DEBORAH SCOTT KATZ

n the last issue of MICHIGAN MUSICTECH, Jacqueline Thompson wrote of the need for a musical "big crayon" that would give students the confidence to compose music with as much ease as children create the visual artwork which adorns so many refrigerators and walls. Children do create music with the same degree of ease or the same amount of struggle as children paint, draw or sculpt. The dilemma comes when we try to preserve that music so we can "hang it up on the refrigerator." I believe that children create music until adults tell them that it is a complicated thing to do and that they must write their music down for it to be real. Music educators need to continue finding more ways to keep composition accessible to children and to preserve the music children create. 

Making Music, developed by composer Morton Subotnick, brings us closer to having a musical "big crayon." Published by Voyager and available on CD-ROM for Macintosh and Windows computers, Making Music is described as "the first real (and totally cool) composing space for kids." It requires no reading skills, no prior musical training, no special settings or technical savvy to use. The basic tool for creating and "notating" music with this software is a paintbrush. Children paint music with the brush on a large blank page called the "composition space." As a child moves the mouse up, down, sideways, forward or backward, the brush paints colorful strokes on the page. The brush strokes represent pitches -- arranged low to high on the page -- and are heard through the computer's speakers as the child paints. The tool bar allows young composers to select tone "colors" from a palette. Choices (sixteen in all) range from flutes and trumpets to steel drums, vocals and bird sounds. Selecting a flight of stairs allows the child to choose between various scales -- diatonic, chromatic, pentatonic, minor, whole tone -- or to devise original scales; the software automatically maps the work-in-progress to the selected scale. Other tools can alter the music using inversion, retrograde, stretching or compressing the music, changing the tempo, and so on. The typical cut, copy and paste tools are available as well, all in a non-technical environement that encourages creativity. 

There are four other components to Making Music. "Building Blocks" provides six simple songs to demonstrate and explore structure and repetition. Songs are displayed visually as series of three wooden blocks, each containing one phrase. Children can mix and match blocks from the various songs to create musical structures of their own or they can substitute music they have composed for the melodies provided in each block. "Melody & Rhythm Maker" uses birds sitting on telegraph wires representing melody and chicks popping out of eggs representing rhythm, allowing children to explore these two elements of music separately and jointly. When both elements are merged, the music is notated piano roll style. Music from other components can be sent to the "Melody & Rhythm Maker" and music composed there can be exported to the other components. "Flip Book" is designed to explore the combination of melody, rhythm and instrumentation using pictures of children in various poses to signify different melodies. Young composers can hear a musical selection performed with any of the tone colors from the musical palette. Again existing melodies can be replaced with ones composed in the composition space or the "Melody & Rhythm Maker." What would a CD-ROM be without a game section? Games in Making Music include "Same or Different," "Find the Same," "Name That Difference," and "Make a Game." Examples range from very simple to quite sophisticated. Once again, children can play these games using their own compositions as well as the existing ones.