Pre-school learning
Though Mozart-like prodigies are few and far between, teaching children music before they have started school has been shown to have many benefits. The key to it, finds Paul Robson, is all about enjoyment
Paul Robson on the plusses of early years music education and the various teaching methods on offer
Almost every parent spends time with their pre-school children, reading and counting to foster an understanding of language and numbers. As a result, by the time they begin school formally at age four they are often competent speakers, understand letters and can count. A window of opportunity is presented by the very young child’s undeveloped mind and what it is exposed to at that stage can have a real impact on future learning.
But is the same true of music? Can a lifelong understanding of the building blocks of music be begun in such young children, and if so, what is the best way? We often hear of unborn babies being exposed to classical music in the womb, but is there a more general approach?
‘Children develop more in their first seven years than at any other time in their life,’ says Rebecca Allen, head of pre-prep at Wells Cathedral School in Somerset. ‘Their brain is mostly developed by the time they reach seven, with the more sophisticated aspects of neurological development continuing until we reach about 25 years of age. Our approach to music in the early years at Wells is less about the nuts and bolts of music and more about the ethos of being “immersed” in a musically alive environment that enables our children to grow from the inside out.
‘There are vast amounts of research demonstrating the benefit of music (regardless of whether one is musical!) to neurological
development, including its positive impact on other areas of development, so to me it makes sense to start young. If a musical and creative curriculum is a priority to you, remember that the majority of this shaping happens before they reach Year 3 [ages 7-8]. At Wells, we believe music is a gateway for all to their mental and emotional wellbeing, their sense of self, the development of confidence and creativity, and much more.’
‘It’s about meeting children where they are,’ says Ella Emery, who runs Little Piccolos music classes in Bath and west London, ‘then taking them with you on that musical journey. There are different ways to do that.’ At Little Piccolos, Emery bases her classes on the Kodály method. Created by its namesake Hungarian composer in the first half of the 20th century, the method emphasises musical learning through the singing of simple, popular songs using solfa (do, re, mi… with associated hand signals), gradually building an understanding of pulse, rhythm, pitch, dynamics and tempo.
It also encourages group learning, and this is something Emery also believes to be beneficial. ‘I think there’s evidence of this in other research across pedagogy,’ she says, ‘but with slightly different ages within one group, younger children learn so much from older children.
And I see that in class. When we have siblings, or when we have a mixed-age group, the younger children so often will sit and watch for at least the first few sessions and just observe.’
Rob Young is a Us-based music teacher who runs Prodigies.com, an online education course for Foundation to Early Years pupils that, like Little Piccolos, uses fun, simple songs and solfa to bring an understanding of pitch and rhythm to very young students. He has explored most
A tuneful beginning: classes at Wells Cathedral School (opposite) and Little Piccolos (left) introduce youngsters – and parents – to the many joys of making music
of the prominent methods for childhood music education and appreciates them all, adapting them to suit his own curriculum.
‘The best methods – Kodály, Taneda, Orff – are all about fostering a life-long love of music,’ he explains, ‘and we use a lot of the Taneda method at Prodigies. Naoyuki and Ruth Taneda’s book, Education for Absolute Pitch, explains the principles of the method very quickly, but it’s about introducing the individual musical notes, as well as the three major chords, in a very systematic progression. Children of a pre-school age are still in the critical period for auditory development, which allows us to give them a much stronger life-long sense of pitch, which in turn enhances their ability to understand, appreciate and perform music.’
Young is keen to expand upon his theme: ‘We focus a lot on that type of pitch development because it’s what non-musical parents can do with their kids most easily. If you think about colours or letters or numbers – they’re all brain-based labels for sounds that we make and things that we sort, stack, combine and so on.
The musical notes are just the auditory version of that, and all it takes is one-to-two years of regular exposure to those stimuli before kids really internalise it.
‘So in my opinion, the advantage of focusing on pitch is that parents don’t need a huge background in music. They don’t need to read notes, know rhythm or even understand music theory; they just need to sing about the colours, the numbers and the letters to open up a child’s brains to the palette of musical sounds we use in the Western world – of course, you can do the same with Carnatic sounds from India or more complex scales found in other parts of the world.’
Young contrasts his approach with the Suzuki method, an intensive curriculum aimed at immersing children in music in the way they are immersed in their native language, and where children as young as three learn to play music physically on scaled-down instruments.
‘It requires an extremely experienced teacher and a ton of technical practice on a difficult instrument,’ he says of Suzuki. ‘The method results in incredible technical players, but it needs strict practice and is kind of at the cost of time and often at the cost of it being fun. So while Suzuki is incredibly effective and powerful, it’s not particularly practical for the average modern family. And while Prodigies may not create violin virtuosos, it does allow masses of kids to experience the musical notes in a way that’s not nearly pervasive enough in our society.’
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You notice the growth in their confidence to sing in front of others, offer their ideas, and also their professionalism, at such a young age
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At Wells Cathedral School, pre-prep pupils are exposed to similar thinking, as Rebecca Allen explains: ‘Pitch, rhythm and tempo, as building blocks to musical understanding, are taught both implicitly and explicitly from an early age. Any good early-years setting will understand the importance of body percussion, sound discrimination (environment and instrumental), rhythm, rhyme, alliteration etc in being the key building blocks to a secure phonological awareness. The importance of an active musical curriculum alongside this ongoing good practice should go without saying.
‘The most noticeable difference that I see in children is the growth in their confidence, their willingness to sing confidently or speak eloquently in front of others, to get on a stage, to offer their ideas, and also their professionalism at such a young age. Our creative curriculum allows children to find their “spark”, and regardless of whether they are naturally musical or not, our musical ethos has an important role in helping our children to find themselves.’
Ella Emery of Little Piccolos believes that the purpose of early musical education is to tap into everyone’s latent ability. ‘We are innately musical,’ she says, ‘because music is a form of communication and we are all predisposed to communicating as that’s how we survive socially. If you look at the earliest found instruments, there’s a flute made out of bone that’s 35,000 years old. People have always created music.’
By using the human voice as the primary instrument, the Kodály method is an extremely democratic approach to music learning. Almost everyone has a voice and can sing, with no financial cost involved: ‘Another thing we try to do in class is to put the music in as many bits of your body as we can. So you’ve got it in your feet as you stomp and your hands as you clap, you’ve got it in your ears, coming out of your mouth, you can see different rhythms, you can talk different rhythms. You’ve got lots of different things happening in different parts of the session.’
As Emery’s classes are extra-curricular, children attend with their parents or carers, and like Young she believes the role of the responsible adult is crucial. Not in the infamous manner of the pushy parent, living out their own musical dreams through a child, but in a more nurturing way. ‘I think it’s so important that the parent or key adult is there with them in our classes,’ she explains. ‘We’re unable to do this as teachers with children on their own, because actually there’s a relationship that precedes any of this, and the bonding element of that comes very naturally and is facilitated through the music as well. And it comes so naturally that it can be forgotten.
‘It’s okay saying the first thing to learn is the beat and rhythm, and then pitch and dynamics and things like that, but who are they doing it with? Who’s continuing to teach them and sing with them? And so I have the parents and carers in mind as well when I’m planning the sessions and thinking, what are they going to like to do at home?’
Many of the teaching methods detailed here continue to work with children well past preschool age, but all work on the principle that it is never too early to begin laying the foundations for a musical life, and that parents and carers have a crucial role to play in helping their children to embrace that understanding in an immersive way. And everyone we spoke to agreed on one thing above all else: it has to be fun, for child and adult alike.