Encouraging the Musical Imagination Through Composition
Identifieur interne : 001487 ( Istex/Corpus ); précédent : 001486; suivant : 001488Encouraging the Musical Imagination Through Composition
Auteurs : Hollis ThomasSource :
- Music educators journal [ 0027-4321 ] ; 1987-01.
English descriptors
- Teeft :
- Abstract concept, Aesthetic decisions, Alto flute, Alto glockenspiel, Alto metallophone, Arch form, Arch form design, Arts course, Brief masterpiece, Brief minuet, Certain point, Certain shape, Classical guitar, Classical guitar line, Claude prelude, Collaborative works, Compelling need, Composite work, Compositional, Compositional activities, Compositional experiences, Consistent manner, Cork mallets, Correct hand position, Curly hair, Dance instructor, Different ways, Distinct lines, Distinctive line, Edgar density, Electronic piece, Elementary school level, Entire work, Evocative book, Exact canon, Familiar prelude movement, Familiar tune, Final work, First project, Forest material, Franz schubert, Fulbright teacher exchange, Hammond organ, Harmonic line, Harp player, High school level, Hollis thors, Important aspect, Important factor, Important factor piece, Improvising works, Johann sebastian sonata, John cage, John notations, John warrener, Last part, Less time, Line works, Literary work, Literary works, Little mischief, Little schubert, Main part, Major project, Martin luther king, Marvelous pieces, Maumee valley country, Maurice bolero, Maurice sendak, More music, Multiarts experience, Musi1 roger sessions, Music classes, Music education, Music experience, Musical composition problem, Musical ideas, Musical imagination roger sessions, Musical line, Musical material, Musical offering, Musical rendition, Musical resources, Musical transformations, Notes form, Orff instruments, Other arts, Other elements, Overall effect, Phillip glass, Pitch line, Private boat, Process composers, Questionsabout music, Rhythmic lines, Round glasses, Same thing, Same time, Second project, Second type, Sendak text, Short pieces, Significant sound images, Silence lectures, Simple theme, Single line, Small child, Small table, Solo flute, Sound images, Stephane mallarme, Strange text, Strict fugal imitation, Subsequent dances, Such activities, Such opportunities, Such thing, Sudden shifts, Talented students, Theater piece, Theme students, Third project, Throusical imaginat, Tremendous rumpus, Typical composer, Unheated room, Valuable ideas, Various possibilities, Various time signatures, Vasili writings, Vertical points, Visual artist, Visual arts, Whole piece, Wild things, William butler yeats, Wolfgang amadeus, Writings wesieyan university press, Yorkww wnorton.
Url:
DOI: 10.2307/3397919
Links to Exploration step
ISTEX:AF1149BF5B8DF1663A6328633744E6A415059891Le document en format XML
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<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Thomas</surname><given-names>Hollis</given-names></name><aff>Teaches music and English at Maumee Valley Country Day School in Toledo, Ohio. He recently was awarded a Fulbright Teacher Exchange to teach music and English at St. Margaret's School in Airdrie, Scotland, this year.</aff></contrib></contrib-group>
<pub-date pub-type="ppub"><month>01</month><year>1987</year></pub-date><volume>73</volume><issue>5</issue><fpage>27</fpage><lpage>30</lpage><custom-meta-wrap><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>sagemeta-type</meta-name><meta-value>Journal Article</meta-value></custom-meta><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>search-text</meta-name><meta-value> by Hollis Thomas Encouraging the Musical Imagination Through Composition In A Little Schubert by M. B. Goffstein, Franz Schubert, drawn affectionately with curly hair and Large, round glasses, lives in a sparsely furnished, unhealed room where he sits at a small table and writes music. He hears music when his friends hear nothing and he hears more music than he can possibly write down. s Schoc MEJ January 87 27 o be a composer means being ready to transform experience into significant sound images. The musical imagination Roger Sessions wrote that “a composer's mind is constantly ready for the activity of composition,”1 and John Cage said the same thing in a different way when he wrote that “there is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.”- In order to compose music one must hear sounds; one must be able to attend to the sounds of the outside and inside soundscapes. To be a composer means being ready to transform experience into significant sound images. It also means that one has such a driving desire and compelling need to manipulate sounds that it becomes an obsession. Students don't know that such attending, readiness, and desire exist unless they are given the opportunity to explore, develop, and arouse these states in a continuous and consistent manner. Music classes should give students such opportunities. On the elementary school level, a number of compositional activities have provided such opportunities for students. These include improvising narrative works using Orff instruments, improvising with a variety of instruments using an electronic piece as a catalyst; setting poems to music; creating a piece based on a simple