Tech Column: Composition against the clock

My composition lessons normally have a pretty clear focus and a definable outcome. As a general rule they are creating music for a film or using found sounds as stimuli for pieces of music. However, sometimes between bigger projects (often at the beginning or end of a term) I like to give my students a challenge: against-the-clock composition.

Leading by example

Composing at speed is quite a skill and some students love it, while others absolutely hate it: they like to let ideas brew and really hone an idea before it develops into a fully-fledged composition. However, being forced to compose at speed begins to develop skills in meeting deadlines and simply getting something done. Don’t worry about if it’s perfect – it probably isn’t – work with it anyway.

The idea for this came from a series of videos Fact magazine did in which they challenged producers to create a beat from scratch in 10 minutes. I often begin this lesson by showing my students a video of Tom Misch doing this and get them to make a note of his creative process, issues he came across and what he added and chose to discard. Obviously, watching a 10-minute video isn’t really an option for a lot of classes – but showing a snippet might help.

My next stage is to demonstrate it myself – I don’t feel comfortable asking students to do anything I won’t do. But I give myself the added pressure of a much shorter period than them and they can all hear everything that I do.

I’ll be honest, this is sometimes more successful than others. In a recent lesson my attempt was a complete disaster – but that’s okay. Compositions are not always a success, and I don’t expect my students to have perfect compositions every time either – there have got to be some misses to get the hits! However, I’ve also done this in front of a class and created some really inspired ideas.

The rules I set myself are pretty open – anything is an appropriate tool. I use loops, synthesisers, samplers and real instruments and I let my students do the same too. The whole project is about finding ideas quickly – limiting students in too many other ways seems harsh for one lesson.

Practical time

I then set the students to create a ‘beat’ (whatever that means to them) in 20 minutes. I set the parameters of drums, bass, chords and melody – but some will play very fast-and-loose with the definitions of those terms. I make it very clear that I won’t be assessing these – I’ll try to listen to as many as I can – but I won’t be assessing the musical quality because the outcomes here are all about the completion of the task.

Once the time is up, I’ll ask them to share their feelings on the process. How easy or hard did they find the task? What worked well and what would they do differently if they did it again? These questions are pretty common in loads of lessons – but in this context I give them the opportunity to put them into practice immediately.

Because the key outcome in this idea is to focus on simply completing something against the clock and moving on, I then repeat the process but with significantly reduced time allocations. I give myself one minute to see what I can achieve and then give the students about ten minutes. This is usually met by a chorus of ‘that’s not long enough’ – but I’ve never yet had a student that hasn’t completed something in this time.

Summing up

The idea of composition against the clock is nothing new – and I definitely won’t take credit for it. But what I have found since I started doing it with my classes (occasionally) is that it has given my less confident composers some confidence that they can compose. I currently only teach A Level, but I have taught at a range of key stages and the model works well with a variety of ages. The key considerations with younger students are to expect more loops and probably not to use live instruments alongside the technology.

Students, for the most part, really enjoy this activity from time-to-time. There are always a few who find that they don’t complete anything that they like within the time allocation, but even then, they will take some useful skills forward into their next bigger composition project.