2. THE PROBLEM OF COMPOSITION

Vygotsky proposed that learning and development is an inherently social process, shaped by the ‘cultural tools’ of thought and language (see Vygotsky Reference Vygotsky1978). This embodies the problem for music-making or compositional activities in group contexts, in the Western classical tradition at least, since it conventionally involves a highly codified system of staff notation and music theory. Within this paradigm, composition is traditionally regarded as an individualistic pursuit, emerging from high levels of training in musical or technological ability. The ephemeral nature of music as an artistic medium, and the consequent linguistic framework used to define and describe it, sets the Western classical tradition of music apart from the ‘plastic arts’, and even other intangible and temporal art forms such as theatre, in which devising is a group-oriented, accessible form of socially oriented making that gives a great deal of agency to participants.

Within the electroacoustic musical tradition, a comparable linguistic framework exists for sound as abstract medium separated from its indexical meaning. Compositional thinking may be rooted in the definitions of Schafer (Reference Schafer1977), that is, the keynotes and signals of a soundscape. Though this may be less rigidly codified than the linguistic framework of the classical tradition, electroacoustic composition differs in its hierarchy of technologies. Compositions are often written for machine playback, an even more individualistic process than that which involves a conductor and ensemble. Furthermore, because composition often involves the arrangement and manipulation of recorded sound, whether on magnetic tape or computer, electroacoustic music has more in common with the ‘plastic arts’ than does the classical tradition. For this kind of composition, the making process relies on the technical ability of the composer rather than their capacity to communicate musical ideas to a performer.

The teaching of graduate music composition within the Western classical tradition imparts a framework for developing and understanding sonic artefacts while also directing students to find their own individual voice or identity. Lerdahl (Reference Lerdahl2012: 291) describes the two aspects of compositional instruction as ‘teaching craftsmanship and guiding a student toward his or her own path’, adding that ‘[the] first can be taught, but the second is a mysterious undertaking’. Ran (Reference Ran2012: 307) states that it is the acquisition of technical tools that ‘allows one to imagine more’. These pedagogies of composition are distinctly individualist in both process and goal, where the outcome of compositional voice or identity is derived from, or at least preceded by, mastery of the linguistic craft.

3. COMPOSITION AND PEDAGOGY

Compositional activities with younger children tend to adhere to a somewhat different pedagogy, more suited to the dynamics of a large mixed-ability group, some of whom may have additional musical training or knowledge. In the music classroom, learning processes and goals may be more grounded in inclusivity, where the curriculum is ‘flexible and accessible’, ‘individual adaptations are only as “specialized” as they need to be’ and social interactions are ‘frequent, positive and reciprocal’ (Jellison Reference Jellison2012: 67). This idea of music composition as inclusive developmental activity is central to the original 1992 national curriculum for Music in the UK. John Paynter led this educational shift by making the case for a pedagogy of composition, where ‘making music is more important than musical information’ (Paynter Reference Paynter1982: xiiii) and learners can ‘use the skills they have acquired as they acquire them’ (ibid.: 123). From this perspective, facilitating music-making activity is more important than maintaining a traditional linguistic framework. That is to say, we should fit the information to the musical activity, rather than viceversa.

The success of this approach depends upon the availability of resources and examples that teaching practitioners can adapt and apply. The 1992 music curriculum involved 77 pages of practical guidance on how music-making activities can function in classroom contexts. The following example demonstrates this focus on process:

This group composition activity establishes the music-making task from the very start of the lesson. Students are working within a broad and relatively open framework – the musical information provided is a kind of storyboard. The central components of musical activity, composing, performing, listening and appraising (Swanwick Reference Swanwick1979) are all present, though crucially, the example begins with the practical exercises and concludes with the listening activity. Notice that the activities are a prelude to listening to Penderecki’s Threnody – a more traditional lesson structure might have the students listen to the piece and then create something similar, resulting in a preoccupation with the lower order recall and apply skills of Bloom’s taxonomy. Instead, we have an example of ‘flipped Bloom’s’ (Wright Reference Wright2012) facilitating a group composition activity with limited imposition upon the creative process, from which the students can then build ideas and understanding for themselves.

