S7: E138 Composing with Students: Lesson Processes and Ideas You Can Use

 Season Seven

Episode 138

Composing with Students:  Lesson Processes and Ideas You Can Use

Composition can be an intimidating word.  Where do you start?  How do you make the process meaningful for students, but not too difficult or so stressful that you want to pull your hair out in the process.  I’m going to share the process I used with my fifth graders this past week.  There are several ways you can go about the composition process with this lesson and the nice thing about it is that you can decide where your final product ends.  There are always ways to extend the process, but these steps are not always necessary.  The goal is that students create something that they are proud of, that demonstrates their musical skills, can be performed well, and that students can understand.  Here are process ideas as well as the specific process I used with my students.

Before you begin teaching the composition process, figure out what music concept you’re wanting students to work on and ideas for how the final outcome might look.  

FIRST STEP:  Figure out how you want to start.  It’s perfectly acceptable to provide students with rhythms to choose from.  It’s totally fine to ask students to compose short phrases using notes and rhythms they have learned.  It’s totally fine to start with improvisation on an instrument and ask students to play around with sounds and find a pattern that they like.  (Highly recommend doing the improvisations in a pentatonic scale as it’s easier for them to hear what they’re playing and easier to discern what they’re playing.  Plus it just sounds so much better as they experiment.)

SECOND STEP:  Decide how you want students to create their composition using the perimeters you have set up.  Are they working with a partner?  How long is the phrase or phrases they are creating?  

THIRD STEP:  Check with each student, partners, or groups throughout the process as they work on their composition.  

FOURTH STEP:  Group students together to perform their composition for each other.  Then ask students to share for the class.  I find that students are more successful when they have opportunities to perform for another partner or small peer group before performing for the entire class.  By performance, I don’t mean a formal thing - just a sharing of what they have created.

FIFTH STEP:  Decide if that was the final step.  For an extension, you could do the following:

• Another extension is to have students play their rhythms on an instrument instead of just patting it or speaking it.  Drums or unpitched percussion can work great for this.  Boomwhackers are fun.  Rhythm sticks.  Whatever you have.

• Another extension is to assign body percussion to each note - quarter notes are snaps, eighth notes are claps, and sixteenth notes are pats.  For rests, students choose a pose to hold for that beat or number of beats.  This might sound simplistic, but I’ve found that performing their composed pattern as body percussion can add a nice challenge.

• If it’s a rhythmic phrase that they’ve created, ask students to set up bars in a specific pentatonic scale and choose pitches for each beat - the rhythm of each beat.  Example:  if the rhythm is Quarter Note - Two Eighth - Four Sixteenth - One Quarter (you might speak this as Ta Titi Tikatika Ta or Ta Tadi takadimi Ta or whatever you syllable system might be).  To get from rhythm to melody, I’d ask students to choose one pitch for the quarter note, another pitch for the eighth notes, another for sixteenth, and another for the quarter.  So they might have A - GG - EEEE - D.  You will have those students who can handle adding different notes for each sixteenth note and let them have at it if they go for it.  Most of your students will likely find it less complicated to choose one note for each beat.

• Ask two groups or individuals to work together.  They share with each other what they have created - either rhythmically, with body percussion, or as melodies on the bars.  Then ask them to learn each other’s parts.  So let’s say Annie and Matt are paired together.  Annie teaches Matt her part and Matt teaches Annie his part.  When they have learned both parts, they decide what order to put them in and combine their compositions to create a longer composition.  It could be as simple as a four beat measure.  By adding their measures together, an 8-beat phrase is created.

• To extend this further, you could have students share their composed measures or phrases with the class.  Write them on the board as they share.  Ask four different students to choose compositions that are different from their own.  Put them in order and ask the class to speak or play the patterns.

Those are just some of the ways that students can compose music.  Here is the specific process I used with my students last week and where we are going this week:

1 - I provided my fifth graders with a selection of 4-beat rhythmic measures on a paper that contain quarter, eighth, sixteenth notes, and quarter rests.  The rhythms are pre-set.  Students work with a partner.  Each person chooses two measures to write on a 4 Line Rhythm Paper.  One partner chooses the measures to write down on lines 1 and 3 while the other students chooses the measures to write down on lines 2 and 4.  Both students will end up with the same rhythms on every single line of their paper.  

2 - From here I ask students to read through each rhythm pattern - working together on their own time - starting with line one.  As they read each pattern they need to speak it and pat it four times.  (demonstrate ta ta takadimi ta… ta ta takadimi ta..).  When they have done this for all four lines, then I ask them to speak it for me.  They are then asked to perform each line one time to speak all four measures in a row.  They practice this and I check them again.

3 - I asked different groups to try different ways of performing their measures.  Some were to perform with body percussion and some were to perform with pens and their desks and some were asked to perform by playing the rhythms on C on the xylophones.  (the xylophone group went in the hallway to practice - if this isn’t an option, then I recommend asking them to perform it without mallets and just using their fingers.  Yes, they might complain that they can’t hear, but with mallets no one else can hear).  Then each group shared what they created with each other in small groups and then with the entire class.

4 - As a class we set up the xylophones into C Pentatonic.  Before asking them to compose melodies with their created rhythms, we did one together as a class.  I chose one of the rhythm patterns from the first page and wrote it on the board.  We spoke the rhythm and then I asked one student to choose a pitch for the first note (let’s say they chose G).  I asked another student to choose a pitch for the second note and so on until all four beats were assigned pitches.  We spoke the rhythm using the note names like “G AA CCCC A.”  From here I asked students to figure out a way to perform this melody.  They often ask which G to play or which C to play.  I tell them to experiment with it until they find the one that sounds the best to them.  We spend time letting them explore how to play this pattern repeatedly and students share how they interpreted the rhythm pattern.  It’s fun to see how this simple example can be played in different ways.  This step is what I choose to do during one class time.  It is something that can be done again with a different rhythm in a second class or another rhythm in a third class.  Whatever your students need and however many times you want them to practice - do that!  This could even be a stopping point.

5 - The next class I asked students to work with their partner to choose the pitches for the rhythm on their first line only.  They write the letters of each note under the rhythms.  They decide how they want to play it and practice just that first rhythm together.  This was the only step students worked on during the next class.  If students are ready to move ahead, ask them to create the melody for their second phrase… third and fourth.  This could take several classes.  This next week we are finishing this step of the process in one class and for a few other classes we’re still on step one and step two.  They’re at different stages and that’s okay!  

6 - From here students practice all four measures in order to create their short phrases and to be sure they know what they’ve composed and how to perform it.  They perform for each other - one partner group sharing with another partner group.  Then they take turns performing for the class.  I don’t have students notate their melodies on the staff, but I could!   That would be another extension for sure.

When you’re composing with students, the process is every bit as important - if not more so - than the culminating result.  I hope this is helpful and gives you confidence to try composing with your students!