Cultivating a Purpose-Driven Composition Pedagogy in General Music

Abstract

Abstract Through composition, music educators can help students cultivate a variety of skills and dispositions, including creativity, musical craftsmanship, and criticality. An educational climate that prioritizes the use of composition to benefit performance-based structures, however, can result in criticality and creativity being understood as secondary, only to be considered after students have mastered a particular set of functional skills. When both criticality and craftsmanship are developed in tandem, students may use composition to explore their own inquiries, helping them cultivate their voices alongside and in community with others. In this chapter, I explore how criticality and creativity can strike a balance with craftsmanship in composition, as students simultaneously explore musical development and engage in musical creation as a form of social response. I then place these ideas within the realm of general music at multiple levels, arguing for a notion of these classes as spaces where dispositions that are critical, creative, and artistic can be cultivated.