Music For Children Essay, Research Paper

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. 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. One 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 if necessary. I would

practice the beginning order of step two to find out if they are ready. If they

are ready, they will start doing things in step two since 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.