"Sitting in a Kindermusik class, even though you may not even realize it, that child is going through a process of cognitive sequences," Jacque Negus says in our conversation on Zeitgeist Radio.
"When we're moving them, especially to a steady beat, that's developing those neural passage ways that we always talk about, and stimulating the vestibular system in so many different ways to help them learn and grow."
If you need to catch up on our conversation, listen here.
There are several early childhood music education programs out there. I'm biased towards Orff-based methods because that's what I personally grew up on, and I have a deep love not just of music, but moving to music (more on this in a moment).
But Kindermusik is only one of several popular programs, and I thought I'd take this month to dig a little into a few of of them.
Kindermusik
Quick background: Carl Orff (yes, of Carmina Burana fame) was a music educator who combined music and movement. You can read about the Orff Schulwerk approach to education if you're curious.
Kindermusik ("music for young children") uses a developmental-based curriculum based on these methods. Music and movement combined are the heart of the program, and Kindermusik touts research showing this combination helps with social skills, math, language, memory, and more.
You can read more about Kindermusik here.
Musikgarten
As Jacque shared in our episode, Dr. Lorna Heyge was a co-founder of the Kindermusik (North America) program. In 1994 she split off from the program (something about not seeing eye to eye with her business partner). She founded Musikgarten after that, and unsurprisingly the foundations are similar to Kindermusik.
This program focuses a lot on parent involvement, especially in the beginning. The expectation is that your child's curriculum is repeated: songs in the car, visuals on the fridge, interactive games while you're making dinner. Musikgarten states,
Singing, dancing, and playing (in class and at home) is the best for your child's holistic development: language, movement, math skills, and physical coordination—all in a group setting that builds community.
You can learn more about Musikgarten here.
Kodaly
In 1925, Hungarian Zoltan Kodaly heard some kids singing at school... And was appalled. He went on a rampage to improve the quality of music education for Hungarian school children.
If you've ever counted rhythm with "ta" and "ti ti," you've experienced this method. Like Orff's work, this method uses movement, though the movement is mostly focused on rhythm. It reinforces singing with visual, kinesthetic, and auditory activities, for example using solfege with accompanying hand signals for each scale degree.
Kodaly was an ethnomusicologist and composer, so his approach to meter and melody is interesting. He believed children should be taught the familiar first, using culturally relevant songs. In Hungary the folk tunes are more often in 6/8 than a derivative of 4, so 6/8 should be used as the baseline for rhythm in that region. The minor 3rd was also more common in Hungarian melodies, so sequences using mi-so were taught first.
However, he encouraged each nation to teach melodic sequences based on their own folk tunes.
You can learn more about the Kodaly method here.
Suzuki
The Suzuki method is common with string players, especially violin... And no wonder, because Shinichi Suzuki was a violin salesman in post-war Japan. His life is actually really interesting and I encourage you to look him up.
The Suzuki method relies on ear training before all else. The method was developed to imitate language learning in children. There is also a focus on listening "saturation" from before birth if possible. This includes constant listening (classical music) and going to lots of concerts (classical).
You can learn more about the Suzuki method here.
Music Together
Music together was started in 1987, and by this time the concepts are familiar. Their core principals are:
- All children are born musical.
- All children can achieve basic music competence—that is, they can learn to sing in tune and dance accurately to a beat.
- It's crucial that parents and caregivers participate in class and model music-making for their children in class and at home, regardless of their own musical ability.
- The environment that best fosters young children's musical growth is playful, musically rich, and developmentally appropriate.
By this point, these concepts sound familiar! There is research constantly being done (much of it by Music Together) that emphasizes these points over and over.
You can learn more about Music Together here.
In closing, I'll say that early childhood music education sure worked for me. Having that love of music, that leg up on reading, rhythm, ear training, etc. set me on a lifelong relationship with music.
And what is my other love, along with making and listening to music? Moving to it! There's such crossover in my mind between music and dance. You may have noticed a plethora of dancers on my podcast... Because to me, music and movement were meant to go together.
I think these folks were on to something.
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