Growing Songwriting : Student Creativities in the Classroom and Beyond

The history of music education over the past 100 years has centered on traditional band, choir, and orchestra models. Yet music education has always secured a prominent place in the curriculum when it captures the musical imagination of the masses, and research has shown that more and more students are seeking alternative opportunities to engage with music. Songwriting is a 21st Century curricular offering that considers who we are as a society--our desires, our goals, our passions. Most often, songwriting occurs in Modern Band classes that are beginning to pop up all around North America and many parts of the world. This book provides curricular support for those efforts as we look to the present and future of music teaching and learning.

Growing Songwriting is a groundbreaking book on the pedagogy of songwriting that starts with the essential question: How do I begin to write songs myself and with my students? In this book, Randles suggests that we start with cover songs, then explore the middle ground of remixes and sampling, and finally, jump into the world of lyric writing and the musical world of original songs. A growing metaphor also features throughout: lesson "seeds" are presented along with "water" in the form of stories of how people have written songs in the past and "sunlight" in the shape of ideas for continuation and inspiration. It is all about growing! In this book, you will be inspired by stories of how riffs were created, how lines were penned, and how songwriters capture their ideas in journals. Original music making is part inspiration and mostly hard work. This book gives you a window into the world of craft that surrounds the working lives of professional songwriters and pulls you into that world in small manageable steps. In looking to the metaphor of nature for pedagogical answers--answers that may very well usher in the most profound curricular growth period in the history of music education--Growing Songwriting aims to sow the seeds of songwriting in your life so that it can also flourish in the lives of your students.