Creative Music Composition is designed to be an introductory textbook for music students. "Creative composition"-composing in your own style, rather than in the style of a composer of the past-is embraced by music educators not only for composition students, but for beginning performers and music educators, and is often offered to all music students and non-music majors who wish to enhance their musical creativity. With 25 years of experience teaching fledgling composers, the author tackles the key ingredients that make for successful composition, including: stimulus to the musical imagination; discussion of a variety of current musical languages; analysis of many examples from contemporary scores; technical exercises; suggestions as to how to start a composition; structures; and examinations of works from particular genres. Wilkins covers several musical languages, from folk and popular to serialism; analyses various rhythmic forms; suggests approaches for composing for a variety of instruments, from traditional to electronic ones, as well as for the human voice; addresses the nuts and bolts of score preparation; and offers career advice. For all composition students-and for music students in general-Creative Music Composition offers a clear and concise introduction that will enable them to reach their personal goals.

The study of musical composition has, in the main, been informed by anecdotal after-the-event accounts or post hoc analyses of composition. This book presents the first coherent exploration around this unique aspect of human creative activity. The central threads, or key themes - compositional process, creative thinking and problem-solving - are integrated by the combination of theoretical understandings of creativity with innovative empirical work.

This book is a full multimedia curriculum that contains over 60 Lesson Plans in 29 Units of Study, Student Assignments Sheets, Worksheets, Handouts, Audio and MIDI files to teach a wide array of musical topics, including: general/basic music theory, music appreciation and analysis, keyboarding, composing/arranging, even ear-training (aural theory) using technology.

This textbook enhances preservice and practicing music educators' understanding of ways to successfully engage children in music composition. It offers both a rationale for the presence of composition in the music education program and a thorough review of what we know of children's compositional practices to date. Minds On Music offers a solid foundation for planning and implementing composition lessons with students in grades PreK-12.

This book represents a new approach to musical creativity, dealing with the semiotics, mathematical principles, and software for creativity processes. After a thorough introduction, the book offers a first practical part with a detailed tutorial for students in composition and improvisation, using musical instruments and music software. The second, theoretical part deals with historical, actual, and new principles of creative processes in music, based on the results and methods developed in the first author’s book Topos of Music and referring to semiotics, predicative objects, topos theory, and object-oriented concept architectures. The third part of the book details four case studies in musical creativity, including an analysis of the six variations of Beethoven's sonata op. 109, a discussion of the creative process in a CD coproduced in 2011 by the first and second authors, a recomposition of Boulez’s "Structures pour deux pianos" using the Rubato software module BigBang developed by the third author, and the Escher theorem from mathematical gesture theory in music. This is both a textbook addressed to undergraduate and graduate students of music composition and improvisation, and also a state-of-the-art survey addressed to researchers in creativity studies and music technology. The book contains summaries and end-of-chapter questions, and the authors have used the book as the main reference to teach an undergraduate creativity studies program and also to teach composition. The text is supported throughout with musical score examples.

Embodiment of Musical Creativity offers an innovative look at the interdisciplinary nature of creativity in musical composition. Using examples from empirical and theoretical research in creativity studies, music theory and cognition, psychology and philosophy, performance and education studies, and the author’s own creative practice, the book examines how the reciprocity of cognition and performativity contributes to our understanding of musical creativity in composition. From the composer’s perspective the book investigates the psychological attributes of creative cognition whose associations become the foundation for an understanding of embodied creativity in musical composition. The book defines the embodiment of musical creativity as a cognitive and performative causality: a relationship between the cause and effect of our experience when composing music. Considering the theoretical, practical, contextual, and pedagogical implications of embodied creative experience, the book redefines aspects of musical composition to reflect the changing ways that musical creativity is understood and evaluated. Embodiment of Musical Creativity provides a comparative study of musical composition, in turn articulating a new perspective on musical creativity.

(Educational Piano Library). This book is meant to assist teachers who wish to introduce their students to creative composition but have limited lesson time available and feel the need for some direction in starting and continuing the process successfully. The process involves devoting as little as five minutes of lesson time to composition, but at every lesson over a period of, for example, six to eight weeks. Suggestions in the concise Lesson Plans help bring about gradual changes or improvements from week to week that are enough to keep the piece developing, and, more importantly, to keep the student immersed and motivated in the process.