My creative work links very directly to my activity as a teacher, and serves to strengthen my teaching. When I teach composition, for instance, I find it valuable to bring in compositional sketches and discuss conceptual frameworks as they evolve through different stages. In a sense, I want to demystify the creative process for my students and demonstrate multiple ways of beginning and developing a project. This leads me to share the stages of my own journey with a selection of very different pieces.
Overall, I want to open an exploration of diverse ideologies surrounding musical conception and “the score”, looking at many sources. I ask my beginning composition students to try their hand at a range of notation methods, beginning with those that define a flexible musical situation in the most general of ways before dealing with more detailed technical issues. Text pieces and graphic scores are among the strategies I introduce before going on to discuss rhythmic issues in the context of conventional notation. After covering diverse methods of organizing pitch and other formal issues, I return to the subject of the score itself to introduce spatial notation, controlled aleatory methods and mobile form.
The first assignment that I give to beginning composers using conventional notation concentrates on defining multiple rhythmic layers in a short loop, conceived for unpitched percussion. It is an exercise in creating vertical interest, rather than a horizontal line. Once we move beyond the self-contained loop, I begin with methods that can generate continuing material most easily through a process of some sort. My aim is to facilitate a sense of liquidity in producing a basic musical fabric, with which the students can then work as if shaping clay. Following an exploration of various types of process-oriented music, I introduce less systematic methods of motivic development, melodic arch, and working with harmonic cells or harmonic fields. Compositional skills are built up through short assigned pieces, working towards a larger project of the student’s own choosing.
While this particular sequence of topics is specific to my teaching of an introductory composition class, the general idea— to expand a student’s frame of reference through a wide range of approaches, is typical of my approach to teaching. In the context of individual lessons, the students choose the projects on which they want to work. I aim to facilitate their goals while widening their sense of possibilities, and to lead them to be more introspective and clear about each musical decision.
In any music class that I teach, I aim to link theory and practice through active music-making. Use of in-class recording and playback to analyze our performances serves as an invaluable learning tool, particularly when dealing with aspects of improvisation.
Whether I am teaching composition or theory, analysis plays a key role. The approaches taken will be similar for both theory and composition classes, as creative integration of the concepts will be asked for in both contexts. There are two general modes of analysis that I use quite often: 1. Close analysis of chosen scores, followed by compositional exercises applying the musical concepts of the selected model; 2. Aural analysis of recordings without a score, considering possible organizational principles and outlining the defining features of the listening experience.
When discussing a general musical concept, such as polyrhythm or melody over a sustained drone, I aim to trace the musical principle across different stylistic worlds— analyzing examples in various popular styles and music of other cultures in addition to examples from the Western classical tradition. I encourage students to create their own stylistic hybrids, incorporating new concepts into musical forms that are close to them.
Another aspect of my teaching philosophy involves reflection on relationships between developments in music as they relate to developments in other art forms, and connecting these with cultural conditions. Since music is so linked to the experience of time, what are the conditions of time experience in our modern culture and how might these conditions influence the music around us? Studies of the environmental soundscape, whether in our immediate surroundings or in another time or place, serve as an additional means for understanding the place of music in that context.