If you’re going to write good songs, you need to perform lots of good songs.
Last week I visited another South London School to see how they teach music there. This is something I don’t do often enough, as seeing another perspective on the job of teaching music always useful.
Lots of the visit wasn’t relevant to songwriting, but one lesson I saw and one conversation with the head of music there were.
The big message about songwriting from my visit was that composing your own songs and performing other peoples’ are inextricably linked.
The Conversation
We were talking about composition, something that is always difficult to teach as part of classroom music. Creating something from nothing is difficult for those of us who are already musicians. When you don’t have many musical skills it is even more of a challenge.
Ben, the head of music, said that must mean composition comes after performance – you can’t compose using a technique until you’ve performed using that technique.
This was a mini eureka moment for me. Thinking about it afterwards, it’s obvious, but non of us songwriters ever tried composing a chord progression before we’d played a load of them from other people’s songs. We didn’t write our own lyrics before we’d sung lots of others.
You can’t compose with an idea or technique before you understand it, and that means performing with it.
That’s useful to me as a music teacher, but also to all of us as songwriters. It emphasises that if we want to expand our musical pallettes we need to always be playing new music as well.
It also means I should emphasise this in future posts, suggesting songs to cover that illustrate the technique I’m talking about.
The Lesson
The lesson I observed put some of this into practice. Members of a year 9 (13-14 year olds) class had split into groups and were writing songs.
They did this in different ways, depending on the ability and tastes of the different groups. One had composed a backing track on Cubase, which they were rapping over, some were doing the more traditional words and a chord progression thing.
The interesting groups were those who were composing in an ‘uncreative’ way.
Group 1
The first group had taken the song ‘Someone like You’ by Adele and just rewritten the lyrics. They played and sang the song with gusto, but the only composition they had done was to come up with their own set of lyrics.
Is that songwriting? Not exactly, but it certainly is learning a vital songwriting skill – writing lyrics to an existing melody. Something any songwriter needs to do at some point.
Group 2
Group 2 had gone a step further. They’d used the backing from another pop song to compose their own melody and lyrics. So here they were practicing the skills of lyrics and melody writing, and not having to worry about the accompaniment, in much the same way a guitar player might use a backing track to practice soloing skills.
I found the lesson very useful because it pointed out the many varied skills used in songwriting and demonstrated what the previous conversation had touched on.
Songwriting and performance are two sides of the same coin and you can’t divorce them. If you’re going to compose your own songs you’ll need to perform lots of songs by other people. The young songwriters I saw were literally halfway between writing their own songs and performing other peoples.
And it was a great way to learn how to do it.
