Case Study 7: Composing With Young Musicians

Saturday, February 28, 2009, from 10:00 am to 10:15 am

With Tawnie Olson — Composition Instructor, ACES Educational Center for the Arts (New Haven, CT, USA)

(The following is the complete presentation, provided by Tawnie Olson)

Good morning! My name is Tawnie Olson, and today I am going to offer a window into one approach to contemporary composition pedagogy by describing some of the things I do as a composition teacher at the Educational Center for the Arts (hereafter ECA), an arts magnet high school in New Haven, Connecticut.

ECA was founded in 1973 with the idea of providing an intensive arts education to students in Visual Arts, Music, Theatre, Dance and Creative Writing. It is a half-time interdistrict magnet school, which means that our students complete their academic coursework at their sending schools in the morning and then are bussed to us in the afternoons. Our 300 students come from 23 different school districts and we have a very diverse but well-integrated student body. An unusual feature of ECA since its inception is that our teachers are not arts educators but “teaching artists” who teach a few hours a week at ECA and maintain active professional careers as artists at the same time.

The ECA Music Department offers courses in music theory and composition on Mondays and Wednesdays, and rehearses large and small ensembles on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Students are placed in theory classes based on their coursework and their scores on placement exams that are given at the beginning and end of each year. All students in level two theory or above (just over half of our students) are placed composition classes. My colleague, Jeff Fuller, teaches two classes in songwriting and jazz composition, and I teach two classes in classical composition. Most students study with both Mr. Fuller and myself, regardless of whether they are more interested in jazz or classical composition.

Over the course of four years of teaching composition at ECA, I have begun to develop my own approach to composition pedagogy, and I will discuss three aspects of this approach today. Namely: the use of contemporary compositions as models, the creation of frameworks that encourage students to use new techniques while allowing them creative freedom, and the importance of creating opportunities for collaborative projects, performances, and the recognition of student work.

Part I

Over the years at ECA, I have observed that students have an easier time composing when they have a clear framework within which to work. Most (though not all) students are not very familiar with new music, and I have found that having students study contemporary compositions and write short pieces using they techniques they learn is enormously helpful to them.

I do this as follows: I begin by giving the students a copy the score of the work at hand and asking them to listen to a recording of the work. They are given several questions to answer, questions that may focus on the form, extra musical meaning or (when improvisation is involved) the performance of the work. If possible, we then perform the work in class. Next, the students compose short works in which they must use or freely adapt the concepts we learned from the work studied. We then play and discuss student works in class.

I’d like to show you an example of one of these listening assignments, in which the students studied “Les Moutons de Panurge,” by Frederick Rzewski. This is a piece that is designed to make the performers lose their place in the music (they are, in fact, told not to try to rejoin the rest of the group when they get lost, but to continue boldly along the path they fall into), and that raises a real challenge to anyone who wishes to perform it. Since we planned to play this work in class and write and perform works based on it, I wanted students to think about how we might perform it convincingly. I therefore asked the students to listen carefully to 8th blackbird’s performance on their recording. The music that you’ll hear as you look at the assignment is Hommage ˆ Rzewski, written by one of the students and performed by the class.

[Play and Show example]

[Next slide]

Since we spend about half of the year working from models like this, I take a lot of time and care in selecting the works we study, and I’d like to briefly summarize the criteria I use in choosing these pieces.

1. I believe that it is helpful for students to be able to draw connections between works, so each year I group works around a common theme. For example, we spent one year examining Minimalist, Post Minimalist and Totalist works, and the next year we looked at experimental and aleatoric composition.
2. When choosing works for study, I also try to find pieces that accomplish a particular goal in such a clear way that, with some help, students can grasp how the composer constructed the piece.
3. I furthermore look for pieces that — regardless of their aesthetic — have a direct and visceral appeal, both for myself and for the students. This means that, for example, when introducing students to graphic scores, I often start with R. Murray Schaffer’s “Snowforms,” because it is a work that is beautiful both to look at and to listen to, and whose aims are accomplished in a clear way. Once students have heard and appreciated that work, I can introduce them to a piece like Morton Feldman’s “Projections IV,” which tends to be more difficult for students to enjoy or understand.
4. The identity of a piece’s composer is also an important factor in its selection. The vast majority of the works we study in the advanced class are by living composers, and I make a point of including works by women, visible minorities and Canadian composers in both my beginner and advanced classes every year. I never discuss this aspect of my selection process with the students, and — interestingly — so far they have remarked upon my use of Canadian music, but they have never once commented on the inclusion of living, women or non-white composers. It seems perfectly natural to them that the New Music world should be just as diverse as our classroom.

