Dr. James Mobberley and I twice co-taught a course in composition pedagogy. I developed the materials
below as part of that course. There are two documents. The first describes a "crisis" in composition pedagogy
and the second presents a list of teaching methodologies that were discussed in the course.
This document has been developed from the opening lecture of a music composition pedagogy course at UMKC. The intent of the presentation were multifold:
The point of the lecture was not to provide a comprehensive list of the factors that contribute to the difficulties of teaching composition. The intent was to present interrelated issues that emphasize fundamental difficulties facing composition teachers. Since the presentation of issues is meant to facilitate conversion, there are no conclusions provided.
Unlike other specialties within the field of music and other creative fields within academia, pedagogy courses and research in music composition are not ubiquitous. Nor is there a basic list of the problems that face a music composition teacher. Defining the basic issues facing composition teachers today is the first step in building a field in composition pedagogy. Not only does defining these problems reveal questions that a teacher should contemplate and try to answer, it also uncovers underlying assumptions that affect how one teaches.
There are social, philosophical, historical, and economic currents and events that result in the complex landscape of modern art music and create issues that composition teachers must address. While there are too many issues to address, defining a set of fundamental issues provides a springboard for further discussion. The issues the author presents all relate to following basic questions:
Even a Google search for “music composition pedagogy” fails to provide an interested person with a significant amount of resources. While there are a good number of books that allow a teacher to take a step-by-step approach and teach a specific style of music composition as a fixed domain, there are not significant resources that outline basic issues regarding teaching composition or provide a detailed set of questions for consideration. Currently there are not definitive resources for composition teachers: there is a paucity of material a teacher can reference in order to build an individual teaching style, and there is not a set of fundamental questions that composition teachers know that they need to address. This situation often results in composition teachers who merely replicate or reject the pedagogic style and practices of their own teachers.
The reasons for this paucity of materials and courses are likely multifaceted. A significant reason is that the changes around 1800 (discussed below), as well as the other issues discussed, have created a “crisis” that has not been addressed. While these changes are outlined in music history texts and courses, their relationship to teaching composition is not generally discussed. Defining such issues is the beginning of formulating a basis to create a set of questions that can be the foundation for inquiry, and ensure that music composition teachers are not unleashed upon their students without consciously determining teaching practices they find suitable.
Circa 1800 a “profound change” occurred in how music from the past functioned in contemporary society as “history and tradition took on new importance.” Rather than being relegated to the past, older music was performed alongside contemporary music as Felix Mendelssohn revived the music of J.S. Bach and Franz Lizst transformed the traditional concert program of pianists by performing older works alongside contemporary pieces. This programming practice is still preferred today amongst curators for symphonies, chamber music ensembles, and on instrumentalist’s recitals. Previously “earlier traditions” may have transferred to contemporary works through the replication of style traits or “generic norms.” After 1800 the works themselves “constitute the substance” inherited by contemporary society.
Around the same time another significant transformation occurred: there was a “renewed belief in progress” that accompanied the “Romantic insistence upon originality.” The presentation of older works on contemporary concerts meant that wholly derivative practices could be immediately identified. In the past composers had learned through replication and modeling, composers now had to learn the much more abstract skills of creativity and originality. Carl Dahlhaus states that the “instruction that was meant to make professional composers superior to dilettantes resembled exercises in a dead language, the easy codifiability of which is obtained only at the price of its irrelevance.” No longer is teaching someone to write music in imitation of a previous composer or genre the same as teaching composition; rather, it is teaching an aspect of music theory. The mere transmission of technique from one composer to another does not teach a composer to satisfy the demands of the post-1800 age, in which originality is a fairly universal aesthetic value. Dahlhaus determines that this yields a “crisis in the teaching of musical craftsmanship.”
Just as the nineteenth-century developments in programming have persisted, so has the value of newness. While the notion of newness or musical progress has changed since the height of modernism, most contemporary practitioners and connoisseurs still value newness in terms of a unique synthesis of musical traits or a personal perspective. Entirely derivative works may have parochial interest, by being a companion piece or an etude, but they still do not have a reverberating affect on the field and are generally thought to have limited lasting power.
If composition teachers believe that teaching a student how to imitate the style of a Mozart sonata is not teaching the student composition, then teachers have to determine what, beyond technique, it is that they are teaching. Secondly, along with the acceptance that something the student does should be original—oft referred to as developing a compositional voice—teachers must develop a pedagogy that addresses issues regarding creativity and originality. Determining both what a composition teacher is supposed to teach, the content beyond technique, and how one fosters or develops creativity and originality is patently a complex process and may simply be beyond human capacities to define satisfactorily.
Another nineteenth-century development has had lasting affects on composition. How society views composers and how composers perceive their own role in society relates to how one teaches and why one wants to learn to be a composer. In the nineteenth-century the view of the composer changed. For “the first time it gradually became possible for them [composers] to make a living by offering their services to the public as free agents.” Composers were no longer servants of courts, churches, or parochial public tastes, such as an opera house in a specific city. Furthermore, the value that society placed on art music resulted in a valorization of composers. The model for a composer became a lone eccentric genius transmuting societies underlying zeitgeist in pure, fundamental forms. Successful composers, such as Beethoven, could even write music that patrons did not appreciate, but rather than condemning the artist, the patrons would fault their own lack of understanding. Composers came to be viewed as great people and their music as a communion of the human condition.
The idea that composer’s music fulfills such a lofty societal role has affected how musicologists and theorist construct the history of music and how they analyze music. As composers learn about the history of music, most composers adopt a rather serious attitude about their art and its role in society (even if their art itself is not serious). If composition teachers accept such a significant role, even if not so grandiose, for art music and the composers thereof, then they need to develop a pedagogy that deals with issues that result from this conception. Or, if composition teachers reject these notions, they need to develop a suitable pedagogy (and a justification for the time, energy, and economic investment that facilitates the art form they teach).