Revisions to the music curriculum have tended towards a stripping away of this practical process-oriented content, focusing instead on concise output and assessment criteria. For example, the 2013 curriculum (Department for Education 2013) is only four pages in length and requires Key Stage 2 students to learn staff notation, something that has never previously been included at this level. This apparent revision of priorities reinforces the barrier of a linguistic framework in front of music-making activity:

Within the constructivist paradigm, knowledge is not imparted but constructed by the learner through exploratory activity (Piaget Reference Piaget1962). Cunningham and Duffy summarise these perspectives as ‘the general view that (1) learning is an active process of constructing rather than acquiring knowledge, and (2) instruction is a process of supporting that construction rather than communicating knowledge’ (Cunningham and Duffy Reference Cunningham and Duffy1996: 171). Burnard (Reference Burnard2000) offers a pedagogical definition of composition as the means by which children attribute meaning to their improvisations, and highlights the importance of looking closely at ‘not only what children actually do, but also what they have to say’ (Burnard Reference Burnard1999: 61). Espeland (Reference Espeland2007) demonstrates that this dialogue shapes group compositional process, using discourse analysis to highlight transactive statements (Macdonald and Miell Reference Macdonald and Miell2000). This demonstrates how the linguistic ‘tools’ of music composition emerge from the activity itself, while also highlighting the crucial influence of the social environment in the dynamics of knowledge acquisition (see Vygotsky Reference Vygotsky1978). In pedagogical terms, this poses a challenge to the traditional idea of composition as individualistic activity:

From this perspective, musical creativity emerges from social contexts and interactions. Indeed, outside the classical tradition, it is typically the case that music-making is an inherently social activity, driven by an agreed communicative framework between participants – the interactions or cues a rock band may use when jamming, for example. Small defines music as ‘not a thing at all, but an activity’ (Small Reference Small1998: 2), coining the term ‘musicking’ to describe a communal, participatory process in which we may be engaged as makers, consumers, or any role in between. Odendaal, Kankkunen, Nikkanen and Vakeva (2014) argue that this perspective offers a dynamic for participation that reinforces the value of music in education. The challenge for educators is to provide an environment for learners to engage in and reflect upon this kind of interaction.

4. TECHNOLOGICAL CONTEXT

Musical learning environments may be augmented through digital technologies (see Finney and Burnard Reference Finney and Burnard2010). This can add value by allowing us to choose how a concept should be represented and interacted with, acting as a scaffold for engaging with ideas and developing linguistic tools. Papert describes these components as ‘objects-to-think-with, objects in which there is an intersection of cultural presence, embedded knowledge, and the possibility for personal identification’ (Papert Reference Papert1980: 11). In a digital environment, the cultural tools of thought and language can be objects at the hand of the learner, though a computer mouse or touchscreen interface. This idea is deployed in a musical context by Bamberger, whose concept of tune-blocks provides the interface for the music software Impromptu:

The pedagogical impact of this idea is twofold. First, aggregated musical structures, or phrases, are more readily recognised and associated with some other meaning than individual notes, and are therefore better suited to both individual and group composing activity for novice learners. Second, the embodiment of tune-blocks in a digital interface provides an exploratory and improvisatory mode of engagement with music composition that benefits the novice learner. It facilitates the kind of ‘hands-on’ interaction that makes the visual and plastic arts actions of sketching, splashing and sculpting so suited to pedagogical creativity.

Portable touchscreen devices greatly expand these possibilities, offering a more transparent (Gadd and Fels Reference Gadd and Fels2002) mode of interaction with onscreen objects-to-think-with. The portable nature of these devices also further supports collaborative activity, allowing learners to move around a space and more easily swap and share ideas (Hart Reference Hart2018). In this project, we sought to develop a touchscreen app that could facilitate social and inclusive composition activity in a classroom through the creation and arrangement of sonic objects, which could be ‘drawn’, stored and edited in a variety of ways.

5. PAYNTER

Paynter (named after the composer and educationalist) is a tablet-based app that allows the user to compose a piece by drawing shapes and arranging icons on a canvas-type background (Figure 1). It was developed by Adam Hart for the purpose of the study described in this article, as an exploration of pedagogical approaches to music composition. It was produced in Unity using royalty-free sounds and images.

