Children Musical Education
A detailed synopsis of the guidance of young
children from Absorption to
Purposeful Response. Early is the best time to
start children with an enriched
musical background. The earlier the child
starts to hear and learn about music,
the more enriched and fulfilling the
child’s experience of music is going to
be. This is even more beneficial for
talented children. A child cannot receive
the full benefit of music and will
not learn as much or at all without the first
three stages of preparatory
audiation. With this in mind, I will now show you
how to guide children
through these stages. First of all, we need to look at
resources. For this
particular situation, I will have two helpers, two rooms in
which to work
(one is furnished with cribs, the other is mostly open space with
a carpet).
Also, I will have a good sound system in both rooms (that includes a
tape
player and compact disc player), and some money (available to buy
recordings
and equipment). Next is the age range of the children. This is not
related to
the resources, but important. The age range is between shortly after
birth
and about 36 months (3 years). The first stage is Absorption. One of the
most
difficult things to do when guiding children through these stages is to
know
when the right time is to move them to the next stage. This often
requires
much patience. The reason that you need so much patience is because
all children
move through the different stages of preparatory audiation at
different times.
The times when children move are as different as their
handwriting. In the
Absorption stage, children are "absorbing" music.
But, not all music is
appropriate. Most of the music that should be played is
live music. It should
also be played in different keyalities, tonalities,
harmonies, meters, and
tempos. When playing such diverse groups of music it
is also important to not
play music with words. Why you ask? Because if you
play music with words. The
children seem to focus their attention more on the
words than the music itself.
Out of the two rooms that we have, I would
use the one room, which has the cribs
in it for the children in the
absorption stage. This would be more appropriate
for children in the
absorption stage than for children in any other stage
because the children in
the absorption stage are the youngest. I am going to
give names to my two
helpers so that we can easily tell the difference between
the two. The one
helper that is going to be helping me with the children in the
absorption
stage is named Mary. The other helper, which will help me with the
two other
stages (random response and purposeful response), is named Peter. Mary
would
be playing live music for the children. Live music and/or any kind of
music
that you play for children must be pleasing to the ear. It is also
important
that children hear a wide variety of instruments so they are
introduced to a
variety of pitches and timbres. Another thing is that
children’s attention
spans are very short. This means that it is best to play
only short sections
of music or music with frequent shifts in dynamics, timbre,
and tempo. This
encourages children to continually redirect their attention to
the music.
Once you think a child is ready to go through the absorption stage,
than you
can go onto the next stage, which is random response. But, before a
child can
go through absorption you must make sure the child is really ready to
go to
the next stage. On thing you do not want to do is to rush a child
through
each stage. They must be emotionally ready. Even if it seems like
they are
mentally or physically ready, you must wait. One thing I would do is
start into
step two to find out if they are ready. If they are ready, they
will start doing
things in step two. Step one and two overlap one another.
The way I would be
able to tell if they changed is by looking at the
different things they do
during this stage. In the second stage children
begin to make babble sounds and
movements. These are not coordinated with
each other or with aspects in the
environment and should not even be
interpreted as an attempt by children to
imitate what they are listening to
or seeing, or as a conscious response to what
they have listened to or seen.
Adults guiding children at this stage need to
understand that at this age
children simply have the need to babble. Another
activity that happens during
stage two is group interaction. It is important in
this stage that children
have this because children learn much about music as a
result of listening to
and observing other children of similar ages as they
attempt to sing chant
and move. One of the purposes of stage two of preparatory
audiation is to
continue children’s exposure to music so that they will be
better
acculturated to the sound of more complex music than in stage one.
Even
another thing that happens during this stage is random movement that is
mostly
associated with subjective tonality and subjective meter. Although
they make
these movements, they should not be expected to imitate anything.
Only the
natural sounds and random movements that children voluntarily engage
in should
be encouraged. Children are still encouraged to listen to music as
in stage one.
