“Can you write down this melody?” An investigation of the music writing skills of school orchestra students

This article examines the music writing skills of instrumental students. The study participants, aged 8 to 19 ( n = 78), from four school orchestras in Western Norway, none of them beginners, were asked to write down a well-known children’s song on a blank staff. 8.7% of the participants performed the task correctly, using all the necessary musical symbols. 66.7% of the participants wrote all the pitches correctly, while 25.8% wrote all the note values correctly. The nonparametric correlation test (Spearman) revealed a significant correlation between age and the number of correctly written note values and pitches. These results suggest that student recognition of pitches and rhythm patterns while playing does not transfer directly to the ability to write down the same notes and patterns. Understanding the relationship between pitches and their place on the staff seems to be less cognitively demanding than notation of the time relation between the note values. The results are compared with findings from the field of language literacy and discussed from an educational perspective, arguing that writing is an important a means to enhance music literacy skills.