Figure 1.

The interface of the Paynter app.

The app is used by arranging various sounding objects on the canvas, triggering a sound whenever a new object is instantiated. There are then various options for playback of the onscreen objects, where a playhead moves across the screen triggering the sounding objects. Playback can be a single read-through or looping playback of the current onscreen objects, or may continue scrolling to the right to play further objects. There are also simple menu items for changing the speed of playback, represented by various animals from tortoise to cheetah, and the mood or tonality of the music, which effectively toggles notes values between major and minor keys.

The sounding objects of Paynter consist of audio clips as well as MIDI-type notes. The user can arrange the latter by choosing a paintbrush tool to ‘draw’ phrases of notes, represented as coloured shapes and assigned to an instrument, which the user can select from a sound library of samples. This is a mode of novice-friendly interaction similar to Hyperscore (Farbood, Pasztor and Jennings Reference Farbood, Pasztor and Jennings2004). The app also contains a bank of musical fragments and phrases that can be arranged on the canvas, drawing on Bamberger’s notion of tune-blocks. In addition to this, there is a library of audio clips, each with a corresponding description and symbol, which can be arranged on the canvas. Some of these objects are longer loops that cycle whenever the symbol is onscreen. Others are one-shot sounds that trigger when reached by the playhead. As such, these objects correspond to Schaeffer’s definitions of keynote and signal sounds – some are looping background ambiences, such as weather, birdsong and traffic, while others are momentary and more indicative of an action or event. The position of these objects on the vertical axis of the canvas also determines their speed and pitch – an object will play back at a higher speed and pitch if placed further up the canvas, and a lower speed and pitch if placed further down.

There are various other touchscreen actions that aid composition. The user can drag to select a group of objects and then reposition this group on the canvas, or copy it to produce a sequence. Pinching with two fingers will alter the size of any selected objects, which relates to their amplitude. Larger objects play back at a greater volume. These functions allow certain compositional procedures such as motivic repetition, transposition and imitation to be used; it also allows sounds recorded from the environment or from an acoustic ensemble to be manipulated in ways familiar from electroacoustic composition.

Our initial expectations were that the MIDI-type note operations would form the main focus of the students’ compositional activities and that the audio clips would be there to facilitate storytelling as a form of sound effect. However, during the course of the study, we observed that the exploration and layering of these sound files were the principal source of engagement and creative interaction for the groups of students, resulting in a music-making approach more akin to electroacoustic composition than traditional note-based interaction. The reflexive nature of this study, and the development stage of the app, allowed us to respond to the activities of the students by implementing the functions that enabled the students to re-pitch and otherwise transform these sound objects.

6. THE STUDY

The research team visited a primary school in Salford on five visits from March to May 2019, with the aim of using Paynter to get the students to collaboratively create a composition for an ensemble of musicians from the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. The school is a mixed-ability faith school drawing its students from a highly culturally diverse community with a relatively high level of social and economic deprivation. The school has ambitions to attaining ArtsMark status and saw our activity as assisting in the realisation of that ambition. Relatively few of the students had had any formal musical education, although in each of the two classes we worked with there were one or two students who played and received tuition on an instrument. The teaching staff, while clearly accomplished in general terms, lacked music-specific skills.

On the research team’s first visit we were accompanied by four professional musicians provided by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra: Gary Farr (trumpet), Gemma Bass (violin), Kathryn Williams (flute) and Elinor Gow (cello). All the musicians were accomplished improvisers and animateurs in their own right (Gary and Gemma make up part of the free improv and contemporary scored collective the Vonnegut Collective, and Kathryn Williams is a leading member of House of Bedlam), and we were able to make use of their expertise in sourcing sounds from the ensemble that would later be used in the tablet app. All the sessions were audio-recorded using two Zoom H2n digital recorders, so in theory anything that occurred in the sessions could be used as material for the subsequent collaboratively composed composition.

