Thinking about Children's Compositions

Abstract

The writer offers an analysis of examples of music (which can be heard on the accompanying cassette tape) composed by pupils as part of their ordinary class music lesson. He suggests that, like any other music, children's compositions can be approached as a quasi-symbolic image of consciousness. The process of skill learning and the act of musical creation are closely connected, even in some sense identical. This way of understanding children's music has implications for the initiation of composition work in class, and for the assessment of that work.