Guardrails on failure, Open highway on success.

One thing i firmly believe in is exploratory approaches to music education. Music is a set of actions and intents and learning what they mean and feel like is something that truly happens only experientially.

This poses a problem though, I teach inside a system that doesn’t reward exploration and iteration. The school system functions largely on fear of failure and rewards for success. When you’re exploring sounds there is no failure or success but the students are conditioned by their environment (the school- in its transactional function of grading and the culture- in its “good music sounds like X” expectation) to function in that context.

So students when confronted with compositional exploration of sounds (banging on stuff, but with intent and reflection) they often freeze. What if my composition “fails” what if my sound is “bad” . In the evaluative frames they have already there isn’t a lot of room for success because they are progressing from a baseline that is so far from their conception of success that it is unreachable.

How do you manage to create success when the only thing available is failure (which has a negative reinforcement component)? You make failure the goal.

”The first thing we are doing together class is we are going to write the worst song in the world, right here right now. Its going to be boring and stupid and awful. Lets pick one word, one pitch and one rhythm”

From there we engage in discussion of ways to make the song better by manipulating the elements of music: Could we add something? Change something? The pitch? The Word? The Tempo? the texture? What else could we do? Could we make it “about something”? What about the registers? Could we add percussion? etc.

By incentivizing “failure” by making something explicitly Not Good you allow for exploration from that point because after you create the worst thing, everything else is a qualified success! It gives you material to work from that has been robbed of its power to assess the student because the teacher explicitly asked for a bad product. Building understanding of how to improve a bad product, and understanding what makes a “bad” product is a way to sneak in learning about creating what would be considered a “success” without shooting for the moon the first time.

If something doesn’t work it doesn’t matter, it was already broken. I, as the teacher, eat the failure. Its bad because I made it bad.

If something does work? Dap them up! Praise them and ask about their thinking, bring it out into the light and use it to teach with.

Transition the successes on to them immediately!

For Example: I did a composition exercise with 5th grade guitar players who are working on reading tablature (really they are also working on playing clean notes with good technique but we're sneaking that in through the reading part) where each student chose a fret along a single string to contribute to a collaborative piece.

After each choice we practice our composition in quarter notes for 30 seconds and then play through what we have together. While we play through we also reflect on the affect of the piece. "wow that note on the 8th fret sounds really crunchy to me!" "what kind of scene is this if you were going to put it in a movie? Whats happening on screen?"

when someone comes up with a choice that changes the affect or really makes a motif POP we talk about it and have them own the choice and the effect (even though at this point its unintentional)

Then after we've done it all on 1/4 notes I bring up a 5th grade drum set player and grab a bass guitar and play their piece with some funky syncopations over a rock beat.

I'm a good enough player that I can embellish and make it sound good pretty much regardless of what they come up with because the bass is a solo voice against a rock beat and that is a known and funky texture.

As I play I talk about what I really like about their piece and how it makes me feel as a player.

"OO, this right here is super cool! It makes the sound change from kind of bright and sunshine to like spooky clouds at midnight vibes. Super cool to play! Do you all hear what I'm hearing or does it fit your ear differently? Keegan, that was your contribution right? Super Cool!"

Guardrails on failure, Open highway on success.

Also if you get a chance to really sweat through this process you can create an environment where each attempt is "just a practice" or "not the final thing" where the iteration is less stressful.

the less stressful the iterative process the more iteration can get done and the more refined the end product can be.

It’s squishy and it moves for each group of students but it helps them to decide when something is done after doing a bunch of drafts, it might take a couple classes to work through to a finished product but that is to be expected, beginners need more time to explore the options than the more experienced hands who have this experience as part of their repertoire of knowledge already.

I would also say this is the front part of a compositional process or any kind of learning process. Its the exploration and discovery stage that comes before informed intent. You have to discover the sounds before you create the music with intent. This process isn’t only working to teach composition, its laying the foundation for the schemas of musical sound and feeling that are going to work for the student when they start to exercise their own intent. One needs an internal vocabulary of sounds, arrived at through careful listening and experimentation, to be able to make conscious choices about compositional intent.

The idea of judgement of their “intentional” engagement would be mitigated by incentivizing failure as the first product (boring song) then changing the parameters one at a time emphasizing their effect on the product while framing it as exploration/iteration. Developing vocabulary without the need for elocution tests.

Using this approach one can then shift toward a more structured student owned type of project.

Providing these guardrails on failure and opening up the musical world for exploration is a return to the principles of play, the foundations of learning and language. Its a great way to set a stage for meaningful dialogue and creation.

Continuing Questions?

Why is providing guardrails on failure important? How do we already do this in our educational practice? How can we bring it into creative/generative activities?
This is framed as the beginning of a process of discovery and refinement, how could this principle be applied in a more advanced way? What might the place of this outlook be in later stages of a project?
What are the disincentives to approaching a composition this way?