We opted to work with two year groups: Year 3 and Year 5. This was because we wanted to observe differences between Key Stages 1 and 2 in how they worked collaboratively, utilised the app and composed a piece of music. The sessions were led by the researchers, drawing from Brown’s (Reference Brown2007) method of software development as music education research in recording observations and identifying opportunities to develop the app. This was done by taking notes of the sessions, making audio recordings of the activities and looking for moments of creativity, where the contributions of students formed compositional decisions agreed by the class. Retrospectively, it is a limitation of the study that we did not gather feedback or interview data from the students, as this would have provided further reflections on the compositional activity itself. However, our intention when planning the study was to observe the dynamics of how the app functioned within the wider learning process, so we did not account for interviews or other reflective feedback when obtaining approval from the university ethics panel. This is something we will amend when building upon this research.

In the first session, as well as demonstrating their instruments, the orchestral musicians co-developed an improvised piece with the students, prompted by a list of real-world objects suggested by the research team. In response to ideas elicited from the student group, the ensemble created a number of sounds using extended techniques on their instruments, and it was these sounds that would become the basis of some of the compositional material that could be manipulated using the Paynter app. For example, one member of the ensemble, cellist Elinor Gow, used a harmonic glissando technique to make a seagull sound, which was used extensively in a highly representative way in one of the pieces. This dialogic process was particularly productive, as the ensemble musicians were experienced in demonstrating their instruments to school children and approached the activity with exceptional showmanship. Furthermore, it was clear that hearing these instruments in a live setting was a new experience for many of these students, evident from the reactions audible in many of the recordings, which ranged from awe to laughter.

Following the first session, this library of sound files was sent to the class teachers for both Year 3 and Year 5, who shared them with the students and asked them to devise a story, using the audio clips to show a sequence of events. The Year 3 class opted to tell the story of the Titanic (this was a scheme of work being undertaken at the time), while the Year 5 class devised an original story about a cat trying to catch a bird.

In three further visits, the research team worked on the narratives with the two classes. We asked the students to divide up the story into scenes that could be relayed using sounds and musical ideas using the Paynter app. Additional sounds were sourced by recording the class making narrative sounds such as bubble noises (collectively popping their cheeks) and basic Foley-type effects made with classroom items. One noise in particular was popular in the Titanic scene – one student was able to make very effective dolphin chattering noises with his own voice and was given a starring role in the final performance. In addition, they collectively composed through singing some melodic material that was later used in the pieces (Figures 2 and 3). This was a collaborative activity that we did with both classes, asking students to suggest the next note of a sequence by singing, discussing whether this is ‘up’ or ‘down’ in pitch, and then finding it on the app.

Figure 2.

The collectively composed Titanic theme in Paynter (Year 3).

Figure 3.

The Titanic theme in traditional notation (Year 3).

A key aspect of the collaborative process was the convening of an agreed summary of the events in the stories, what sounds would be used to represent these events, and how they would be represented. This inevitably was a form of negotiation, the results of which can be seen in Figure 4. The agreement of both a vocabulary of sounds available to the group and the means by which these sounds can be represented can be related to Vygotsky’s idea of semiotic mediation (see John-Steiner and Mahn Reference John-Steiner and Mahn1996), and more directly to the experience of one of the researchers taking part in the Watching Dance project, in which non-specialist audiences were encouraged to develop their own vocabulary to understand and appreciate contemporary dance (Reason and Reynolds Reference Reason and Reynolds2010), as well as Burnard’s observations of how children carry out the same process of meaning-making (Burnard Reference Burnard2002).

Figure 4.

Discussing the final composition as a class.

Although a separation between the idea of the composer and the performance of the composition is embedded in the Western classical tradition, the research team felt that the project would benefit from performative participation on the part of the student group. Many of the sounds that had been sourced collaboratively to represent the sea, or other natural sounds, could be made in real time instead of being recordings triggered digitally. Although Paynter could have functioned in this way as a triggering device or sequencer for live performance, we wanted to emphasise that the app is a composition environment rather than digital sequencing environment. Sounds agreed by the students that were not to be played by the orchestral musicians would therefore be produced as part of the live final performance. In that performance, in the school hall, with an audience of fellow students and their families, the students were facing the audience, with their backs to the screen showing the graphic scores. The student group therefore needed to be rehearsed using visual, gestural cues on the part of one of the researchers, who would also conduct the ensemble. This gestural language replaced the mnemonic of the graphic score and constituted another negotiated system of symbols.

