WHO ARE WE TEACHING AND WHY ARE WE TEACHING THEM? THOUGHTS ON MUSICAL DIVERSITY IN UNIVERSITY COMPOSITION TEACHING

Musical composition has traditionally been taught with the assumption that students share musical backgrounds and have similar aims. In today's highly diverse musical world, however, composition students are exposed to a multiplicity of musical languages. They develop their personal creative styles from an internal conceptual 'melting pot' and must also develop compositional methodologies for a potentially large array of disparate usages. This article argues that the teaching of composition should recognise both the rich global diversity of musics and the plethora of uses to which compositional techniques might be applied, and that such teaching might most productively be focused on imparting a broad selection of technical concepts from many musics, coupled with an interrogation of the underlying purposes of techniques taught. All musics must be treated as equally worthy of study and students' embodied experiences respected. Curricula need to be designed with such a catholic view in mind, encouraging students to embrace the growing profusion of genres, techniques and resources available and develop a flexible, broadly informed and resourceful outlook.