Creativity

As a teacher of elementary general music classes, my students can be creative and can easily make creative choices in music class.  Creativity can come into play in music class in all three areas of music education, including creating, performing, and responding.

In creating, students can compose music for themselves.  Students can compose on instruments or for singing.  These composition projects need to involve parameters, however; students should not be “set free” to make up whatever they want because this can be overwhelming.  One of the composition projects that I do with my first grade students is that I give them a phrase on the xylophone to learn to play that is a “question” phrase.  We discuss call and response musical phrasing.  Then students are given parameters such as a number of measures, the use of quarter notes, eighth notes, and quarter rests, certain pitches they can use, and that the ending note must be C to create the response part of their composition.  They are also required, according to new Common Core Reading and Writing Standards, to write a sentence defending their choices and explaining why their phrase works as an answer to the question, which allows them to participate in the responding area of music.  If students are given the chance to practice and perform their answer, then they are also participating in the performing area of music.

Within the performing area of music, I like to have my students figure out how to play simple melodic songs by ear.  I believe this requires creative thinking because students have to think deeply and make creative connections between what they’ve learned about music in the past in order to figure out the melody of the songs.  One example was with the fourth graders.  I asked them to figure out how to play on their recorders One Direction’s song “You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful” because the chorus of the song uses only do, re, and mi.  They were very excited to get to figure out a song that they listened to all the time, and each rendition was slightly different since the chorus of the song is performed slightly different each time.  It was fun and very creative of an activity.  We furthered the creative activity by “passing off” the melody by playing a portion of it and then pointing recorders at the next person, who would play the next section.  This allowed for a creative performance of the piece, even though it was an already established piece.  The passing off game was the students’ idea, not mine, which I thought was very fun and innovative.

A second way that students can be creating in music class is to listen to music and make up stories that accompany that music.  While not all music is intended to be programmatic, students will listen more actively if they are allowed to create as they listen.  Therefore, with my third grade students, I give my students the title of a piece of music and tell them to make up a story as they listen.  I give them a pencil and paper and sometimes crayons to use.  As they listen, they are to make up a story and use musical sounds as evidence for what they chose as their stories.  This way, students are both creating and responding to music, and they are listening very actively.  My students have come up with some excellent stories for what they are hearing in pieces of music.  One student created an entire story of a good guy, a bad guy with a curly mustache, and a girl tied to railroad tracks while listening to Beethoven’s Fifth.  He even recognized a certain theme as the bad guy’s theme and another motive as the good guy’s theme, and the continual movement of the main motive as the train coming through.  I could not believe the complexity of his creativity.  I have found this to be the norm for my students; they can make up fantastic stories to go with music and give musical reasons why they chose those parts of the stories.  This has become one of my favorite creative musical activities.

I have never been quite brave enough to let my elementary students choose a piece of music for a performance, but I have allowed them to choose which songs they would like to learn in regular music class setting.  For example, during the American Vernacular music course for this masters degree, I established a unit of studying American music with my students.  Within the unit, which is set up mostly be decades, I made a playlist of youtube videos for each one with at least 10 songs, and the students were assigned for homework to listen to all the songs and choose their favorites, but they had to list reasons why those were their favorites.  In class later, we chose through voting which pieces we wanted to learn and use in our study of the genre or decade of music.  This assured that the students were listening to all the assigned pieces but still were able to focus on a few even in only 25 minutes twice per week of music class.  It worked very well this year when we actually implemented it.

The fifth way that I encourage creativity in music class is through dancing and body movement.  Sometimes when we dance, we all do the same thing together, but other times, I ask the students to make up dances or to move in a way that goes with the music.  This allows the students who might not be willing to express themselves vocally another way to express their feelings of the music.  Students respond very well in these activities.  With kindergarten students, I do an entire unit of Carnival of the Animals in which we act out each movement as we listen to it. One example is in the movement called "Elephants." It is a low-register waltz played on the stringed bass. My students moved to the music, knowing it was titled elephants. They were very funny. Most of them pretended to have elephant trunks, and many of them were ballet dancing, but in a way that looked very heavy. In our discussion afterward, students revealed that it was hard to move the way the music sounded because elephants are big and heavy but the music was gentle and light. It was a great discussion for the music. Many of the students said they thought the elephant wanted to be a ballerina really bad. It was a fun and creative experience for everyone.