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This chapter presents a study of teacher-supported collaborative songwriting events which provides a context for the investigation of learner agency and teacher scaffolding in children's musical learning. The study is based on the premise that learning is an interactive social process that is characterized by negotiation and mutuality, undertaken in a community of practice, and located in physical settings (often classrooms) that in turn shape the nature, intent, and purposes of interaction. Through a careful analysis of the actions of teachers scaffolding children's musical learning, the chapter explores the ways in which teacher actions may enable and/or constrain student learning and sense of agency in the music-making process, and the ways in which learners draw on the cultural signs and tools at their disposal to make meaning from these experiences. The presentation of scaffolding as a teaching strategy acknowledges contrasting views of the pedagogical intentions and learning outcomes of scaffolding.

Berlin’s conception of musical theater grew from his experiences performing in the saloons of New York’s Lower East Side in the early twentieth century. The term Lower East Side Aesthetic encompasses a distinctively Jewish survivalist sensibility for which expert craftsmanship serves faith in the audience, expressed in Berlin’s notion that “the mob is always right.” His songwriting reflects that belief in its disciplined simplicity, calculated repetition, deployment of antithesis, use of ragtime’s musical and linguistic features, and above all, in Berlin’s uniquely omnivorous stylistic range. His notion of theater likewise embraced everything available on the American musical stage: minstrelsy, vaudeville, revue, musical comedy, operetta, and opera. Above all, Berlin’s stage work manifests a meta-theatrical impulse: a sense that theater thrives by being about itself and reminding the audience of that fact.

Songwriting has special appeal to adolescents. It capitalizes on their need to communicate their experiences and fit in with their peers while laying claim to their own individuality. This chapter suggests ways of preparing pre-service teachers to capitalize on this engaging approach to educating adolescents in music. Guidelines for experientially-based college-level songwriting classes are suggested and ways of weaving songwriting through a variety of music methods courses are provided. Specific techniques for engaging young songwriters within a community of singer/songwriters are presented. Although the term “composition” is associated with classical music and “songwriting” more with popular music, the two activities share similar processes and artistic intents. The chapter describes experiences in teaching songwriting classes to college students and provides a rationale for such courses for both music education students and for the general population of college students. The detailed outline provided at the conclusion of the chapter serves as a model for others seeking to implement similar courses.

This chapter demonstrates how Bob Dylan has shown a fondness for narrative both in his songwriting and his public persona, as seen from his self-mythologizing days in Greenwich Village to his memoir, Chronicles. It focuses on how “Love and Theft,”Modern Times, and Tempest continue to reflect Dylan's playful and experimental approach to the organizational framework of narrative, which in its broadest sense refers to the representation of a series of events. The chapter shows Dylan divesting from his work the idea of an autonomous, self-sufficient text, and situating his work in a longitudinal spectrum of literary influences where narratives are suggested laterally throughout an album, as well as historically via the use of preexisting text.

This chapter examines Tom Cipullo’s Long Island Songs (2005). Cipullo’s Italian-American heritage, combined with a family background in jazz, makes for a potently individual brand of unabashed romanticism. His intimate understanding of the voice has enabled him to mine a vein of luxuriant lyricism without exceeding bounds of taste. His harmonies are richly sensual and the music flows freely through constantly changing metres, capturing fluctuating moods effortlessly. Arching phrases exploit the voice’s full capacity and highlight the sensuousness of language and timbre. These texts by William Heyen, set with meticulous care, prove to be ideal vehicles for his musical vision. Every nuance is calibrated, yet the effect is entirely spontaneous. One is sometimes reminded of the great French song composers, such as Debussy, in the use of sudden tender, floated pianissimi.

This chapter explores creative work and the contexts of popular songwriting as well as their implications for bringing words and music together. Here the text reflects on the similarities rather than the differences between experience in writing a song called ‘Model Son’ and the writer-performer rock ‘norm’. The chapter comments on the distance between how popular music is organised industrially and how it is represented to the public in talent shows and in films about talent. It also looks at Paul Zollo's book Songwriters on Songwriting, which features interviews with more than fifty of the leading North American songwriters, mainly from the ‘Rock’ era. Finally, the chapter talks about symbolic creativity and the cultural industries.

With this activity, your second and third grade music students will have the opportunity to create a song using the GarageBand app on iPads. The process of writing a song can lead to a plethora of learning outcomes that are shaped by the students, own strengths and interests. They will have access to over 3,750 prerecorded music loops from eighteen different genres and be able to record themselves playing over 300 digital instruments. Students will have full control over the different musical elements of their song, such as: form, tempo, genre, key signature, dynamics, texture, and instrumentation (to name a few).

The lesson in this chapter explains a compositional approach for students who do not have any theoretical understanding of chords or harmony. Students are often put off by a music theory-first approach to composing, which can be a barrier for many interested but inexperienced students. This lesson emphasizes having fun and making music. This approach gets students who are using a keyboard (MIDI, on-screen, piano, it does not matter) to “randomly” create chords, then order them, and sequence them, to create an original piece of music. By diving directly into composing, students can gain both knowledge and confidence in their own musical voice.

The aim of this activity is to record a song in its most rudimentary, structural, and diagrammatic form. This is accomplished by employing nothing but the room tone of different spaces. The tone of one space serves as the song’s verse, and the tone of another space serves as the song’s chorus. Students are given what seems like little to work with in order to foster their compositional creativity and skill with a DAW. By stripping away some of the usual complicating factors in composition such as rhythm and pitch, the importance of form becomes more easily identifiable by learners.

