Listen Imagine Compose - Research Report

Listen, Imagine, Compose (LIC) is a project designed to investigate pedagogies of composing in secondary schools. It was funded by the Esm�e Fairbairn foundation, and organised by Sound and Music (SAM), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG), with Birmingham City University (BCU) as the lead academic partner. It involved composers, an apprentice composer, musicians, schoolteachers, researchers, music education partners, and critical friends. The main body of the project ran between June 2011 ? Spring 2013. Background The 2009 Ofsted report Making More of Music (Ofsted, 2009) highlighted a number of issues with composing in secondary school music provision, including: lack of attention to internalising sound as a basis for creative thinking; lack of quality and depth in pupil responses; insufficient understanding of what musical progress involves; composing activities are rarely related to the work of established composers. We know that composing is the area of the music curriculum that is often least accessible for teachers (Berkley, 2001), and that changes to the Key Stage 3 Curriculum in operation during the research period placed increased stress on genuinely creative thinking. The purpose of the LIC project was to address these issues through interaction between pupils and their teachers with professional composers and performers.