The Art of Teaching Music

9. Composer

nine composer Thinking about composing from a teacher’s perspective requires focusing on the act of composing and its relationship to performing and listening, and the ways in which composing can be fostered throughout music education , from elementary to advanced levels of instruction. Composing is one of the least-emphasized aspects of musical instruction in general education . Although invoked as a necessary element of musical education in The National Standards for Arts Education: What Every Young American Should Know and Be Able to Do in the Arts, and an important aspect of British public music education, it still remains, for too many music teachers, something of a mystery.1 Since undergraduate and graduate music education programs generally pay scant attention to composing, it is not surprising that music teachers often feel unprepared to lead their students in composing and that composing in schools is often undertaken only by the bestprepared musicians who themselves are composers. This state of affairs seems somewhat disjunct from another pervasive reality in music education, namely, the important role of composers in pressing for music education and formulating ways by which it should be accomplished. Ian Lawrence documents this contribution in his study of composers who have also been actively involved in music education throughout Western musical history.2 In the twentieth century, for example , we think of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Zoltán Kodály, Carl Orff, Dmitri Kabalevsky, and R. Murray Schafer, who designed systematic ways of teaching music and offered compelling musical and other reasons for music 162 • The Art of Teaching Music instruction in general education.3 We could also add composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Roger Sessions, Aaron Copland, and Igor Stravinsky who have theorized about music and composing and written etudes, exercises , and pedagogical pieces.4 So, how can it be that composing plays a lesser role than performing and listening in general education given that composers have been so very involved in it? Among the three principal participants in the musical event, the composer, performer, and listener, the composer has been reified especially since the nineteenth century as the musician closest to the initial inspiration of music. The composer is seen as the “creator” of the score or template whereby music is realized by the performer, who merely interprets the composer’s intent expressed in as complete a form as possible in the score. In this view, the performer is the recipient of the composer’s creativity , one step removed from it, with the lowlier objective of faithfully executing the composer’s wishes. Of course, the performer has some leeway and may, within certain limits, bring his or her own individuality to bear in interpreting the score. Still, interpreting an already existing score is, in the minds of those who defend the composer’s preeminence, a secondorder form of creativity since it involves playing with musical ideas that are already there rather than inventing them in the first place. By this reasoning , the listener is one step further removed from the initial inspiration claimed by the composer, and dependent on the performer who translates the composer’s intent, and so listening is therefore a third-order form of creativity. Since composers have bought into this logic, it is not surprising that they write the music that others sing or play. There is little in the methods devised by composers such as Jaques-Dalcroze, Orff, Kodály, or Kabalevsky to prompt the widespread and sophisticated development of composing. Even Orff and his collaborator Gunild Keetman (who wrote a large part of the Schulwerk) did not pay much attention to the development of advanced compositional skills but, rather, focused on the elementary development of improvisational technique.5 For example, the five parts of the original OrffSchulwerk : Musik für Kinder do not take the student very far and it is unclear how these beginning compositional (or improvisational) skills are to be developed further through more advanced programs of instruction.6 Kodály’s system of ear training focuses on tonal music and does little to develop improvisational abilities. Instead, Kodály writes out in full the exercises he intends for use in his Choral Method—brilliant exercises that carefully develop a systematic framework for hearing music yet bypass the possibility that students should also compose as part of their musical train- Composer • 163 ing from elementary to advanced stages of instruction.7 Even in Arnold Schoenberg’s pedagogical theory of...