For the 2022–2023 school year at Margaret L. Donovan Elementary of Randolph, Massachusetts, my teaching schedule included something new. Four teaching blocks per week were titled “intervention” and were meant to serve students who required support beyond what they could receive in traditional classroom settings. Each week I met with small groups of students to make music in creative ways. I told them it was not a “normal class” where I would teach them a specific lesson; rather, the point of the time was to have fun, explore, and see what emerges. Along the way, we used breathwork and mindfulness practices to open and close sessions, I helped facilitate collaborations and social connection building among students, and when problems arose, I helped students name their feelings and arrive at mutually beneficial solutions.

About halfway through the school year, it became clear that we were doing special work by making our songs. Students reported how the creative sessions helped them feel joy and calmness—two feelings that can be rare and fleeting in classroom settings. Wanting to celebrate their successes and help them hear the good work they were doing, I started recording some of the songs we made.

This is a collection of those songs. Each composition is entirely student-made and student-titled. My role varied. Sometimes I was just standing and holding or monitoring the recording equipment, after working with students to create the song. Other times I noticed students were doing something special entirely on their own and started recording without them knowing until the end. At other times, I participated in the musicking as a co-performer. The last two songs were recorded in non-intervention block classes. “Reconnecting Through Music” is an activity I designed based on Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, in which students use instruments, body percussion, and voices to sound connections to the world around them. The final “Playscape” is a collage I created from additional recordings I made in classrooms where K–2 students had free or semi-constructed play time with instruments.

Each song is credited with the students’ first names or student-chosen performer names. I credited myself as “Q” here. The album artwork was designed and drawn by fourth-grade students who participated in the sessions; then I added the text in a photo editing software. I titled the album “Interventions: Playscapes” to 1) playfully credit the “intervention” blocks we used to create the songs in, 2) connect this album to my composition albums—of which the first two are titled “Interventions”—theorizing my teaching and facilitation as composition, and 3) to speak to the playful nature of our musicking. What we did was seemingly simple, but it made a difference to all of us. Every student and teacher deserves to feel playful, creative, joyful, and connected to others every day. This album celebrates those wonderful moments we had during the school year.

—Nicholas Patrick Quigley