by Robinson McClellan

In June at Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School (LREI) in Manhattan, a concert of student compositions beautifully showcased one of Noteflight’s main reasons for being: lowering the barriers to creating new music and sharing it with others. Thanks to the vision and leadership of Matt McLean, one of LREI’s music teachers, the school used Noteflight and other music technologies to make the creative process accessible to a group of young composers. By creating new compositions and hearing them performed live by experienced musicians, LREI’s students were able to express themselves through music with a new level of ease, spontaneity and collaboration.

These fifth and sixth graders offered 28 world premiere compositions in under two hours. The students scored their compositions directly in Noteflight, which were then printed out and performed by an ensemble of top-flight conservatory students from Mannes College (view and hear the compositions). Noteflight sponsored the concert after Matt McLean, who conceived and oversaw the project, contacted Noteflight with the idea. His students used Noteflight for music creation and sharing alongside EAMIR, an interactive composing tool.

These tools were not just a convenience: they were part of the point. As Matt explains, the larger goal was to allow young people with a love of music to address “big” musical questions, like how to balance consonance with dissonance, or repetition with contrast, or how to shape a melody. He says that by using Noteflight, the composing process comes more in line with tactile arts like painting:

Children’s early play is often filled with organizing melodies and rhythms. Improvisations can turn into elaborate arrangements as a child playfully tries to makes sense of the sounds around her. The esoteric nature of music has, until recently, made it difficult for music educators to expand upon a child’s love of creating and arranging sound. The alternative is usually either the ‘re-creation’ of another’s work or at best encouraging one’s improvisational experiences. Technology has helped to remove this barrier.

What makes using Noteflight so awesome is that the kids can start with making something first! Then within Noteflight I can offer feedback to help them understand what they wrote and give them ideas about other choices. More importantly they can post questions in the Comments section about what they wrote. It makes the whole process much more student centered and also practical from the teacher’s perspective. I also used the Annotations feature in Noteflight a great deal. I would also change the color of notes if I wanted the student to look them over.

The way the concert was set up reinforced and supported the creative process. It was democratic: there were no “featured composers” or “awards for best piece” or the like. The performers simply progressed from one piece to the next, giving each a committed and serious rendering. And while the concert was celebratory, it was not treated as an afterthought to creativity. It was itself a learning event, asking the composers to continue engaging creatively with their work as they listened.

Matt began the concert by encouraging his students to listen for whether what they heard would match what they had expected to hear. This may sound obvious, but it points to why this project was so valuable. The ease of audio playback in a program like Noteflight can make it tempting to assume that such playback “is” the piece. But that is of course far from the case. As Joe Berkovitz, Noteflight’s founder and president, said in a recent blog post:

I am personally in love with the looseness and freedom that notation allows. Even our most complex masterworks contain vital room for the performer to move: a written piece can be played and interpreted in an infinity of ways…A recording [and by extension, synth playback of a Noteflight score] is already telling you, “this is how it sounds.” In contrast a score asks a question: “how could this sound?”

Thus the end goal of a live performance was a crucial part of the project at LREI from the very beginning. It brought together the best of two freedoms inherent in each end of the compositional process: first, the freedom of increased access to the act of creation itself, and second, the freedom inherent in music notation to generate live performances of infinite variety.

And what about the compositions themselves — the result of all that hard work? The ensemble of string quartet plus flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon was well chosen, offering students a wide range of expressive possibilities. Students created their pieces individually or in pairs, and each piece drew on a different combination of instruments, ranging from flute/violin duos to full-ensemble pieces. To preserve the democratic tone of the event I won’t single out any particular pieces here; I encourage you to visit this website where you can hear all of them and read the program notes each composer provided. But a few general comments will give a sense of how the students approached their creative task.

Every single piece had something definite to say that it said convincingly. Likewise, every piece felt “heard” as opposed to “written”: these melodies, chords and rhythms had shape, direction and coherence that made immediate sense to the listener. To me, this spoke not only to the talents of the composers, but also to the value of using notation technologies like Noteflight: with the immediate feedback of audio playback, problems like weaknesses in melodic line, unintended dissonances, and awkward rhythms tend to “pop” and so are easier to avoid. Finding that “heard” sound in a composition is not easy at all, and to hear it so consistently in the 28 pieces on this concert suggests that the technology facilitated something truly special.

Which brings us to the program notes written by each student composer. As a composer myself, I found them uncannily familiar: these students eloquently described experiences that would be familiar to composers at all levels of experience. To take just a tiny sampling:

• “When I started composing my piece I put mostly random notes together and then edited it to sound better…the challenges that I had were when I was stuck on what to write next or how to put certain notes together so that they would fit better and sound good.”
• “The main way I got the idea for writing this piece is looking at other people’s pieces and my own that I made in the past. But, my main idea was that I wanted it to be different from everyone else’s piece and unlike my other pieces.”
• “I didn’t like my first piece, so I deleted it, feeling frustrated. Then I put together the first 4 measures of my piece. This is the main melody that made me not give up. Now I have this whole piece that I am very proud of!”
  “I really like composing music for a concert because it is hard but you really get to see the results.”

I know well the thrill and terror of hearing a newly written composition played live for the first time in a large crowded room. That moment of suspense and fulfillment always becomes seared in one’s memory, and no wonder: it is the culmination of so much focused experimentation, creative risk-taking, and plain old hard work. The chance offered to these students by LREI and Noteflight to have that experience, at such an early stage in their musical lives, is truly extraordinary. I hope it becomes a model for other projects to come, at many other schools and beyond.