The students themselves made many of the creative decisions during the project, and the app was altered in response to these decisions. This reflexiveness can be thought of as enabling participation not just through collaboratively composing using the app but also through collaboratively creating the method of composing using the app (see Brown Reference Brown2007). Our motivation for working in this responsive manner was partly to improve the app through trying it out and partly to generate a sense in the students that they were (at least partly) in charge of the process. Certain other decisions were made in the project to demonstrate to non-participants – in particular, the audience – the relationship between graphic score produced in the project and traditional notation. As the orchestral musicians were more than capable of performing from a graphic score, the transcription undertaken by the research team of the graphic score and sounding material generated by Paynter into a fully notated score was not strictly necessary to the functioning of the project – the compositions produced by the student groups using Paynter were finished products in themselves. However, the highly codified nature of traditional scoring, as well as Alan Williams’s familiarity with the performance practice of these particular musicians as members of the BBC Philharmonic meant that the ensemble were able to turn up and play on minimal rehearsal, and the student groups were given the opportunity to experience the authoritative position traditionally enjoyed by the composer.

8. THE RIVET’S TALE, SUBSEQUENT DEVELOPMENTS

A final layer of creative development for the project came in the form of a related commission for an ensemble of 13 instrumentalists from the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra by Alan Williams, entitled The Rivet’s Tale (Williams 2019). Although the commissioning process for this piece occurred independently of the Paynter project, we saw the opportunity to tie it in to the work we were doing in schools by basing the larger piece on material generated by the Paynter project. Prior to the project, Williams had envisaged that this would be a process of expansion and refinement of traditional note-based themes and motives created collaboratively with the students. As the project continued, however, it was the sound objects and soundscapes generated by the electroacoustic aspect of Paynter that proved to be the main sources of material for The Rivet’s Tale, albeit that the piece still used the narrative framework developed by the Key Stage 1 group of the Titanic story.

An example of the transformation of sound object to acoustic music material for the large ensemble can be seen in Figures 11–12.

Figure 11.

Setting Sail (Year 3).

Figure 12.

Rivet’s Tale Letter D.

At the bottom left of the screen is an icon of an explosion – this sound object was recorded as part of musical gesture improvised by the BBC Philharmonic musicians in the first session in the school and consists mainly of a low trumpet note, with other elements of flute and violin. At its original pitch, it did resemble a musical ‘bang’, but through play with Paynter, the students at Key Stage 1 quickly discovered that by dragging it to the bottom of the screen, its frequency and therefore timbre were altered so that it resembled a ship’s horn. Within the narrative framework of the piece, this sonic shorthand for the ship helped to tell the story of the Titanic, but the action of transformation of the original audio is fundamentally an operation derived from electroacoustic composition. The icon used to visually represent the sound object (the ship’s horn) has actually become inappropriate since it no longer sounds like its original referent, a ‘bang’, emphasising the willingness of the students to play and alter sounds in acousmatic ways.

In the original transcription for four musicians performing alongside the students in the school, this sound object appears on the cello, reflecting its predominantly low frequencies, and in a low note on the trumpet (see Figure 3, bar 7). The pitching of this diad, a D/F minor 10th, was a compromise as the sound generated by the students’ play with the original audio was pitched somewhere between a D and C♯. Moreover, over headphones it had an audibly complex frequency spectrum that we were not able to represent on the instruments available – the minor third component to the sound was only one of these timbral elements, and although the use of extended techniques might have created a more complex version of the sound, this would have meant diverting instrumental resources from the representation of other sound objects that needed to be present in the texture.

At the stage of development that pertained at the time of composition, it was not possible to export audio from Paynter – otherwise a spectrum analysis could have been done on this sound object, so its relatively complex spectrum could still only be translated onto the larger ensemble by ear. This was done through euphonium multiphonics, involving the use of the voice as well as the played note

The contributions of the students involved in the school made Williams reconsider the nature of the musical material used in The Rivet’s Tale, emphasizing the importance of the multilayered interactions that were facilitated by the use of Paynter. Without this experience, and without the sounds composed collaboratively by the students, the commission for the BBC Philharmonic ensemble would have been very different, and probably less effective as a piece.