Compositori In Erba project 2016/2019

The music training project Compositori in Erba continues, dedicated to primary schools across the local territory.

The project aims to encourage creativity and musical composition in young people, exploring the world of sound through listening, improvisation, the organisation of short musical pieces, the use of traditional musical instruments and the creation of original musical instruments.

The disciplinary objectives are: to develop the ability to listen to music and in particular to recognise sounds at a given or unknown pitch, notes and musical intervals; to learn the basics of rhythm, melody, harmony and timbre; to experiment with sounds and instruments, and to play with composition.

The course takes place at the school throughout the school year, with one-hour lessons per class each week and a final concert with parents at the Foundation’s headquarters. The course is taught by an expert appointed by the Foundation, who is accompanied during lessons by the schoolteacher. The method used integrates various theories and experiences, referring in particular to the pedagogical methods of Carl Orff, Rudolf Steiner, François Delalande and Boris Porena. Various musical instruments provided by the Foundation are used: recorders, violins, guitars, xylophones and various percussion instruments.

From the third year of the workshop, together with the fifth-year classes, a collaboration was established with the Eutopia Ensemble to give children the chance to work on the performance of their own compositions with professional musicians. The first three-year cycle of the project at the Istituto Comprensivo di Villanova D’Asti (AT) has now been completed, and the concert programme of the fifth-year classes as performed by Corinna Canzian (violin), Edoardo Lega (clarinet) and Federico Bagnasco (double bass) is now being re-proposed as part of the Eutopia Ensemble’s season.

The next three-year cycles have already begun, with the intention of continuing to nurture compositori in erba (‘budding composers’).

Teacher for the academic years 2016–2017, 2017–2018 and 2018–2019:

• Maestro Matteo Manzitti

Reflections on the first four years of the Compositori in Erba project:

“When it comes to music education, we are faced with an incredible variety of methodological approaches. The scientific studies that have now been established on the effectiveness and validity of musical practice for the growth of the individual, on the other hand, have pushed the community of educators to use music more and more, not only as a subject to be expanded through literacy, also as a privileged means of education towards sociality. Traditionally, school practice – whether vocal or instrumental – requires years of study, a degree of literacy of which the purpose is the acquisition of a notational code that the West has refined ever since the Middle Ages and that for some centuries now has represented the symbolic system of reference for the reading of music. A large part of traditional music education is based on the acquisition of this code in order to know how to play and/or sing.

In history, ‘codification’ has also been a vector for the transformation of music into an autonomous aesthetic and cultural element, in short into a form of human ‘knowledge’. Creating music today therefore requires ongoing training, since the intellectual effort is denser, decidedly more demanding than that of reading or performance. Yet children (not all, but many), while learning to read and play music, sometimes write it. They may do so secretly, aware that their desire corresponds to an activity often considered by adults to be unsuitable or at least premature. Adults then reinforce this belief by drawing on a range of information: after all, children and young people of different ages almost always follow the notes of a successful melody when they find themselves in front of a piano, showing in this a certain inventive dryness, or in any case a lack of autonomous and original musical imagination.

Herein lies a fundamental issue, that is whether students (of music or anything else) are considered merely a product of the environment or whether they themselves, whoever they are, are born already ‘endowed’ with contents that are relevant to them, absolutely individual, original, unique contents, pre-dating any educational process, and which through a certain type of education has the chance to be expressed.

Compositori in Erba is an educational-musical project that believes in this second image. The project, commissioned and financed entirely by the Fondazione Spinola Banna per l’Arte, has been held for four years at the ‘De Amicis’ Elementary School in Villanova D’Asti.

Musical composition, often seen as the highest form of musical specialisation, becomes a basic subject in this three-year workshop for primary schools. A subject, that of organised sound, which is explored by children without prejudice. The first prejudice to be discarded is that which contrasts sound with noise, attributing only to the former the dignity of being considered a musical element. Instead during the workshop, many different ‘noises’ are explored, creating a general empathy with the sound element. At the same time, we also work with notes, learning how to combine them in an increasing number, working on the possible combinations and compositional principles that preside over these forms of organisation of the elements, thus exercising not only musical thought but logical thinking in the broadest sense.

As far back as the 1970s, Boris Porena explored the infinite possibilities of ‘basic composition’ through the establishment of the Centro di Ricerca Metaculturale Musica in Sabina, where all children from six/seven years of age and up from a small village (Cantalupo) were involved in a path of musical education through the writing and conception of new songs devised by them. In elementary schools, on the other hand, there is always access to what Delalande calls ‘the Game of Rules’, a growth phase where one can detach oneself from the continuous symbolic and narrative references to experience the things of the world, and one may also conceive a series of abstract and objective rules in the attribution of roles and functions. And yet the symbolic world, the desire to tell a story or to approach an image, remains very strong in the musical creation of children from eight to eleven years of age, and this is a good thing: it connects sound to the world and is also a form of protection as you go deeper and deeper into the musical language, still often unknown and disturbing in its infinite possibilities.

Another methodological characteristic of the workshop consists in giving great importance to children’s instinct and intuition, not giving them an aura of blind fideistic acceptance, but, linking to the above, believing that there is in them an ‘intuitive thought’ of real creative capacity, a thought that therefore does not only replicate and imitate but which is capable of creating autonomous and interesting musical images, often hidden behind terrible calligraphy or confused and contradictory notation. The confidence in that thought consists precisely in the act of not immediately correcting uncertainty and lack of care of that written stroke, but of questioning it, of understanding its relevance to the inner world of the student who – through that sign – knocks on our doors.

Compositori in Erba ends its itinerary in the fifth year with the possibility of writing for professional musicians. In short, you really become a composer: you have to be concerned with making your idea ‘stick’ and writing it, but you no longer have the burden of the performance of the work on your shoulders. Professional musicians come to school, present their instruments to children, play them, show them all the ‘special techniques’ that may be adopted, which often fascinate children even more than the ordinary ones, and then let them get to work. A few weeks later, we meet again, and we read excerpts, drafts, fragments that have been conceived in the meantime. We listen to the results, discuss them and then work to improve. In the end, many small pieces of music will be ready, pieces conceived and created over the year, composed and written not by chance but according to rules and self-imposed constraints, and according to a particular ‘dramaturgy’. What shared listening teaches us is precisely the importance of the repetition-variation dialectic in the construction of the overall architecture: only by listening do we realise when some element is ripe to be transformed/varied or when vice versa it is repeated excessively.

Listening to one’s own musical thought is also a way of looking in the mirror, acknowledging one’s weaknesses and strengths, one’s lack of concentration and patience or one’s missing sense of risk and adventure… The compositions of these fifth-year children are often surprising, and the Eutopia Ensemble (an ensemble of contemporary music that serves as the ‘ensemble in residence’ of the project) has performed them in various contexts (Festival Le Strade del Suono in Genoa, Museo Ettore Fico in Turin, and the Palazzo dei Congressi in Aosta).

Compositori in Erba gives something to the children who undertake this journey: emotions that have almost always been exclusive, thrills usually limited to a single highly professional category. Seeing one’s own piece of paper come to life and become sound is one of these such emotions, and only those who go through this experience at least once in their lives may feel it in all its strength.

Compositori in Erba is also a minor/major political revolution, a way of addressing the issue of cultural education at the root, of tearing down a wall separating high culture from the social base.

For me, as the one who has been leading it for four years, it is above all a great possibility for encounter and continuous amazement at the infinite wonders that the human mind may reveal to us, especially that of children.”

Matteo Manzitti