WHY
DO WE COMPOSE?
It is the most natural thing for human beings to make up music.
Even now, as we look back on the twentieth century with its extraordinary
record of scientific achievement, all over the world people continue
to create songs and dances intuitively more or less as they have
done for thousands of years. Only a small part of the daily outpouring
of music is made by those we would call 'trained musicians'.
Unfortunately, this very fact causes problems for us in musical
education. If inventing music is intuitive, who are we to interfere?
Why should we even try to help pupils to get better at composing?
Surely it's enough that they do it at all? Isn't it obvious that
children make up whatever is in their imagination? They are not
concerned with high-flown things like 'structure' and 'form';
they are simply responding imaginatively to a stimulus. They
like the sounds they discover, they enjoy playing with them and
making patterns, and they can fashion little musical 'pictures'
to represent incidents, animals, or whatever. Isn't it all a
matter of feeling and emotion, not something that a teacher should
attempt to influence? Even renowned composers appear to have
supported that view; Ravel, for instance, in pointing out that
'Sensitivity and emotion are the real content of a work of art'.
That is true, but the mistake is to conceive of emotion and feeling
as being entirely divorced from and in opposition to 'thought',
It has tended to make teachers of younger children wary of discussing
musical details, on the grounds that what the children have made
is simply 'what they feel'; whilst with older pupils the tendency
is to avoid reference to what is felt by concentrating upon technicalities
which are presented as 'rules'. Neither way are pupils being
helped to get better at inventing their own music.
Our feelings may appear to be involuntary and irrational but
they are, of course, activities of the mind, Even the simplest
intuitive piece made up by a very young child is recognised as
music only because it is heard as music: that is, as a process
which starts, goes on, and stops and in which sounds follow one
another or are combined in various ways. Spontaneous and natural
though the music may be, there are points where things change:
some things happen that are not heard again; some things go on
for a short time and others for much longer; some passages are
progressive, so that we feel the energy and forward 'drive' of
the music, others are recessive in effect, the music calming
or becoming quieter or slower until it seems to want to stop
of its own accord. These things are the result of decisions -
not necessarily conscious decisions but decisions nevertheless
- taken by whoever makes up the music, and the precise moments
when changes occur are crucial to its success. Since - as I shall
try to show - all musical expression, simple or complex and of
whatever style or cultural background, behaves like this, we
could conclude that the surest way to help pupils to get better
at composing is to encourage them to think about the essentially
musical process, not as abstract rules, but directly in relation
to what they themselves create.
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SHORT EXCERPT FROM THE RECOMMANDED
ARTICLE: MAKING PROGRESS WITH COMPOSING puvlished in the BRITISH
JOURNAL FOR MUSIC EDUCATION 2000 17: 1, 5-31 , p.6-7. All rights
reserved to CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS: in MusicAnd only for
educational purpose.
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