A Comparison of Mexican Children's Music Compositions and Contextual Songs.

This research explores children's original music composition through the lens of cultural context. Since the development in the United States of the National Standards for Music Education in 1994, there has been much interest in student music composition. One of the nine music content standards states that students should be composing music (MENC, 1994), and this has posed a challenge for many educators unfamiliar with the teaching of music composition. This research study of cultural context as it influences student music composition will provide a new layer of understanding about the teaching of music composition. This increased understanding should facilitate more effective teaching and learning in this important area of music education. According to Upitis (1992), music provides a way of interpreting and understanding our world. Elliott defines context as "the total of ideas, associations, and circumstances that surround, shape, frame, and influence something and our understanding of that something" (1995, p. 40). Campbell (2004) writes that even the youngest children can compose music, and that informal musical experiences within family and social environments enhance musical understandings. This research contributes a new dimension, cultural context, to research in the area of student music composition. Marsh (1995) researched children in an Australian inner-city school playground to examine their compositional processes as they related to text, movement, and context. She found that children work in several compositional modes simultaneously, and that they progress through a cycle of experimenting in which new ideas are invented and introduced, and then either "retained, reworked or discarded" (p. 6). Marsh also reported that the compositional processes of children are influenced by "collaborative interaction" among group members, and that "children's varying levels of understanding or skill may be accommodated and extended by this process of musical joint construction" (p. 7). Levi (1991), Kratus (1989), Ashby (1995), and Perconti (1996) state that children progress through stages of music composition development. Levi (1991) investigated 6 second-grade children over a period of seven weeks, during which they composed music using Orff xylophones, and also composed using written language. The children were asked to "improvise with the goal of creating a piece that could be played for the teacher" (p. 63). In subsequent sessions, they were given the option of starting new pieces, or revising earlier ones. Levi describes a five-phase process that consists of exploring, focusing, rehearsing, composing, and editing. Kratus (1989) found that children use different strategies for composing music depending on their age, with seven-year-old children composing primarily through exploration. As children become older, he found that they compose through development and repetition, and noted that the 9- and 11-year-old children change processes as they compose--starting with exploration, progressing to development, and ending with repetition. Ashby (1995) examined the processes of 8-year-old (n=15), and 10-year-old (n=15) children as they composed music during a 10-minute session, and reported that children of these ages are able to replicate compositions that they have created. Similar to Kratus, Ashby writes that children "tend to change from one process to another while composing" (p. 18), with the 8-year-old children using approximately the same amount of time exploring, developing, and repeating musical ideas, while the 10-year-old children used substantially less time exploring and developing, and more time repeating musical ideas. Also similar to Kratus, Ashby reported that during the composition process, the children generally moved from exploring, to developing, to repeating musical ideas. Perconti (1996) studied children in first through fourth grade as they composed in general music classes over a 2-year period. …