At Nordic Music Days in Tórshavn, I gave a lecture at the Composition Pedagogy Seminar.
I spoke about how very young beginners can actually begin composing score-based music before they have an adult technical language for it. They can understand form, tension, direction and consequence if we speak through images and bodily experiences they already know: falling, meeting resistance, being at home, moving away, finding the way back.
Mark Johnson was important to this thinking because his theory of bodily meaning and image schemas gives a language for experiences that already exist before musical terminology: path, balance, centre, resistance, blockage, force and release.
Ernst Kurth was equally important as a musical reference. His thinking about line, energy and force gives a way to speak about melody and counterpoint as something alive: not just notes placed after one another, but music with pressure, inertia, direction and inner necessity.
I also showed video excerpts from my teaching. The videos showed how a student can begin with a small fragment and, through a more physical and metaphorical language, discover that the fragment already contains movement, resistance and possible continuation.