Composing Music Based on the Actual Processes of Composers

In my middle school classes, my students often began composing after analyzing an existing piece of music to serve as a model or example to get their own compositional ideas. Because my students were working with loop-based software, I tried to find intriguing pieces of music that were based around loops or extended ostinati. When I was listening to the CDs that accompany the new Silver Burdett Making Music series, I ran across a track in Grade 2 entitled Fish Food by electric cellist Gideon Freudmann.


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I tracked Gideon down on the web through his website and asked him about his process for creating Fish Food:

I recorded Fish Food with my electric cello and a Lexicon JamMan - a nice rack-mounted looper that has not been on the market for several years. Lately I have been using a foot peddle looper - the Boss Loop Station (RC-20). It's not stereo, but very easy to use and has some other nice features.

Fish Food is from my CD, Hologram Crackers which is an entire album of loop based electric cello instrumental tunes (all original. It's available, along with my other CDs at http://www.cellobop.com. Fish Food is an unusual tune in that the "verse" has three measures in 7 and one in 6.

The tune was recorded mostly in one pass with the looper - playing the the strum phrase first and then building the layers of the loop on top of it. Once it was all there I improvised some leads over the top - again, all in the one pass. When I mixed it down, I started the piece at a point where the loop with all the layers were established (as opposed to some other tunes where left in each layer as they get added) and at the very end I overdubbed a few of the weird atonal sounds. The big chord that begins and ends the tune came from another tune and those were the last sounds to be added." (personal communication)

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Not only were my students informed by analyzing the recording of Fish Food, but they also were informed by Gideon's personal process of working with a stand-alone loop-pedal and production process in his studio.

I wish as teachers we had access to more stories of the actual production and composing processes musicians use to create music today. I did find a few older sources, such as writings by Igor Stravinsky (Poetics of Music) and Aaron Copland (What to listen for in music.) but what about more contemporary music and musicians?

In the bargain bin at a Tuesday Morning, I found a great book entitled: Off the record: Songwriters on songwriting by Graham Nash. This book and set of audio CDs includes interviews with Randy Bachman, David Crosby, John Lee Hooker, and others.

Another interesting book is Talking Music: Conversations With John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers by William Duckworth. This book shares interviews and conversations with the above mentioned composers and others. I have found great quotes and descriptions of process in this book to share with my students.

For the most up-to-date examples of process, I have found Jon Savage's Sound2Picture resources to be most intriguing. In this resource and in his own personal blog, Jon shares detailed notes and videos of sound designer Andrew Diey. In these notes, Andrew talks about his composing process for each of the films and computer games he composed for in the Sound2Picture and Sound2Game projects.

Lastly, Sam Reese pointed me in the direction of a great article by University of Illinois composer Stephen Taylor entitled: Translating unapproachable light: How composers write music. This article describes his own process composing a piece entitled: Unapproachable Light. Lots of great insight here that should be shared with student composers.

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If you are interested in listening to Fish Food or using it with your students, check out the following information:
Fish Food (click to listen to and/or purchase from iTunes)
Gideon Freudmann - http://www.cellobop.com
2005 album Hologram Crackers

Rite of Spring Project

Listen to and watch the full performance

Aural Sculptures

Musicians often approach composing with music software in an additive way--starting by creating music one layer, voice, or note at a time. We might lay down a bass or drum track, then a melody or another instrument as we build our compositions. Most music software is designed to facilitate this approach. However, what might happen if we took advantage of the design of loop-based software programs like Super Duper Music Looper, Acid Music Studio, or GarageBand by allowing students to compose in a subtractive way, similar to that of sculptors who start with a piece of rock or wood, removing portions to reveal the finished work? What might a piece of music sound like if we borrowed the process that sculptors use and applied it to composing?

To start the project, students viewed four Marshall Fredericks sculptures entitled Pony Express. These sculptures were created by sculpting a block of clay to reveal the images. A mold of the clay carvings was created which was then used to cast the final sculptures in bronze. The process that Marshall Fredericks used was a subtractive process--he removed portions of clay to reveal his final sculpture.

