Composing Your Own Score

After a lesson on Naming Scales from the Montessori music album, the children got inspired to write their own music. One child wanted to write his own music for tone bars and percussion.

The first step was to place a scale strip in front of the tone bars and make up a nice melody. In this case, Zachary wrote two melodies, both using the pentatonic scale strip (because the notes of the pentatonic scale sound nice in any combination).

To write his first melody, he placed a pentatonic scale strip with black numbers on the bottom octave of the tone bars. To write the second, he placed another pentatonic scale strip, this one with red numbers, on the top octave (making sure to place the 1 on both scale strips on the same note.)

Next, he wrote his melody out on a large poster-sized score. First he drew an “L” shape on the paper. The left axis indicates the instruments used in the piece (represented in words or cute drawings), the bottom axis denotes the divisions of time (represented simply as an evenly spaced series of numbers from 1 to 8.)

To write his notes, he simply used numbers with no rhythm sticks. One number standing alone signified one sound on a beat (ta) and two numbers close together signified two sounds on a beat (ti-ti). Finally, he wrote out percussion parts in standard percussion notation.

This follow-up can be done by children of all ages. Here’s a first-year working on a piece solely for percussion.

And here are two older children working with a chromatic scale strip. First they’re writing on 3-line staff paper using stick notation. Later they’ll transfer their melodies to a full score.

Procedures for creating a score can be found in the book, or you can download them here.

Have fun making scores with your children! If you have any questions, come and get ahold of me via the contact page.