Sibelius 3 brings music educator and band students to “The Edge”

Music Software helps build collaborative class composition

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.—When a young daughter took the simple step of following along with her father at the piano, music educator J. Franklin Horn had an epiphany: create a collaborative composition project for the members of his band at South Middle School in Aurora, Colorado. A few months and many bursts of inspiration later, “The Edge” was born, with help from Sibelius 3 notation software.

Horn recently shared his experience, along with excerpts from an article he has submitted for publication, “At the Edge of Awareness: Collaborative Composition in a Middle School Band Room.”

“I don’t want to motivate students with punishment and rewards. I’m much more interested in ‘intrinsic motivation,’” Horn told Gracenotes. “Intrinsic motivation isn’t just for students anymore; it’s just as thrilling for educators as well. I would also suggest that a euphoric teacher is a successful teacher, and a jubilant student is a productive student.”

“Franz Kafka claimed that there is infinite hope— but not for us,” he wrote. “What? No hope for us? Well, have no fear. Kafka probably couldn’t tell a B-flat from a discipline referral form. Most secondary music teachers ingest hope for breakfast and then consume a hearty bowl of barely realistic expectations for lunch. (I recommend soup and a salad for dinner.) You want hope? Here’s your hope: How about a collaborative composition project that will engage students at the core of their emotional being? And did I say ‘project?’ Forget project. This is a journey, a mission, a voyage into musically and personally enriching areas of life. For me, it started very simply…”

In August of 2004, Horn was playing the piano at home when one of his children sat down next to him. Although she was not a piano player, she began to follow and mimic the melody line.

“She hit some clunkers, started to improve, and then, somewhat miraculously, she began to change the melody, to make it her own, to improvise, to…compose.”

“That got me thinking,” he said later. “What if I wrote down a couple melodies and accompaniment parts and then handed those musical ideas over to my middle school band students? No egos allowed, and no ownership permitted. What if we collectively took those musical germs and spent weeks or months manipulating them, shaping them into something that would belong to all of us?”

Although the first few rehearsals were initially met with blank stares and an occasional yawn, gradually, as he explains,

“a certain intensity built up as the students began to develop definite ideas about how the piece should sound. They began to discover elements of the piece that they liked, other sections they wanted to alter or throw out, and they began to slowly claim ownership of our embryonic enterprise.”

“When a music educator decides to dive off this compositional cliff into the sea of musical collaboration,” Horn says, “there are at least three ingredients required for success: musical structure, music software and absolute humility.

“The idea of providing a framework is not meant to imply that our ‘teacher ideas’ should drive this journey,” he says. “This framework is more about intent participation, a type of activity in which students can observe an expert (in this case,the music teacher) working through problems in composition. Over time they will begin to participate in the activity and will eventually come to view themselves as experts too.

“After a couple weeks I transcribed all of our existing music into Sibelius 3 and we began to manipulate, adjust, and collaboratively nudge the piece from there. It grew at its own pace, in its own way, as it took on a life of its own. Soon we felt more than just the thirty-seven of us in the room each day. ‘The Edge’ joined us in an aurally embodied form. We could feel it in our fingers and in our ears as the students literally breathed life into ‘The Edge’ on a daily basis.” 

According to Horn, “The Edge” not only involved a few dozen equal partners, but also a lot of rewriting.

“All these changes would have been frustrating if not for flexible music software,” he adds. “We used Sibelius 3 because of its streamlined functions, its flexible playback quality, and its ‘band director-proof’ CD burning capability. When we had a fairly complete rendering of “Edge,” I burned a CD for each student to take home. The first track contained the tentatively complete version of “Edge.” The second track was again “Edge,” but this time with each student’s individual part mixed to the front so they could hear their own lines and play along at home.

“Once the student ideas started rolling I found myself scribbling copious notes on the score during each rehearsal. I then spent a few minutes of my planning time each day inserting the student-suggested changes into Sibelius 3. The next step was to print the new parts and pass them out at the next rehearsal.

“By the time we forged the main body of the piece, around January, virtually everyone had developed a strong opinion about both technical and musical aspects of the composition.”

“The Edge” encouraged us to dive to unusual depths of musical and personal experience,” notes Horn. “The piece, and the South Middle School students, taught me something valuable about the importance of intrinsic motivation, and about sharing the classroom in a truly collaborative manner. This was an experience that was enjoyable and deeply rewarding.”

J. Franklin Horn has taught band and orchestra in Georgia, Florida, and Colorado for twenty-seven years. He is currently the director of bands at South Middle School in Aurora, Colorado, and is also an adjunct professor with Colorado State University at Pueblo, teaching several graduate level courses on classroom culture and student motivation.

To date, there are more than 100,000 Sibelius users worldwide, including television composer Alf Clausen, musician Pat Metheny, composer Sammy Nestico, choral composer John Rutter, guitarist Andy Summers and conductor Michael Tilson-Thomas.

Notes to editors

About Sibelius

Sibelius Software Ltd. is based in London , England . Its U.S. subsidiary, Sibelius USA, Inc., is located at 1407 Oakland Boulevard, Suite 103 , Walnut Creek , CA 94596 , and has offices in Baltimore , Cleveland , Dallas and Nashville . Sibelius products are available worldwide in more than 100 countries. For more information, contact Sibelius USA at phone (925) 280-0600; fax (925) 280-0008; on the Web at www.sibelius.com; or via e-mail at infoUSA@sibelius.com.