harmonic progression: and collecting sounds from the environment and manipulating them on tape. Most of the compositional experiences are accomplished with very little abstract reflection. The experiences are spontaneous and fresh. The purpose of these compositional activities is to provide students with an opportunity to develop an awareness that such activities are indeed possible and part of music making. For example, studying the violin doesn't just mean learning the correct hand position or memorizing a piece for a recital. It also means using one's skill on the instrument to explore both the sounds of the violin and one's musi- 1 Roge’ Sessons Ques:ons Abou: Muse (New Vo'K WW \0!on 1970) 77 2 John Cage S ence ec:ures ana W:ng$ (M aa e:own Connect cut Wes eyan on ve's ly P'ess 1961) 8 191 cal imagination at the same time. Going one step further On the high school level, students go a step further and begin to ‘think’ about their compositional attending. readiness, and desires. Three projects have worked particularly well in helping students think as composers. The first is the development of a set of variations based on the very familiar tune *Ah. vous dirai-je, maman’ (composer uses pre-existing musical material to generate musical ideas). The second is a theater piece based on a children's book by Maurice Sendak called Where the Wild Things Are (composer uses literary work to generate musical ideas). The third is an interdisciplinary visual art, dance, and music experience focusing on the concept of line in those arts (composer uses other arts and an abstract concept to generate musical ideas). The first project resulted from listening to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Twelve Variations on ‘Ah, vous dirai-je* maman’ K.265. We listened to the set of variations and followed the line of musical thought that Mozart was developing as he worked with the simple theme. The students were to come to some conclusions about what and why Mozart did what he did to the theme and what the overall effect was. We talked about how he manipulated the theme, increased or decreased the intensity, changed the mood through sudden shifts of tempo, key or texture, and how each of the three was embellished or merely suggested in each variation. After listening to the piece each student: 1. took the *Ah, vous dirai-je, maman’ theme and composed a variation in either the key of F major minor or C major minor; 2. played the variation on the recorder; 3. wrote out the variation that had been composed (this included work on calligraphy and notation); 4. played everyone's variation; 5. and designed a set using all the variations with an accompanying written essay explaining how the 28 MEJ/January ‘87 aesthetic decisions were made (this was the most important aspect of the assignment). For the last part of the assignment, the students were given a “test,” after they had thought about their set of variations. They were asked to place them where they wanted it played (at the beginning, end, middle, or beginning and end), and then, in the boxes provided, they inserted the initials of each student's name (referring to the variation) in the order they had chosen. Second, they had to write in one sentence how they had organized the set of variations. We talked about the various possibilities such as going from the simplest to the most complex (and vice versa); going from the closest to the theme to the most distant from the theme; from the slowest to the fastest; going through a sort of arch form; increasing tension through the insertion of significant pauses and changes of pace and alternating major and minor or various time signatures. Wrestling with decisions When confronted with a conventional, musical composition problem such as how to create a set of variations on a given theme students were encouraged to ‘think’ as composers and wrestle with aesthetic decisions. In this way, they had to develop a line of musical thought. The students began to think of composing as more than just making interesting sounds; it also involved making decisions about the sequence and placement of those sounds in the design of an entire work. Because composers often cull musical ideas from literary works, the second project was a musical setting generated by Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. In preparation for this assignment, students listened to three works that used literary works in completely different ways: Claude Debussy's Prelude a Vapres-midi dJun faune, based on a poem by Stephane Mal-larme; Joseph Schwantner's recent New Morning for the World, based on the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.; and John Harbison's Full Moon in March, based on a strange text by William Butler Yeats. Students worked in groups of three or four, used the piano and Orff instruments, and were allowed to use the Sendak text in any way they wanted. They could: 1. compose a purely musical rendition suggesting the narration of the text (like the Debussy), or 2. compose music to accompany a spoken narration of the text (like the Schwantner), or 3. compose an opera-like adaptation of the narration (like the Harbison). The students submitted works in all three categories, but the ones that were the most successful