This is not to say that composers before 1800 were not creative or original, just that it was not viewed as a necessary feature of the trade by the connoisseurs.
This is not to say that we have to accept the importance of originality, just that it is generally valued.
The British empire and other colonial powers justified horrific acts with concepts of social eugenics or divine right: for example, it was stated that the “true philanthropist” would not work to prolong “savages’s” struggle against a slow “extinction,” but, after comprehending the “natural law of anthological evolution,” would embrace “an acceleration” of extinction until its “end.” Such Herbert Spencer-like justifications were common: race and ethnicity were linked to concepts of superiority and survival. In this intellectual environment the rise of cultural anthropology occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. For example, Friedrich Ratzel discussed “the decline of peoples of inferior cultures at contact with culture.” Denigrating determinations of the relative status of other cultures compared to European cultures were common. Cultural anthropologist’s reinforcements of racial superiority and progress were added to the pile of justifications for colonization, forced labor, and genocide.
The atrocities of Nazi Germany can be viewed as the outgrowth of such ideologies. Hitler sought a “continental equivalent of the British Empire,” after all he had grown up in a culture that believed that inferior races were “by nature condemned to extinction.” Nazi Germany brought the horror of such ideas to light in dramatic fashion and there was a response in intellectual and artistic culture. Once determinations of complexity or quality have been associated with ideological formulations of racial superiority, such statements become understandingly compromised. It is no longer politically correct to formulate an argument in order to determine that Western art music is definitively of higher value, quality, or importance than a variety of American Indian music or any other music. While one can say they prefer one kind of music to another, justifications based on substantive claims recall comparative cultural statements of the past.
This issue has had a chilling affect on strong claims regarding the quality of music. If one extrapolates from this that qualitative distinctions regarding materials, how they develop, and their interrelationships are personal decisions that cannot be universalized, then any qualitative claims become impossible. A composition teacher can no longer say that one thing is definitely preferable, only that he or she prefers it.
In a way philosophical postmodernism is a response to the horrors of Europe’s social eugenicist past and compounds the issues regarding a composition teacher’s ability to make definitive claims about quality. Postmodern theorists confront the distinction between high and low art: Frederic Jameson includes the “breakdown between high and low culture” as one of the cultural “shifts” defining the postmodern era. While in the modern era the focus was on linear progress and supplanting one dominant form/system/practice with a new dominant form/system/practice that is anteceded on the old form, postmodern theorists focus on non-hierarchical heterogeneity, plurality, micro-cultures, and dramatic fractures in historical flow. Furthermore, totalizing, universal theories that explain social phenomena or are meant to determine general behaviors are frowned upon. Also, postmodernism tends to question the existence of absolutes within a singularly perceived reality, the epistemological process, and notions of linear progress. Lastly, postmodern philosophers have focused on identity politics, whereby a person’s cultural background plays a part in constituting their true reality. Thus, different people can have literally different realities. Theoretically one person may not even be able to perceive the veracity of someone else’s experiential claims; however, this does not mean that former person did not experience what s/he claimed.
It should be noted that while postmodernism questions linear progress, the idea of artistic newness still prevails, albeit in an altered form. Newness is no longer the “progress” of the young Pierre Boulez, but the synthesis and recombination of past materials, forms, and styles. Some postmodern philosophers, such as Jean Baudrillard, believe that there is really nothing new to be done other than recombine elements until no “definitions” are possible. Ibid. 128.
Technocracy in education is the process of separating fields and divorcing related fields. Each individual academic area will then engage in a specific endeavor. In music this process is evident in the relatively recent separation between musicology, music theory, instrumental performance, and composition. In the past part of a composer’s training in composition would have been historical excavations and analytical projects as deemed necessary by the pedagogue. Now such projects occur separate from that training. Composition teachers can include history and theory in the content they provide to their students. However, if the entirety of the content consisted of theory and history, it would be impossible to justify courses in composition in addition to theory and history classes. With these academic pursuits divorced, a composition teacher must determine how to incorporate such content in composition courses in distinct ways, or whether to incorporate such content at all. This issue also begs the question (again) of what it is that composition teachers teach beyond technique?
There is an accessibility and plurality of styles that no person on the planet can possibly internalize. The availability of music from anywhere in the world has resulted in composition students experiencing an unprecedented musical multiculturalism. Also, students may appreciate music from thousands of geographically dispersed micro-cultures that are organized online. Most fields assume a wide breath of knowledge of the subject matter one is supposed to be teaching, especially when teaching others to work in the field in a generative, creative capacity. However, given today’s present musical landscape, no teacher can have experience with or knowledge about hardly any of the available genres, subgenres, and cross-genres of which each individual student has a unique knowledge and understanding.
Given the increasing non-distinction between “high” and “low” art, composition teachers frequently coach students whose primary musical experience is partly or entirely alien to their own. A teacher can listen to and likely understand a single piece and its substantive parts and materials; however, the semiotics and references unique to a particular micro-culture that help create meaningful musical experiences would be incomprehensible without an emersion in that micro-culture. No teacher can be expected to delve into all the musical interests his or her students may have; however, composition teachers need, unless they want to limit their students to writing a very particular type of music, to develop a pedagogy that successfully develops a student’s ability to write satisfactorily in the style of his or her choice. This situation compounds the fact that composition teachers do not state what they teach beyond technique: there are too many available styles to codify and teach; therefore, focusing teaching on technique limits a student to a given set of styles and preferences certain types of music (and that music’s inherent cultural associations) over others.