Incorporating Composition in the Piano Lab Classroom
The National Core Arts Standards are organized around four modalities: Creating, Performing, Responding, and Connecting. While we tend to focus on performance in our ensemble courses, that is only one of the four modalities. Electives like Piano Lab, which often have less performance requirements can be a great place to explore the other three modalities, including creating!
Aside from just teaching to the standards, there are lots of great reasons for incorporating composition into your piano classrooms. Composition experiences can be a highly rewarding activity for many students. Students often enjoy being able to express themselves creatively and tasking them with creating their own music often provokes a sense of ownership over the academic experience. Plus, create is at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy and can help students interact with musical concepts at the highest level.
Using the National Standards to Create Assignments
The composition standards for harmonizing instruments do a good job of breaking down the processes that go into composition. Within the larger category of ‘Create’ there are sub categories grouped by the verbs: Imagine, Plan and Make, Evaluate and Refine, and Present. I’ve found it helpful to organize my composition instruction around these verbs. Importantly, I do not necessarily include every verb every time. Sometimes, I assign brainstorming activities that center around imagining and planning compositions. Other times, the brainstorming activities get extended into formal compositions, but many times they don’t. Sometimes, students are pushed to present short musical ideas in a round-robin style, other times, they go through a process of self and peer evaluation and refinement of compositions. Sometimes, students present their ideas just for me, other times for their peers. Creative assignments don’t have to just look like one thing. They can be large or small, woven into larger lessons, or a lesson all on their own.
Examples
Small Moments of Creativity
Not every creative task has to be a long assignment with a formal grade. Instead, try incorporating small moments of creativity into your lessons. These small moments provide a scaffold for students to start exercising their creativity muscles. Here are a few ideas for small moments of creativity to get you started:
Rhythm Creations: Any time you teach a new rhythm, ask students to compose their own short rhythm that incorporates the new material. Length of rhythm can depend on experience level. Then, have students perform the rhythm through a call and response clapping exercise. For example, student A claps the four beats they composed, then the class responds with a predetermined rhythm, then student B claps their four beats, followed by the class response, etc.
Hand Position Improv: Introducing a new scale, or hand position? Give students a few moments to improvise within that group of notes. In addition to just teaching them to move up and down through the scale or hand position, allowing them to improvise will help students gain familiarity with the sound of that group of notes and feel more comfortable moving around within that group of notes.
Creative Interpretation: Don’t forget that we make creative decisions all the time! Whenever you’re adding things like expression, rubato, and articulation, you’re being creative. Sometimes these things are marked in the music, but often we add them even when they’re not marked because we are interpreting music creatively. Highlight these moments for students in their own music. Consider asking questions like: How fast do you think the tempo should be here? or Which notes do you think should be the loudest? These decisions are things both performers and composers consider.
Assignments
These smaller moments of creativity can help provide scaffolding for larger assignments. Here are a few more robust assignments you could assign your piano students.
Compose within a given form: Ask students to listen to a variety of examples of a form, for example ABA form. Then, ask students to compose their own piece in ABA form.
Harmonization: Once you start introducing chords, you can also introduce harmonization. Just like any other concept, start small. Consider asking students to harmonize a piece using just the I and V chords.
Compose based on a theme or emotion: Emotional expression is an important part of musical creativity, especially for young people. Consider assignments that allow students to portray an emotion, mood, or theme.
General Advice
Finally, here are two miscellaneous pieces of advice:
First year piano students will compose music that sounds like it was created by someone who has only been playing for a year. The goal of these assignments should never be to create the world’s best song. The goal is to play and experiment with new musical concepts through composition. Set these expectations for both yourself and your students. In my experience, some students will want to write a song that sounds like it could be on the radio. Steer students away from these perfectionistic goals. They are beginners. The songwriters on the radio are not. It is ok to sound like a beginner. Setting unrealistic expectations can keep students from feeling free to explore and experiment with sound.
Lastly, be clear with your students about grading criteria and keep that criteria simple. For example, if you assign a composition project in which students need to compose using ABA form, then grade them based on whether or not they correctly implemented that form. Sticking to clear criteria empowers students to complete assignments and allows for a variety of ability levels. Attempting to place objective metrics onto a subjective process stifles creativity. In the example of ABA form, regardless of how advanced or aesthetically pleasing a student’s composition is, as long as they composed in ABA form, they should get an A.