This study is the result of a two-year experimental collaboration with children from my piano class. Together, the children and I designed a method that uses visual expression as a starting point for composing and visualising music-theoretical concepts. In this method various dimensions of musicality such as listening, creating, noting down and performing are interrelated. The article goes on to compare this method with other piano methods in which visual expression is part of the learning process. The findings indicate that, by using their visual capacity, children can acquire a deeper insight of what music means as structured material and a better understanding of the music terminology.

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Existing studies show the value of using visual expression as a means of teaching children to understand and create music. This study aspires to point out an additional valuable aspect, namely, the influence composing via visual expression – whereby children transform their own drawings – may have on children's subsequent compositional processes. This is an area which is, as yet, largely unexplored. The article will examine this within a context in which children compose individually at the keyboard. With the aid of some examples taken from actual teaching practice, the author shows how children – consciously or intuitively and in a more complex and sophisticated manner – transpose their playing strategies from ‘visual composing’ to a primarily musical context or a context incorporating new, non-musical references.

Existing studies have demonstrated how children compose, experiment and use their imagination within the conventions of the tonal idiom with functional harmony. However, one area of research that has hardly been explored is how tonality emerges in the compositions of children who compose by transforming their own non-musical ideas, such as their drawings and stories. To that end, and within a context in which children individually compose at the piano, the present study examines the differences or similarities that, with respect to the tonal idiom, result from both approaches to composing. The findings demonstrate how interdisciplinary and symbolic thinking can help children achieve a better understanding of the tonal idiom and at the same time lower the threshold to compose.