ABSTRACT

Composing music is directly related to a personal creativity and is the efficient way that could approach to the essence of music most comprehensively among other fields of music education. Nevertheless, the instruction of composition is not executed successfully in most music classroom. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop the method of teaching composition in general school through investigations of literature. First, I analyzed the contents of curriculum and textbooks connected with composition, and discussed its direction of improvement. Second, I presented a systematic instruction of musical composition on the basis of a methodology deviced by Thomas A. Regelski. Third, I introduced a theory of musical development which is made by Keith Swanwick and finally I thought the possibility of an instructional stages of composition based on his theory. Swanwick presents eight developmental modes in musical development : sensory, manipulative, personal expressiveness, the vernacular, the speculative, the idiomatic, the symbolic, the systematic. The sequence of these developmental stages takes the form of a spiral because the process is cyclical : which means that its progression is ranged over all ages and no matter age whenever each music learning is occured the spiral is repeated from a first stage. The first stage of an instructional system in composing music for seventh grade begins with exploration of sound. The next stage belongs to sound compositions includes 1) improvised sound compositions which have two sub-stages of improvised compositions with an outline plan and freely improvised sound compositions, 2) notated sound compositions, and 3) composite sound compositions using both improvised sound compositions and notated sound compositions. The third stage of composing music is songwriting in which four ways of practicing are presented : ① songwriting with a tone-row, ② songwriting with harmonic emphasis, ③ songwriting with rhythmic emphasis, ④ full songwriting which is a combination of these three activities - with a tone-row, harmonic, and rhythmic songwriting. Then I considered an instructional stages of composition in relation to a musical development. It is possible that activities for exploration of sound are practiced at the level of sensory and manipulative in which the materials of music are emphasized. At the level of personal expressiveness, expressive quality is emphasized, can be practiced improvised sound composition activities which provide maximal opportunities of expression. At the vernacular level, notated sound compositions are suitable. And at the speculative and the idiomatic level, focused on a form, various songwriting activities by means of a form are applicable. An idea of the correlation between a theory of musical development and instructional stages of composition can be shown as a following figure : There are many ways of instruction for musical composition but the importance of instructional stages and learning sequence or a hierachy must be considered first of all. For the normalization of teaching composition in current school music, must be continued the development of methods for systematic instruction of composition.