologies? Who gets underserved or not served at all if one thinks composing is meant for a genius few? Or, that other forms of music creation (e.g., songwriting, beat-boxing, DJing, rapping, soundscaping, etc.) do not denote “real” composing? Could it be that some music education policies and classroom/studio practices are inadvertently seeking out the “best geniusses,” perhaps “raking” over those not showing “promise”?

It is without question that neoliberal notions of “promise” or “potential” are propelled by a Western ideal of “success,” which today madly manifests itself via cut-throat competitiveness and high-stakes assessment and standardization that values an “acceleration” (Rosa, 2013/2005) toward a consumeristic-driven sellable “creative” product over deeply reflective imaginative creative critical processes (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014). For music educators who have inherited and work within this faulty system, it is worth never forgetting that curricular policies and pedagogical practices of yesterday can (and do) still haunt, rearing their ugly head. Segregation and siloing may be seen today in K-16 music programs and departments across North America. While these boundaries and bunching of music students may not be directly drawn along color, class, or gender lines completely, they are often drafted via conceptions of “genius” or “natural talent” as evinced through the conservatory model’s auditioning processes, ensemble seating arrangements, or choice of student soloists—thus, still buying into a traditionalist or conservationist view of music teaching and learning. As music educators work to “take account of issues of oppression” so as to disrupt “the status quo” (Wright, 2016/2010, p. 276), it is all the more important to recognize where we may implement changes in perception, policy, and practice.