What a great question! The first books of Music Moves for Piano were written to be used with children from the age of 4 by Marilyn Lowe White, helped by Dr Edwin Gordon who spent his career researching how children learn music. First of all I'll consider what the method offers, then move onto music aptitude, which is ability to achieve in music. By the end I hope you'll know that your child is probably not too young start Music Moves for piano lessons! You might have heard that children should wait to learn piano until they are 6 or 7 years old and this is probably true for many other approaches because they try to teach piano playing through the reading of music notation. The problem with this approach is that most children don’t have much experience of listening to and making music and so are unlikely to be very successful understanding the notation because they have no musical foundation. Often the approach is the opposite of joyful music making and becomes one of a struggle to read notation. The music gets lost, children get frustrated and lose interest and parents feel they are fighting a losing battle to get their child to practise. Were you one of these children? Is your child? It doesn’t have to be this way. As the folk singer Peter Seeger wrote in Henscratches and Flyspecks (1973: p9) ‘Would you teach a baby to read before it could talk? Should a teenager study dance notation before learning to dance? Musicians need, in the beginning, to training their ears, their vocal chords, or their hands, and to develop the sense of music that tells them when to sing (or play) what’. As a non dancer I can imagine just how difficult I would find trying to interpret dance notation – it seems it would be next to impossible! Music Moves starts with music (not music notation), front and centre and develops a child’s audiation (the ability to understand and, eventually label what is being heard). For example, is it major, minor or something else, is it in duple meter (march like), triple meter (dance like), or something else? Now you know Music Moves starts with music let’s move on to music aptitude. Music aptitude means the ability to achieve in music later in life and is a product of both nature and nurture. Children are born with varying degrees of music aptitude. If they grow up in a musically poor environment then their level of aptitude will decrease. If they are exposed to a rich musical environment then their aptitude will increase. A rich musical environment doesn’t just mean listening to music at home. Most music at home will be in major tonality and duple meter. Children need exposure to different meters and tonalities. As well as major and minor, a rich musical environment exposes children to music in tonalities such as Mixolydian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian and so on (what we call ‘the modes’). Not only do they need to listen to these but they need to interact with them in a purposeful way, because we know that children learn through movement. For example, children might move as if they are carrying something heavy, or as if they are feathers floating in the sky, or as if they are trapped in a box or swimming underwater. They need to hear and sing the resting tone, tonal and rhythm patterns which are the building blocks of music. Young children and babies who experience this richness of music environment are developing their music aptitude. The most important age for developing this is the time right after birth to about 5 years old. Music aptitude fluctuates during this time. We can make a parallel with language learning here – we talk to babies before they are born and never stop! They get very good at understanding us, making sounds, copying us and eventually speaking. Music needs to be taught the same way. I watched a YouTube lecture by Dr Gordon (I’m afraid I can’t remember which one) where he talked about singing songs to babies, but not singing the last note (the resting tone). The babies would stare at him till he sung it and then they would be satisfied! The babies knew ‘where the music needed to go’ to sound finished. Mozart did the same thing to his father, practising scales late at night but missing the resting tone, his father would come down the stairs to protest, unable to bear hearing an unfinished scale! As children grow older their level of aptitude fluctuates less and less until it stabilises around age 9. By then the environment can no longer influence a child’s potential to achieve in music. This doesn’t mean it’s too late and of course children can still achieve in music but it won’t be as easy for them as those who started early. So if you want your child to receive all the benefits music learning can bring then it’s best to start early with the best possible music instruction – covering all the tonalities and meters mentioned above, and avoid any music notation at all. Music notation hampers the development of audiation and is better left till the child is older and able to grasp abstract concepts. As Dr Gordon says, learning about music (i.e. music notation) is not learning music! I wrote about that here. The Music Moves programme is based on the research of Dr Edwin Gordon who had input on writing the method. It provides exactly the rich environment your child needs to succeed and thrive in music. As your child enters school around age 4 there is