This activity challenges middle school students to determine what is expressed through lyrics. Through annotation, students analyze and interpret lyrics to uncover the expressive meaning of a song as well as the specific tools lyricists and songwriters use to express their ideas. To begin, students are tasked with selecting and studying a song that they deem has interesting lyrics and labeling its form (verse, chorus, etc.). Following, students engage a three-step analysis process. First, they sift through the lyrics word-by-word to identify unfamiliar terms so that they can better contextualize the intended meanings of the song. Second, they identify and annotate expressive meanings in the lyrics. Finally, they annotate examples of songwriting craft, which might include literary or poetic devices.

Charles B. Cochran invited Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers to do the music for a show which would star Jessie Matthews, now a major name in London. They sent the outline to Cochran, who loved it but told them that he couldn't get to it until after he produced Private Lives. Just prior to the New York opening of Heads Up!, Hart talked to a reporter from the Boston Herald about their changing approach to songwriting. It was laudable; but it would turn out to be entirely the wrong approach with Florenz Ziegfeld. If Ziegfeld believed Rodgers and Hart songs were finer things for finer audiences, he did a great job of concealing it. The story goes that one day he rounded on Hart and Rodgers. Before the afternoon was over, they had completed a plangent, affecting song about a downtrodden dance-hall hostess, “Ten Cents A Dance.”

With their fusion of passionate energy and laconic wit, the songs of George and Ira Gershwin are distinctively individual creations, standing out in a popular medium whose products are often indistinguishable one from the other. But before their contrasting personalities coalesced into percussive chords and whimsical words, George and Ira moved to different rhythms. George, with his usual fervor, plunged directly into a career in music. Ira's course, typically, was as aimless as George's was direct. In what he called his “peregrinatory Manhattan boyhood,” his wanderings enabled him to absorb the sights, smells, and, above all, the language of the polyglot city. New York, particularly in those early years of the century, was a city of words, and Ira not only absorbed the language of the streets, he read avidly. By the time Ira was in high school, light verse had become his passion as much as music was George's.

The prospect of doing an Astaire–Rogers picture is what that ultimately lured the Gershwin brothers to Hollywood. One of their closest friends in California, the pianist Oscar Levant, observed that for George, there was “a considerable problem of adjustment, after the freedom of Porgy, to the more precise definitions of the popular song.” Nonetheless, according to Alec Wilder, “the writing of his more ambitious compositions did not cause his songs to become too complex for popular appeal. George's music moved even closer to Ira's lyrics, and the songs that emerged from that coalescence of music and words were perfect for the casual elegance that had become Fred Astaire's stylistic trademark. But before their new style emerged to produce the great standards they would write, the Gershwins wrote several songs that mark the transition from their recent work on Broadway.

Soon after the completion of Lady in the Dark Ira and Leonore purchased a house in Beverly Hills. After the ceaseless moves of the Gershwin household during his boyhood, Ira finally could settle into a home where he would spend most of the rest of his life. As time went by, his excursions became fewer; he managed to run things nicely from where he was. Thus during what is now recognized as the Broadway musical's greatest era, Ira Gershwin was rooted in California. Almost all of his work over the course of the next twenty years was done for Hollywood films, few of which provided the kind of script he longed for.

Jimi Hendrix rapidly establishes his presence in Britain’s burgeoning musical scene by “head-cutting” a stunned Eric Clapton during an onstage jam session with Cream. Drummer Mitch Mitchell agrees to join the Experience, and the trio begin rehearsals; this section includes details about the musician’s guitars, basses, strings, picks, effects devices, and Marshall amplification. Prior to embarking on the Experience’s first tour, Hendrix signs the first of several exploitive contracts with Michael Jeffery. During their tour of France, the musicians share hashish, Captagon, and other drugs and earn mixed – and sometimes racist -- reviews in French newspapers. After their triumphant appearance at the Paris Olympia, they return to London and record their first single, “Hey Joe.” In search of a song to put on the 45’s flip-side, Jimi begins songwriting in earnest.

This chapter presents guidelines and suggestions for the inclusion of composition activities in choral music methods and literature classes. These activities provide critical personal experiences with composition that are a necessary component in preparing pre-service teacher to utilize compositional activities within the performance ensembles that they will eventually lead. Examples of composition activities that enhance choral instruction are provided. Specific examples are offered in the areas of songwriting with large groups and arranging works for choral ensembles of various sizes. The chapter closes with suggestions for balancing time allocation between student composition projects and choral concerts and also presents guidelines for inclusion of original student works in public performance.

By the late 1870s the jubilee marketplace was in full swing, and the term jubilee singer had become so diluted as to be essentially meaningless. All manner of jubilee singers represented themselves as tradition bearers, giving rise to frequent skirmishes over legitimacy that were played out in marketing. As traditional spirituals, contrafacta, parodies, answer songs, and parodies of parodies cycled back on each other, the boundaries between them and their performers blurred. Some troupes, like the Wilmington Jubilee Singers, began as concert artists but ended up as minstrel or variety entertainers. Others, like the Nashville Students, successfully incorporated variety entertainment in their programs while maintaining their reputation as concert artists. The career of Sam Lucas demonstrates the nexus between folk and popular song traditions as the boundaries between the altruistic and the purely commercial, between the folk and the popular, and between “high” and “low” began to dissolve.