Music Notes April 2011

“Music Notes” continues its series: building foundations for literacy.

Imaginative play fosters literacy. Imaginative, joyful, MUSICAL play fosters MUSIC LITERACY, which is WeJoySing’s ultimate musical goal. OurHeart Strings early childhood program lays the foundation and skills needed for musical literacy by stimulating and nurturing your child’s innate musical abilities. Music & Me, our school aged program, builds upon this foundation and guides the child to MUSIC LITERACY, the ability to read, sight sing, play, and write music. What makes these programs so effective? The music education philosophy and methodology of Hungarian composer/educator Zoltán Kodály.

Kodály’s Philosophy

Kodály believed that:

• Music literacy is for everyone, not just the gifted or those who can afford it.
• Music education should begin early (nine months before the birth of the child…or his mother.)
• Singing should be the main mode of music instruction. The voice is our “God given” instrument.
• Movement is a child’s favorite response to music and is necessary for the child to understand musical concepts.
• The highest quality of song-choice is found in the folk song of the country in which a child lives; these songs are the child’s “Musical Mother Tongue,” reflecting the rhythm patterns of the spoken word, the melodic contour (pitches of high or low) of speech, and a text that is of the child’s world.

“Do, A Deer…”

The Kodály Methodology is a logical, comprehensive, sequential, developmentally appropriate training in sight singing/reading by means ofRelative Solmization(do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do’ like inThe Sound of Music).

Kodály also identified three stages in his teaching methodology:

1. The Preparation Stage
2. The Presentation Stage
3. The Practice Stage. (More on these stages and the methodology in the next “Music Notes”.)

The teaching of theHeart Stringsprogram (birth through age five) falls into the first (“Preparation”) category, because we don’t label concepts; we simply “play” and experience them.Music & Meprograms incorporate all three stages of teaching/learning.

“Formal” Music Instruction

Parents often ask when they should begin “formal” music training like piano, violin, or guitar lessons. Understanding Kodály educator/early childhood expert Dr. John Feierabend’s comparison to “reading readiness” may help parents to make that decision:

“Designers of kindergarten curricula have long advocated spending the year in reading readiness programs. Postponing the teaching of reading skills in order to build stronger readiness skills does not delay ultimate reading skills-it actually enhances reading…Music literacy also requires laying a proper foundation. Before embarking on a music literacy program, three readiness skills should be in place.”1

They are:

1. Comfortable and accurate singing skills.
2. Comfortable and accurate moving skills (with the beat in metrical groupings of 2 and 3)
3. Expressive sensitivity.

About “Expressive Sensitivity”

Subtleties of expression cannot adequately be represented by notation in music. It is the inherent expressiveness, however, that is the artistic part of music.

“What appears in notation is merely the skeleton of the music. The interpreter…must breathe life into this skeleton. Development of expressive sensitivity can be traced to good musical models, as well as to quality literature that embodies expressiveness. A preschool child who has been read to [expressively] will later integrate expression into his/her reading. A child who is sung to in an expressive manner will later sing with expression and…be sensitive to the…expressive qualities in music.”2

A Note from Mrs. Jo
WeJoySing fosters all of these foundational areas, INCLUDING the often overlooked third aspect (have you noticed how EXPRESSIVE your WeJoySing teacher is?!) Developing expressive sensitivity in early childhood enables us to take musical understanding to its highest (emotional, spiritual, artistically expressive) levels. So, our answer about “music lessons” is: Enroll inHeart Strings. When your child exhibits the skills Feierabend mentions, sign up for all of that wonderful, “formal” training. By the way, children are often fascinated by guitars and want to learn to play. Start when your child has enough strength in her fingers to form chords and manipulate strings—usually not until fourth or fifth grade. Buy the guitar, though, and learn to accompany yourself as you sing to your child. Expressively, of course.

1-2) Feierabend, Dr. John, “Developing Music Literacy: An Aural Approach for an Aural Art” from Early Childhood Connections, Fall 1997 Read more athttp://www.giamusic.com/music_education/feier_developingmusicliteracy.cfm