Songwriting curriculum (for High School)... is there such a thing?

[Donna J.]

and do they teach songwriting in college? :confused:

 

AND if they do, WHAT would a high school course need to look like, to accomplish this feat????

 

I would GREATLY appreciate :) ANY and ALL help you can provide me with on this subject...because I know NOTHING about music, songwriting OR singing! :lol:

 

TIA!! :):001_smile::seeya::seeya:

[Dmmetler]

Check your local college bookstore, if you have one. Songwriting is a fairly common elective for non-music majors at the college level, so there are multiple texts for this purpose, which could be applied at the high school level. Another option, which is more common at the high school level, would be a good music theory course. There is an AP music theory syllabus, and lots of good materials. Master Theory workbooks aren't a bad place to start-they go from easy to quite challenging. In most cases, music theory placement in college is done by exam on-site. There's too much difference in theory sequence from school to school to be able to trust that even transfer credits would have the same content (in my case, I'd done music theory at a local college and taken the AP exam-and discovered, when I got to my undergrad school that I'd had about 2/3 of theory I,about half of theory II, and a chunk of theory III, with a bit of theory IV thrown in. So I ended up doing one year of theory private lessons to cover theory I-IV-because I just plain didn't fit into their sequence).

 

Songwriting at the college level as a career would fall under a composition major, and you'd want to pick the college carefully depending on style-if you want to write Country and Western, for example, you don't want to go to Oberlin.

Edited October 23, 2011 by dmmetler

[AngieW in Texas]

Since you seem to know a lot about this, where would you recommend for country?

 

I doubt that's what my dd would want to do, but she is heavily committed to her guitar and country music and wanted to do poetry this year because that was the closest thing she could think of to songwriting (the lyrics anyway).

[Dmmetler]

Belmont in Nashville isn't a bad choice-they're a very strong music program and have their own recording studio, although they're a little more focused on contemporary Christian/Gospel than straight Country and Western. And, of course, there's a lot of options for internships and actual performance experiences in the Nashville metropolitan area because it's the center of Country and Contemporary Christian/Gospel music industry.

 

Middle TN State University offers a degree in composition for contemporary media as well, and also does quite a bit of recording technology. Murfreesboro is only 39 miles from Nashville, so has many of the same benefits. And, since MTSU is a state school, it's more affordable than Belmont.

 

I'm sure there are some outside of TN, too, but I'm less familiar with them.