were of the second type. One group incorporated an arch form design into the overall musical material (ABCBA) as well as a I-V-I harmonic design. In the A section, Max is mischievous and his mother sends him to his room. To suggest the little boy's mischief, the students used the tonic. While in his room, Max's imagination begins to take over and the forest begins to grow in his room. To mirror this, the group built up a series of ascending thirds on the alto glockenspiel and alto metallophone. In the B section, Max goes off in a private boat over an ocean to where the wild things are. The group created floating sounds here to mimic the action. In the C section, Max is where the wild things are and makes a tremendous rumpus. At this point the group tried some experimental sounds inside the piano, clusters on the keyboard, and percussion. By this time they appropriately had modulated to the dominant because Max was the farthest from ‘home’ at this point. After the rumpus, Max gets into his boat and goes over the ocean (once again the B section) to his room (the A section) where there is no longer any forest (the group played an inversion of the forest material) and back to some hot supper his mother had left for him. Thinking like a composer Transforming a literary work into musical ideas is another typical composer ‘problem’ that requires students to think like composers. The process composers use to compose onto a literary work is mysteriously intuitive but very real. Somehow sounds take shape from words. Where the Wild Things Are is a simple yet evocative book that helps students create musical transformations. The third project was a bit more involved than the previous two, which were required projects in a freshman fine arts course. This project took place during an intensive and extensive interim course entitled “Line.” This course was suggested and initiated by our dance instructor who was joined by a visual artist and myself. Students explored the definition of line in the three areas of dance, visual arts, and music, and developed a fifteen-minute, multi-media, multi-arts presentation involving the students' own work in dance, film, and music. The students discussed “line in music,” including line as melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, texture, dynamics, and emotion. As a result of our discussions the students created their own “lines” using whatever musical resources and talents they had at their disposal. Their compositions were used as catalysts for their subsequent dances and filmmaking. Paul Klee's the thinking eye, Vasili Kandinsky's writings, John Cage's Notations, and R. Murray Schaefer's Creative Music Education provided valuable ideas. For pitch, the students drew a line indicating the shape of the pitch line in Johann Sebastian Bach's Sonata in G-dur for violin-cello, the familiar prelude movement, and Edgar Verese's Density 21.5 for solo flute. On an 11” by 17” piece of paper with seconds marked off they had to draw the shape of the pitch line with movement from high to low. After these two works, I played them a work of mine entitled Ruins that used alto flute and soprano where the pitch line alternated between a single line and two contrasting lines, moving constantly back and forth from one to two lines. Finally, they looked at Bach's “Invention No. 2,” in which he writes two distinct lines, one in MEJ/January ‘87 29 exact canon to the other, and a movement from his Musical Offering where one line is free, one is the theme, and one is in strict fugal imitation. After this discussion of pitch, they wrote a paragraph on pitch as line. One student wrote that each line of music has a distinct beginning, middle, and end. It begins on a certain point, a note, just as a line begins with a point, a dot. A note begins the piece, but it is not the whole piece. Here movement takes a part. Movement continues the piece with a succession of points or notes. Each note is its own entity, but together, these notes form a line of melody; the melody is the main part of the music. As with a drawing, music has a certain shape. The timbre, dynamics, texture, pitch, and rhythm merge with each other to give the music a soft, strong, flowing, or jagged feel. The most important factor of a piece is the melody. After pitch, we discussed harmony as line and students listened to a twelve-bar blues, a progression of chords as vertical points on a harmonic line in which chords first move away from the tonic, creating tension, to the dominant; once the dominant is reached, movement is once again created by moving back to the tonic, or relaxed state. We looked at Bach's “Prelude in C” from Hie Well-Tempered Clavier. and we drew a line showing the harmonic line and the alteration of tension and relaxation. Finally, we looked at a brief minuet by Mozart that showed how melody and harmony combine to create a line of music. We spent less time on the other elements of music, looking at dynamics as line in Witold Lutos-lawski's brief Postlude for Orchestra, at timbre as line in Maurice Ravel's Bolero, and then texture, rhythm, and emotion. For their major project the students created a one-minute musical line concentrating on one of the elements of music, though certainly all elements would