Music Composition in Music Education

Abstract

Abstract Music composition from an African point of view calls for attention to music as both an academic skill and a cultural practice. A music composition portrays the full intention and contextual significance of the community and in many, if not all cases, the composer is also the performer. Music composition is therefore embedded within the oral tradition and reflective of the African philosophy of direct experience within music-making as opposed to the Western perspective where music composition is acquired as an academic skill and intellectual ability. In Uganda, music creativity is mostly practiced by community musicians who have no experience with the theoretical knowledge and notational skills favored in the West. Attempts are being made to formalize the teaching and learning of music based on African philosophical approaches, yet the current formal music education program has not done enough to promote music composition as an academic aspect of music education across a wider part of the country. The main objective of this chapter is to evaluate music composition within various spaces. Discussion focuses on compositional techniques and creative resources as a means of evaluating the creative processes engaged in the education system. The chapter highlights the ‘African perspective’, which refers to philosophical models that are based on African concepts and aesthetics other than those that are practiced in the West. The African perspective addresses the holistic, integrated arts and cultural approach of musical arts education, addressing the oral, informal, formal and non-formal acquisition of musical arts education, Where “listening and observation remain the key elements of acquiring the basic skills . . . ’ (Flolu in Herbst, 2005:109). The African perspective is very much felt in terms of reality and attitude, of music composition pedagogy centered around the practical means of creating, assessing, appreciating, approving or otherwise of music, composition which applies to all other creative arts disciplines such as drama, poetry, and plastic art (Onyeji 2019:263), and which “entails creating and manipulating intangible realities that imperceptibly influence attitudinal dispositions and relational habits (Nzewi, 2013)”. Recommendations are made based educational perspective both for the teaching of Uganda music composition.