one year left to really make a significant difference to their musical aptitude, or ability to achieve in music. But, I hear you say, ‘my child isn’t ready to practise, I know they won’t play the piano regularly’. This is true. Young children often don’t want to practise the piano, but that doesn’t matter. They will play the piano in their lessons and will develop their technique and ability to navigate the keyboard with ease, they will learn pieces, improvise and compose, their audiation will develop (ability to understand and label what they are hearing), they may even decide to play in a concert. They will learn all these skills regardless of practise at home. At home, if your child doesn’t want to practise then listening also counts, in fact at this age listening is the most important thing. Music Moves involves lots of listening – listening to pieces they are going to learn, listening to songs and chants, listening to a variety of other music. All of this will influence your child’s musical aptitude. You could create a really special time at home, listening, singing and moving to the songs, chants and pieces. Last year I taught one Reception child for a year who doesn’t want to practise at home. He has made progress, he can play different pieces (at our last lesson in the summer term we reviewed about 12 pieces – he remembered them all!). He can move in time to the beat and echo rhythm patterns. By the end of his first year he was able to echo tonal patterns in tune – this was a huge achievement for him. It took a whole year to be able to do this. Imagine the benefit this brings him – he is starting to be able to hear music and sing it back accurately. I know children age 10/11 who haven’t learned this way, who can’t do this. This is the start of being able to understand and play music beautifully. He can do it now, he will always be able to do it and it will stand him very good stead in the years to come. I have another child a year ahead of this one and during her second year of piano study, in Year 1, I was told that her interest in piano was growing and she was practising more and showing more interest. She was also interacting musically with music she heard. As children’s understanding and audiation develops so does their interest, curiosity and desire to play the piano and make music. These children aren’t just learning piano, they are learning music. They will be able to make, understand and enjoy music for life and this is why I teach piano! If you’re still with me – thank you! This has been a long post but it’s an important topic. I hope you can see that your child isn’t too young to start the Music Moves programme and that now is the time start developing their musical aptitude so that they will get the wonderful, lifetime benefits of music and piano playing.
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If your child is in the Music Moves programme you (and they) may start to wonder when they will start to learn to read music, after all most piano lessons involve learning to read music almost from day one. Music Moves is different. In this audiation based approach children learn music first, and music reading later. Audiation: the ability to think music in the mind with understanding Learning about music is not learning music. If your child is in the first few years of the programme then they are currently busy learning music through listening to it, moving to it and making it. They are developing their audiation. Formal music reading will be introduced when they are ready to grasp abstract concepts, around age 10-11. At that stage it’s their audiation that will help them read music with understanding. More on that later.
Imagine how impossible that would be – how would you describe a world they had never experienced, how could they ever deeply understand about the world only through reading about it. Instead of being filled with joy and wonder, your child’s experience would be dry and meaningless. Music is wonder, awe, sadness, despair, joy, happiness. Music takes the experience of being human and delivers that experience back to us through sound. It is with us when we’re happy, when we’re sad, when we want our mood lifted, when we want to relax – there are thousands of pieces of music for every human emotion and experience. If music reading is introduced as soon as a child starts learning an instrument then they are at risk of missing out on the wonder of music. Music Moves for Piano is based on Music Learning Theory, developed by Dr Edwin Gordon who spent his career studying how children learn music and coined the term 'audiation'. People who audiate can:
If we want children to easily read music then we have to start from an aural / oral perspective When children can grasp the concept that: sounds the same as and both use the same rhythm syllables but are written differently, then they are ready to formally learn how the musical patterns they already know are notated. Taught in this way, the ear, the heart and audiation are at the centre of the music learning experience. Before this children will be exposed to how music is notated by looking at the score and noticing patterns, so they will start to recognise patterns before the formal instruction begins. This puts them in a good place as they will start to become familiar with music notation long before they are expected to read and play from it. Gordon's research shows that children can grasp abstract concepts such as this, around age 10-11