You will observe that I have not made any mention of canon in the list of criteria above. I’ve made the decision that, as I am teaching a composition course and not a history course, the class should study pieces that are most helpful to the students as composers, rather than those that are deemed to be “representative” or “important.”

Part II

One concern about using existing works as guides for student compositions might be that students could be denied the opportunity to develop their individual voices as composers, and that their creativity could be stifled.

I have tried to avoid that danger in the following ways:

1. First, I try to focus on technique rather than style or genre. In my beginner class, for example, students can — and do — write in any idiom they wish (classical, jazz, rock, etc.) provided they make use of the concept we’re learning about (say, irregular meters or the Phrygian mode).

In my advanced class, students must use the process or technique in the piece we’ve studied, but they are free to creatively interpret or alter what they have learned.

[CHANGE SLIDE]

Here, for example, you can see two responses to Terry Riley’s In C. The student on the left followed Riley’s example closely in composing short melodic cells that the ensemble moves through and repeats according to the rules he devised. You’ll notice that the student added two new rules of her own at the bottom, but otherwise she stayed quite close to the model.

The second student, however, dispensed with Riley’s eighth notes and — more importantly — with any clearly defined rhythm. (Unfortunately, we did not record these works, but I can assure you that when we played them through in class they sounded quite different.)

I would also like to mention that in the second half of the year students in both the beginner and the advanced classes compose larger works. In those pieces students are given even more freedom to choose what they write, though I do ask them to use at least one concept we studied in the first semester.

2. Another approach I have found helpful in freeing students to find their own voice and take ownership of their own work is for me to hold the reins of authority very lightly. I let students know that they are free to disregard my suggestions for improvement so long as they come up with a change that they like better. I also structure most classes so that, when students bring in new work, we all gather around to follow the score as it is performed and the students take turns offering feedback and suggestions. Beginner students often need coaching on how to make their comments specific and helpful; it is hard work for them, but they grow enormously as musicians as they try to learn how to fix something that doesn’t quite work. An advantage of this approach is that there is often a class consensus about what needs to be changed (though usually not about how to change it), which makes it easier for individual composers to accept that they need to make revisions, and builds up the other students’ confidence in their own ears and instincts.

Part III

Of course, once students have written all of this music, it needs to be performed! There are three different forums in which student works are performed during the year: informal recitals during school hours, collaborations with other departments or with professional musicians, and the New Music Festival.

1. The majority of student compositions are performed by the students themselves at informal concerts set aside for them. These concerts take place during school hours, and the entire music department (and some parents) attend them. With rare exceptions, every student has a piece performed at these concerts. Computer music is played over loudspeakers, but instrumental music is always performed live; we have NEVER used midi as a substitute for live performance. Students write music for their classmates and they learn from their first pieces that they are writing for people they know, who have specific strengths and weaknesses, and not for a machine or for some platonic ideal of a trumpet or a clarinet.
2. Writing for beginner and intermediate performers does place limitations on our student composers, so we have also sought out opportunities to have students write for professional musicians. We don’t have money for this in our shoestring budget, but two years ago the American Composers Forum provided funds to have a professional bassoonist give a workshop on composing for bassoon and perform student compositions. This year, we received a grant from the ACES foundation to have a professional string quartet — the Haven Quartet — workshop and perform compositions created by our advanced composition students.

[Play Yoni’s piece]

This spring the Maenad Ensemble is also going to do a workshop/performance of works by our beginner students.

3. Collaborations with other departments also provide students with fruitful opportunities to have their music performed in front of new audiences. In my first and second years at ECA, for example, my beginner composition class collaborated with the sculpture class to create music for sound-making sculptures. In the second year, some of the advanced dance students created partially improvised choreography to go with each piece.

[Show Louis image and piece]

4. Student works are incorporated into the regular music department concerts as well. Advanced students write works for the small ensembles in which they play, and some of those works are performed on the spring small ensembles concert, a formal evening event.
5. Three years ago, the Music Department started our annual New Music Festival. This monthlong series of events includes presentations and masterclasses by living composers like Martin Bresnick, Alvin Lucier and Joan Panetti, an evening concert of music by living composers performed by both student and professional musicians, and it also includes an evening concert devoted entirely to the performance of student compositions. The students regard it as a special honour to have their music included on this concert, and it tends to spur them to take more care on their compositions and it also bolsters their self-esteem and their sense of themselves as composers.
6. As part of our NMF, we also offer composition prizes, which are divided into beginner and advanced categories and adjudicated by three composers from outside the department who do not know the students. The winners are announced with dramatic fanfare at our Small Ensembles Concert, and the first place winners have their pieces performed during the Large Ensembles concert at the end of the year.