Teaching Music Through Composition

Book excerpt: Teaching Music through Composition offers a practical, fully multimedia curriculum designed to teach basic musical concepts through the creative process of music composition. Author and award-winning music educator Barbara Freedman presents classroom-tested ways of teaching composition with technology as a tool with which students can create, edit, save, and reproduce music. As Freedman demonstrates, technology allows a musical experience for all skill levels in opportunities never before available to compose manipulate, instantly listen to music electronically and even print standard Western music notation for others to play without having to know much about traditional music theory or notation. All students can have meaningful hands-on applied learning experiences that will impact not only their music experience and learning but also their understanding and comfort with 21st century technology. Whether the primary focus of your class is to use technology to create music or to explore using technology in a unit or two, this book will show you how it can be done with practical, tried-and-true lesson plans and student activities.