ABSTRACT
You’ve just collected your fifth-grade students’ MIDI1 compositions and, with a hot cup of coffee in hand, are settled down and ready to listen to them from your computer. The assignment for the children was to compose a song on the synthesizer using notation software. The song was to be eight measures long, in 3/4 time and in the key of B. You emphasized that students use B as their “home tone”; that is, they were to use that pitch at least three times in the composition and also to end on the B. Your purpose, as a teacher, was to teach about and reinforce the concept of key centeredness (i.e., tonality), as well as to determine whether the students understood 3/4 time. A second – no less important – purpose for this assignment was to give children the chance to be creative in their approach to learning. You smile and nod as you listen to the first ten or so compositions, all just a little different, but mostly the same: clearly following the parameters that you set to create a simple, single line melody. But when you get to Nora’s song you are startled. Though she did write in 3/4 time and used the B as asked, she clearly experimented with several different timbres and composed a jagged atonal melody full of wide leaps, accompanied by alternating loud/ soft tone clusters using an electronic-sounding timbre. It didn’t sound very “good” to you, yet it was somehow interesting. Was it a random mess? Or did Nora compose this song deliberately? How should it be graded? How do you respond to Nora? It certainly was not nearly as “neat” and tonally “centered” as the other student compositions. In fact, it was downright strange. You’re stuck with these questions, yet also intrigued by what Nora composed.
