Composing Helps Build Understanding

COMPOSING HELPS BUILD UNDERSTANDING

Some students seem to learn the building blocks of music better when they make their own pieces out of them. Students benefit from being encouraged to explore the world of music, especially to compose or improvise their own pieces, often using the concepts they’re currently learning from their music reading materials.

At the very beginning, they may make a piece of their own that goes up or down, or a piece that uses both loud and soft sounds. As time progresses, they may make a blues of their own, or a piece that uses ABA form. After much more study, the student may be making pieces or improvisations that involve more intricate musical forms, chords with #11's or another more advanced music theory idea.

STUDENTS ARE TERRIFIC COMPOSERS

Through improvising and experimenting with sounds, students can find combinations of musical ideas they especially like. When students use musical elements by building pieces of their own, they gain insight, experience and more expansive ideas about the expressive qualities of music.

True understanding of the building blocks of music, such as chords, scales, pitch sets and forms, eventually makes for better music reading, too. Here, the student is not just reading one note at a time, but rather groups of notes, as the mind perceives them and as the ear hears them as part of the music's flow and structure.

When a good reading approach is combined with solid musicianship skills, students are often able to notate their own pieces and sometimes become surprisingly original composers.