Music Composition Lessons: the multimodal affordances of technology

This article seeks to investigate the multimodal affordances presented by music software and how it can provide new opportunities for students to engage with composition work in the classroom. It aims to broaden the scope of current research into classroom composition using technology, through a study of students’ environments and compositional processes as seen from these new perspectives. The authors believe there is a now a need for a reconsideration of the scope of multimodal enquiry in the field of creative music. Introduction The multimodal affordances presented by composition software appear to provide new opportunities for students to engage with composition work in the classroom. We provide an account of the processes and outcomes of the InterActive Education research project, drawing on data from the work of the music team working within the teaching and learning strand. This explored the ways in which students approached the composition process, through the use of various software programs. Each teacher was asked to consider a composition area of the Music curriculum and plan, develop and teach a Subject Design Initiative (SDI). The government requires that students aged between 5 and 14 years of age engage with Music composition. So, what characterises composition work in today’s Music lessons in English schools? For students aged 7 – 14 (the age of students within our research), this has been typified by work in small groups of between 2 and 6, often using classroom instruments including keyboards. When using computers, students most commonly work in pairs. Composition briefs provided by the teacher are 1 The overall aims of this project were to understand more about the relationship between ICT and learning and to find ways of using ICT in education to make teaching and learning more effective. Work in English, geography, history, mathematics, modern foreign languages, music and science was carried out with 56 teachers from 10 institutions: 4 primary schools, 5 secondary schools and 1 tertiary college. The research design included five strands each of which looked at ICT in relation to a specific aspect: (i) teaching and learning, (ii) policy and management, (iii) subject cultures, (iv) professional development, and (v) learners’ out-of-school uses of technology. Music work discussed in this paper derives from strand (i), teaching and learning. See project website for further information: www.interactiveeducation.ac.uk 2 The music subject team comprised 3 teachers from 2 primary schools, 5 teachers from 3 secondary schools and 2 teacher educators/researchers (Gall and Breeze). The team worked together over a period of two years both together and in teacher/researcher pairs. 3 A Subject Design Initiative (SDI) is a unit of work in which the teacher explores the ways in which technology supports learning within the subject.