play a part. They notated their short pieces, creating a notation that would express their distinctive line. The students composed some marvelous pieces for Fisher-Price xylophone, glasses (rubbed and hit with cork mallets), Casios, classical guitar, harp, piano, and computer, and even a brief masterpiece for Hammond organ and parrot. Finalizing the work We listened to all of the pieces and began to “think” how we might combine these line works into an extended composition that could be danced and also provide the background for a film. We ended up expanding the classical guitar line into a three-minute piece using Orff instruments, a synthesizer, and glasses. Some line works we kept “as is,” determining what sequence they would be put into the harp, computer, Hammond organ, and parrot. We mixed some of the excerpts into a new work emphasizing the contrast of the lines, and this composite work was used as the background for the film. For the finale, we created a three-minute piece using only rhythmic lines, piling up the ostinatos into a pulsating finish. The final fifteen-minute work was truly a multimedia and multi-arts experience (in vogue these days in light of the collaborative works of Phillip Glass and others) that combined original musical compositions with dance and film. One of the brightest and most talented students, a harp player, created two line works during the course of the four weeks. She said the course had made her ‘think’ about composing and she really enjoyed it. She had never tried it before. On the evening of the performance. this student's parents commented that the course had gotten their daughter to compose once again. They explained that as a small child she had done improvising and composing and that this course had reawakened such an interest. She had been given the opportunity to explore, develop, and arouse her own attending, readiness, and desire to compose and create sound images. She didn't know that she had it in her to do so. Such an awareness and reawakening was reward enough for offering such a course. </meta-value></custom-meta></custom-meta-wrap></article-meta></front></article></istex:document></istex:metadataXml><mods version="3.6"><titleInfo lang="en"><title>Encouraging the Musical Imagination Through Composition</title></titleInfo><titleInfo type="alternative" lang="en" contentType="CDATA"><title>Encouraging the Musical Imagination Through Composition</title></titleInfo><name type="personal"><namePart type="given">Hollis</namePart><namePart type="family">Thomas</namePart><affiliation>Teaches music and English at Maumee Valley Country Day School in Toledo, Ohio. He recently was awarded a Fulbright Teacher Exchange to teach music and English at St. Margaret's School in Airdrie, Scotland, this year.</affiliation></name><typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource><genre type="research-article" displayLabel="research-article" authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://content-type.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://content-type.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/XTP-1JC4F85T-7">research-article</genre><originInfo><publisher>SAGE Publications</publisher><place><placeTerm type="text">Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA</placeTerm></place><dateIssued encoding="w3cdtf">1987-01</dateIssued><copyrightDate encoding="w3cdtf">1987</copyrightDate></originInfo><language><languageTerm type="code" authority="iso639-2b">eng</languageTerm><languageTerm type="code" authority="rfc3066">en</languageTerm></language><relatedItem type="host"><titleInfo><title>Music educators journal</title></titleInfo><genre type="journal" authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://publication-type.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://publication-type.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/JMC-0GLKJH51-B">journal</genre><identifier type="ISSN">0027-4321</identifier><identifier type="eISSN">1945-0087</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID">MEJ</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID-hwp">spmej</identifier><part><date>1987</date><detail type="volume"><caption>vol.</caption><number>73</number></detail><detail type="issue"><caption>no.</caption><number>5</number></detail><extent unit="pages"><start>27</start><end>30</end></extent></part></relatedItem><identifier type="istex">AF1149BF5B8DF1663A6328633744E6A415059891</identifier><identifier type="ark">ark:/67375/M70-DVL71QCX-Z</identifier><identifier type="DOI">10.2307/3397919</identifier><identifier type="ArticleID">10.2307_3397919</identifier><recordInfo><recordContentSource authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://loaded-corpus.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://loaded-corpus.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/XBH-0J1N7DQT-B">sage</recordContentSource></recordInfo></mods><json:item><extension>json</extension><original>false</original><mimetype>application/json</mimetype><uri>https://api.istex.fr/document/AF1149BF5B8DF1663A6328633744E6A415059891/metadata/json</uri></json:item></metadata><serie></serie></istex></record>Pour manipuler ce document sous Unix (Dilib)
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