Teaching Music Through Composition: A Curriculum Using Technology

Teaching Music through Composition offers a practical and fully multimedia curriculum of over 60 lesson plans in 29 units of study, including student assignments sheets, worksheets, handouts, and audio, MIDI, and video files on a companion website. Author and award-winning music educator Barbara Freedman presents classroom-tested ways of teaching a wide array of musical topics, including general/basic music theory, music appreciation and analysis, keyboarding, composing/arranging, even ear-training (aural theory) using technology that will directly engage students in the twenty first century. The larger curriculum objective of this book is to teach basic musical concepts through the creative process of music composition. The tool with which students create, edit, save, and reproduce music is the technology. As Freedman demonstrates, technology allows a musical experience for all skill levels in opportunities never before available to compose music 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 as a unit or two, this book will show you how it can be done with practical, tried-and-true lesson plans and student activities.