Composing

A student composed a short tune after being introduced to improvisation.
At first we try to continue to compose by playing "anything" but the outcome is nothing desirable.

I do not want to brush off this opportunity. Thus I asked her to play the short tune today. Next, I asked her to think of a suitable time signature and worked out the rhythm with help. With the composition becoming visible, finding the notes was easy. Right in front of us was a 4 bar rhythm with names of notes .

Though it was the first composition we are working on, but I encourage her to compose a 16 bars piece. Trying out a few keys, the next 4 barsjust do not sound right. Instead of sticking to what the student wanted which is to play the 1st 2 bars again, we used the last note in bar four to be the link to the next 4 bars. After making a few melodies, finally she made her choice. The rhythm and notes are now in place for 8 bars.

There is a sense of achievement though much time was spent on that. Student is assigned homework to work on the next 8 bars with a criteria to end on the key note.

With this lesson, I will teaching composition with small steps of guidelines . Thus this will be a start of part of my teaching curriculum.