Inspire and Encourage Students to Compose

Learning to play an instrument has proven to be helpful in creating and developing healthy mind, body and soul. Music creation is something that aids in enhancing logic building skills and improves concentration, commitment and focus. Composing music gives opportunities to individuals to present their creativity and work around and beyond their imaginations in making their own scores. Normal music lessons would enable your students to learn notes, rhythm and other components of music but encouraging young ones to create their own music is something that lies at another level of teaching.

Benefit of Composing Music:

Inspiring and encouraging young ones to compose has numerous benefits:

• It enhances their understanding of music and related components such as chords, melody, harmony etc.
• It improves listening and reading skills.
• It gives them ease of connecting with their emotions and makes them more expressive.
• It makes lessons more fun for both students and teachers.
• It enhances their motivation to learn especially when you are working with teenage beginners.
• Music creation works as a promoting activity for students to continue music even if they wished to quit.

Tips for Encouraging Students to Compose:

Here are some tips that teachers can opt for in order to inspire their students to compose music.

• Live musical performance: One thing that works impressively well for inspiring and encouraging music composition is by hearing and seeing other musicians performing live music. Perform with your teaching staff at school assembly or get some local performers to play for your students.
• Show work of other musicians in your school: Show work of other musicians and composers in your school to your students. You can put their work on your school website or let them play their pieces at assembly. You can even develop their work on CDs and share with students. Giving importance to their compositions would inspire other students to participate in composing music.
• Low pressure fear free composition: Give your students some space to create low pressure composition meaning let them create what they want to instead of forcing them to work on what they don’t want to compose. Let them be creative and discover what they want. Give them a chance to start that is the hardest point of composition. Encourage them to work and compose a small composition without fear. Just to get them started, set a time frame.
• Give them context for composition: Providing them some context for composition would let them focus on what to compose. Not only that but it would give them a base for their imagination and creativity with music. You can ask your students to create music in context with a fairy take or around a news or for a purpose such as Christmas time performance at school or for summers. Give them a topic and ask them to compose a few lines for that topic.
• Give them some words to play with: You can give your students some lyrics and ask them to compose music for them. You can ask your student to pick some poem or quote and compose for it. If that doesn’t seem to work, you can ask them to find a different melody for a certain song or rhythm. Once they begin to do it for short versus, you can extend the process of composition by expanding the structure and adding more lyrics or versus to it.
• Encourage group composition: Give your students multiple chances to compose in group. As they practice composition in large group, they will begin to observe and take part in the process. As a next step, you may invite them to arrange and perform their composition.
  
• Make notations visible: Make notations of compositions more visible in front of students using a large board or a staff paper in order to build music literacy skills. You can also ask students to do notations of certain compositions.
• Play different activities: Learning is made more fun with activities. In order to make your students learn to compose, play different activities related to arrangements, reading, notations, analysis and evaluation of compositions.One idea to test their skills would be asking them questions related to a certain composition. Let them have a look at their checklist in order to identify if a certain composition makes sense.

Tips for Motivating Young Composers:

Here are some most important tips that would motivate your young composers:

• Take their compositions seriously: Give important to whatever they compose whether it is good or bad. It is important to take them and their work seriously. Ask relevant questions about their composition and treat them as a legitimate piece of music.
• Encourage them for feedbacks: Every class should end with a few minutes session for students to share their feedbacks related to compositions made within the classroom as well as of others outside the class. Encourage them to share their opinion such as telling one thing that they liked about a certain composition or a suggestion that they thing would make the composition even more beautiful.
• Post their compositions on boards: You can have a “Wall of Fame” in your classroom where you can post your students’ compositions; May it be group composition or individual composition. This Wall of Fame would enhance creativity and would encourage students to make more compositions.
• Have audience other than teacher: Another factor that tempts students to compose music is by having an audience other than their teacher. This would help your struggling composers to work beyond their skills and extend their level of creativity.

Conclusion:

The fun of creating something on your own is ever so rewarding that it serves as a motivation in itself but there is always fear of beginning. Similar is with music composition. Some motivation from teachers could do the needful that is needed for students to begin having ownership of learning and creating particular sounds that they would love to play and hear.