Listen Imagine Compose
SAM has been awarded funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to fund a series of national symposia and associated Action Research projects to explore and develop creative solutions for delivering composition in schools.
Past Ofsted reports have highlighted weaknesses in current secondary school music provision, including: the lack of attention to internalising sound as a basis for creative thinking; the lack of quality and depth in pupil responses; insufficient understanding of what musical progress involves; and the fact that composing activities are rarely related to the work of established composers. Our project aims to address these issues through interaction between pupils, teachers and professional composers and performers. The project will also involve leading members of the formal education sector in a bid to bring about significant change in the way composition is taught in schools.
Work will take place throughout the UK during 2011 and 2012, in partnership with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and researchers from the Institute of Education, and Cambridge, Birmingham City and Manchester Metropolitan Universities.
This project builds on previous work delivered by both BCMG and Sound and Music. In 2002, BCMG developed Exchanging Notes, a think tank which brought together composers and teachers. This was designed to strengthen and investigate the pedagogy of composition and develop new strategies for the teaching of composition across the secondary music curriculum. The project was developed in partnership with Robert Bunting who was then Music Advisor for Birmingham and responded to his external research and BCMG's perceptions. The emphasis of the exchange was to develop practical teaching strategies that could be utilised within any scheme of work. The project resulted in a publication which can be downloaded from the BCMG website, http://www.bcmg.org.uk/downloads.php?id=379
Sound and Music, through delivering its annual Summer School for young composers and its associated composition hub projects, has identified that the teaching of composition throughout the UK can be challenging, often for the reasons identified above. This finding was further tested through a composition project delivered in 2010 in a secondary school in London. The short film below documents the challenges that composers and teachers encountered whilst working on the project.
