ABSTRACT
I sit next to Emma 1 in one of her school’s music practice rooms. She is a music teacher in an inner-city school for girls in London, UK, and today is my last visit. The students have gone home for the day and the mood is relaxed. Over the last two months I videoed Emma’s pop-song composition project with her 13–14-year-old students (Year 9) as part of a larger study of music teachers’ perceptions of creativity. It is a couple of weeks after the project’s final concert and we have met to watch a selection of recorded extracts from the project. Emma is excited to watch the resulting selection. In the first extract, from the second lesson, we see clips of a voice warm up and singing followed by work for the pop-song composition. Four groups of students sit in circles in a spacious music room writing the lyrics of their songs. Then two groups read their choruses to everybody before going to separate practice rooms. Next, we see Emma working with one of the groups. She helps them find the tempo for the drum pattern and start shaping their melody. I stop the viewing and ask her to describe what she was doing: ‘I was trying to give them a way into the melody without writing it myself, starting from the words they already had, giving them some opportunities to see different ways they could take that tune for a walk. I was saying, “Oh, you could go up, you could go down …” giving them one example, and it just seemed the right example of how they might get into the next step. It is not the only way of getting into a melody but it felt instinctively the way to go for them.’ She explains that having spent many years working with bands she tends to do things instinctively rather than by having a plan, because every group will have different knowledge and expectations.
