ABSTRACT
Surprisingly little has been written on the teaching of composing in schools. There had been early experiments in the first decades of this century. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, who visited London to teach composition in conservatoires in the first years of the century wrote in 1914, ‘The study of solfège teaches the pupils to hear and mentally envisage melodies, and all sorts of melodic combinations, to identify and vocally improvise them, to notate and compose them’. In the USA, Satis Coleman’s early work in New York with children and composing stated that it seems rather inappropriate to let anything so formal as a fixed method stand between the little child and his experiences in so elemental an art (Coleman 1922). The basis of her work was with individual pupils as was that of Walford Davies whose mission through early BBC broadcasts was based on ‘a belief in the ability of children to compose their own melodies’ (Cox 1997: 45). One of the first written records of the early practice of composing in an English secondary school is that of the young Peter Maxwell Davies where he states: ‘It was here that the creative work with music in the school began – born of sheer necessity’ (Davies 1963: 108).1 Books on classroom composing published in Canada and taken up by Universal Edition here in England brought the views and experience of composer R. Murray Schafer to the attention of music educators in the mid-1960s. Schafer was influenced greatly by the New York group of composers centred on John Cage. George Self’s Cage-inspired work written from the experience of working with lower ability secondary children was published as New Sounds in Class (1967) by Universal Edition. This publishing house did more than many to awaken interest in and support the practice of composing in schools, largely due to the enterprise and enthusiasm of Bill Colleran.2 There was a growth of publications around 1970 including Wilfrid Mellers’s composition and philosophical schools material, The Resources of Music (1969), which preceded Brian Dennis’s Experimental Music in Schools (1970) and Paynter and Aston’s Sound and Silence (1970) by one year. It shows Mellers to have been a powerful influence on music education from his York University base.