I am just starting to experience audiation. So far this means I sometimes just ‘know’ what is coming when I sight read (hopefully that will improve some more!); I hear more of the important notes in the music I’m playing; I can learn and retain complex pieces more quickly. I see what children in the programme can do, the joy they derive from their lessons and music making and am excited to see what lies ahead for all of us. It might look to both you and your child that you are not making progress, or that progress is too slow, or that you are not learning what you expected to learn. But the learning is happening in your child’s audiation. You can’t see this, you will only hear it, and they will experience it as time goes by. Your child’s experience and knowledge of music is growing steadily and will gradually become evident in the way they play and change their pieces, their improvisations, their compositions. If you want to compare to their peers look at more than music reading. Ask yourself, can they do the things people that are learning to audiate can do? They may be able to read music, but you can do so much more than this: you can make your own music. I'll leave you with a quote from the author of Music Moves for Piano: ‘Music notation, in itself, cannot teach music reading. What this means, is that with a familiar music vocabulary (what we are building from day one of Music Moves) children learn to understand and play music they have never seen or heard before. In other words, they can sight read music far more easily than those who have not been taught this way. I hope you will agree this is a goal well worth pursuing.
What do you feel when you listen to music? If it’s uplifting music then you might feel joy, if it’s sad music you might feel down, or even despair, if it’s grand music you might feel expansive and powerful...so what is music? Answers that come to mind are it’s creativity, it’s life, it’s feelings, it’s expression, it’s self expression….what answers come to mind for you?
This led me to consider what then is the purpose of piano lessons, if music is creativity and life, expression and feelings then surely the purpose of piano lessons (or any other instrumental lesson) is to access these feelings, to express them in music. What do students need in order to be able to experience music this way? In short audiation…..watch this video to see audiation in progress - these musicians 'think' music so well they can create great beauty never having met. If this isn't life, then I don't know what is!
Audiation means to ‘think music’, or in the words of Dr Edwin Gordon ‘audiation is to music as thinking is to language’. Just as we ‘think words’, the right sort of teaching can teach people to ‘think music’. (If you’re curious, Dr Gordon spent his academic career studying how children learn music and developing Music Learning Theory, the rigorous academic foundation of Music Moves.) Audiation means 'to think music'
The wrong sort of music teaching doesn’t teach people to ‘think music’ it teaches them to interpret dots on a page that they generally don’t understand. Think how it sounds when your child reads aloud a book they don’t understand. They read the words, but they don’t understand them. The words have no meaning to the child and it sounds that way to the listener. The same thing can, unfortunately, happen in music playing as well.
The right sort of music teaching teaches children to play with understanding
With Music Moves, students’ audiation is developed from day one and developed over years. They hear and echo tonal and rhythm patterns which are the building blocks of music, they feel and move to the beat, they listen to and play a varied range of music using the entire range of the piano. They develop piano technique that allows them to achieve the sounds they want to achieve, they hear and tell stories about the music they are playing. They experiment and explore sounds at the piano, they compose their own music as well as that played by others, they improvise and create. All these areas are developed over the child’s music learning journey, which becomes an extremely rich and fulfilling one.
Music at its best is enjoyed with other people, it provides a bond, a common experience, a language everyone can, in part listen to even if they don’t fully understand it. Music Moves for Piano is unique, not just in that it really does get to heart of what music is about – audiation (thinking music) - but also because it is designed to be taught in small groups. At Surrey Music School children studying Music Moves learn in groups of around 3. They move together, sing together, make music together, as well as having frequent opportunities to do these things solo as well. From day one your child will be making music solo and with others, learning to express themselves, developing their ear and piano technique and having a joyful, meaningful experience.
You may have noticed musicians performing with feeling, with flow (lost in the moment), with meaning… have a look at these videos to see audiation in action:
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Caroline BlountDirector of Surrey Music School. Archives
January 2024
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