Except what is more valuable for them now is to make much
body movement in
accordance to different songs. I would start (being the
teacher) to sing and
chant to them. At the same time I would be making full
use of my body. I would
move my body to the beat of the song or chant. That
way the more children have
this kind of movement modeled for them, the more
they will begin to experiment
with movement themselves. As in stage one, only
short songs and chants in as
many tonalities and meters as possible should be
sung and chanted to children,
and again, these should be performed without
words or instrumental accompaniment
of any kind. Since we have some money to
use for equipment, I might buy some
small instruments like a xylophone,
wooden blocks, and an instrument that makes
a shaking noise of some sort.
Then, after we bought the instruments, I would
chant something to them and
then repeat the chant, but instead of going through
the whole chant like I
did the first time, I would repeat parts of the chant and
ask somebody if
they wanted to play an instrument. When I found three children
that wanted to
play the three instruments, I would show these children how to do
each
different part of the instrument. We would play the chant and the
instruments
separately, then together using simple syllables like "bah" or"bum". The thing
that I feel very strongly about is not expecting much from
the children. We
would try to sing the song and play the instruments, but at the
same time I
would pay special attention to singing the song in the same
keyality,
tonality, meter, and tempo. I wouldn’t be really strict about
playing the
right notes or playing the right tempo. Just having the children
experience
different things like that would be enough. Although it might not
look like the
child would be learning anything, they actually would. Every
little bit of
musical experience a child gets helps to exercise and tone the
audiational
skills a child has. To help me stay in the same meter and tempo,
I would buy a
metronome. At the second stage of Acculturation, consideration
should be given
not only to children’s tonal aptitude, but also to their
rhythm aptitude. In
addition to being concerned with tonal and rhythm
aptitudes, parents and
teachers performing for children should pay greater
attention to musical
expression and phrasing. A lasting impression can be
made on a child’s musical
sensitivity through performance of chants. As in
stage one of preparatory
audiation, unstructured informal guidance is the
rule in stage two of
preparatory audiation. We don’t really know when
children merge from stage to
stage. One thing we do know is that children
typically enter stage three, which
is purposeful response, between the ages
of eighteen months to three years old,
as soon as they begin to make
purposeful responses in relation to their
environment. In this stage children
should still continue to listen to songs and
chants with out words, because
listening to songs and chants with out words is
no less important and maybe
even more important in stage three than in stages
one and two. It is also
important that children with high tonal and/or rhythm
developmental
aptitudes, be encouraged to begin, but in their own initiative, to
create
their own songs and chants. Also in this stage children start to sing
and/or
chant with the parent and/or teacher, but the teacher does not
expect
accuracy. In order to guide a child from stage two to stage three, you
should
sing a song or chant, and if they respond to you with the same
response, it’s
called purposeful response. Another way you can tell when a
child is in stage
three is if they start to participate in the singing of
tonal patterns and the
chanting of rhythm patterns. It is best to keep tonal
and rhythm patters
separate during structured informal guidance for children
in this stage. Adults
should not perform tonal patterns immediately after
rhythm patterns or other way
around, but instead should perform one or more
songs and/or chants between the
tonal and rhythm patterns. When children
begin to sing tonal patterns in stage
three, they typically sing at the same
time that the parent or teacher is
singing. But, adults should not expect
children to be capable or even interested
in imitating tonal patterns with
any degree of accuracy. When, however, children
in this stage spontaneously
sing the same thing as the adult is singing, that is
a signal that the child
is ready to make the transition into stage four. In
order for children to
give meaning to the tonal patterns they are hearing, they
need to establish
syntax. They begin to do this as they gain familiarity with a
variety of
tonalities. Only tonal patterns in major and harmonic minor
tonalities that
move diatonically (by scale–wise steps) should be sung to
children in this
stage. In the classroom, have the children audiate different
tonal and rhythm
patterns. When doing different rhythm patterns use your arms
and legs and
move with the music and try to get them to do it with you.
Absorption,
random response, and purposeful response are not all of the parts of
teaching
children music, but they are the fundamentals. Without this guidance,
most
children will not be able to go far in their musical ability.