Drawing on the sculpting process, students used Acid Music Studio to create their own “sound mass” similar to a block of clay, wood, or stone. Students were asked to create an Acid file comprised of 10 to 15 layers of different sound loops that lasted for a total of two minutes. The result was a screen painted solid with a variety of different sound loops, creating a cacophonous “sound mass.”

After students had created their sound masses, they traded them with their classmates. The task for the classmates was to use a subtractive process of removing or altering portions of the sound mass (parallel to the sculpting process) to create a music composition. Students could not add anything to the sound masses, however, they could use the erase tool to make changes to the the texture and form of the compositions. Students also transform the musical layers through the use of filter, key change, and tempo tools to create their composition.

Strategies for Assessing Musical Understanding in Composing Experiences

As a teacher, I am always looking for ways to better understand how my students think as composer-musicians. I often ask myself questions like:

• What are their conceptions and misconceptions about music and musical process?
  
• What are their challenges in the composing process?
• What are their musical intentions?
  

I have found the following three techniques to provide many insights that have helped me be a better teacher and more importantly, my students to be better peer-teachers.

Composers' Commentaries

When I watch a DVD, I have the option at the end of the movie (or even at the beginning) to watch the move with overdubbed commentaries by the director and often the actors who made the movie. These commentaries provide additional information and insight into the processes of creating the film. Because I wanted to learn more about what my students were thinking as they composed their pieces and what they thought was important to share with the listeners of their compositions, I ask my students to record an additional commentary track on each of their compositions.

When students are finished with their compositions, they save one version with the commentary, and another without it. Here is an example of a composition entitled Rock to the Beat by one of my 6th grade students, Jessica Walton:


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What insights do you have into her compositional process and musical understanding after listening to her composition?

Here is her piece with her recorded commentary:

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What insights do you have into her compositional process and musical understanding after listening to her composition with recorded commentary?

Emergent Encyclopedia of Composing

When I first discovered the Wikipedia website, I was intrigued by its underlying concept - a website where anyone could easily contribute and collaborate to create an online encyclopedia. One of the first ideas I had a music teacher was to adapt this concept for use to support my students classroom composing experiences. Wouldn't it be cool to have my students create an online encyclopedia of composing that contained their suggestions for what made a good piece of music and their own successful strategies for composing and working with our composing tools?

Click here to see what they created

Composition Logs

After reading a great online article by writing researcher and educator Katie Wood Ray entitled Read Like a Teacher of Writing, I decided to have my students create composition logs of each etude and composition they created throughout our middle school general music classes. When students start a composition, they begin to fill out their composition log. They revisit this log again when they decide to either abandon or finish their compositions. Here's a link to the composition log we use:

Our Composition Log

Seeing Sound/Hearing Art

One of the challenges for art educators is to know how a student visually experiences a work of art. What do they notice first? What are the students' visual pathways through the artwork? More broadly, how do they see the artwork?

Similar challenges exist for the music educator in knowing how students listen to music and what they perceive during that process.

In my classes I have used Frank Jonas' Geoscape 6 as a way to better understand how my students see a work of art. A common conception that my students often have is that a work of art is static in that it does not change over time, unlike music which is almost always in motion through time. One way to challenge this conception is to challenge students to compose a piece of music that expresses their visual pathway through a work of art.

I have had students compose to Geoscapes 6 with both acoustic and computer-based instruments. When I present the painting to the students, I often ask them?

• What do you see?
• What did you notice first? Second? Third?
• How might you represent what you see through sound?
• What does this artwork sound like to you?

Whether students work together in small groups with classroom instruments or work alone or in small groups with loop software, I have found my students' pathways through this artwork to be very different from each other. Some students see the background squares first, then additional layers of "chaos" on top. Some view it holistically noticing "chaos" first, then moving "downward" through the artwork to the order of the squares. Others focus on the shapes or colors and try to represent those aspects of the artwork through their music.

Perhaps the most interesting has been our class discussions when sharing our compositions. My students always came away with a better understanding that not everyone sees an artwork in the same way. Also, they come to better understand how an entire class of students can create totally different pieces of music from the same visual artwork and the different techniques composers can use to express through sound.