Early Childhood Essentials

Myth 1: Music is nature.  You're either born with it or you're not.
Myth 2: Music is nurture. With the right practice, anyone can be Mozart.
Truth:  Music is both. But our nature requires nurture in early childhood or some of what we are born with is lost permanently.


Mozart, of course, had both.  He was gifted by nature with extraordinary aptitude, and he was surrounded from birth with extraordinary nurture from his father and older sister. Victor Wooten tells a similar story here. 

She Get's it From Her Father's Side of the Family
No, actually she doesn't.  Nature does provide us with a genetic endowment which includes (among every other human potential) the potential to learn music, but our experiences/nurturing from birth to age four actually have a disproportionately large impact on the kind of musician we ultimately become.

Well, from birth to age four we're usually surrounded by immediate family.  This is the reason music often seems to run in families (i.e. it seems to be 'nature only'). In actual fact, studies tracing hundreds of different families backwards through two generations have discredited the myth of 'he get's it from his mother' or 'she get's it from her grandfather'.  So, unless you get it from your great-grandparents, we cannot predict the 'nature' side of things based on ancestry. Music uses so many disparate areas of the brain, it is probably too complex to be directly heritable the way eye color is.

Birth to Age Three--The Most Potent Stage
For two major reasons, birth to age three has a particularly big impact.

1. Ideal early childhood interactions helps us to retain whatever nature gave us, and 
2. The earlier we begin to nurture our nature, the more time we have to develop it to the fullest.

Music Aptitude
All children are born with some degree of potential to learn music. Regardless of what degree of music aptitude a child is born with, it will decline without rich early childhood musical interactions. 

How Do We Learn Music? (quite like language)
Compare them:
In learning order, the 5 'vocabularies' of language are: Listening, Thinking, Speaking (babble, imitating words & phrases), Conversing (asking & answering questions), Reading, Writing.

In learning order, the 5 'vocabularies' of music are:  Listening, Thinking, Singing (babble, imitating patterns & phrases), Improvising (asking & answering musical questions), Reading, Writing

Early Childhood Stages (also known as: Preparatory Audiation)
There are three broad stages of learning that ready a child to think & contextualize the music of her environment. The stages are as follows:

1. Acculturation:  A stage of absorption of sound & movement. In Acculturation, we provide the experiences that initiate her listening & movement vocabularies.  Such as: 

• Sing to her --using all modes & meters: you engage her, and the mode/meter differences spark learning
• Chant rhythmic poetry - Mother Goose, Edward Lear, etc. (and wordless raps too!!)
• Model tonal & rhythm patterns; pause to allow baby to audiate (start around 18 mo.)
• Model movements--esp. free flowing full body movements, and macro/microbeat mvts.

2. (Attempted) Imitation: She now attempts to imitate (initially inaccurately) the sounds & movements absorbed via Acculturation.

• Accuracy will increase over time given proper feedback (described next)
• Facilitate comparisons:  playfully conversationally imitate her inaccuracies then return to original 
• Don't force responses or correct inaccuracies; just model correctness & imitate her.

3. Assimilation:  This stage is about discovering differences. Your feedback in the Imitation stage leads her to notice that her sounds & movements don't match yours.  Now she has the necessary information to correct herself, and accuracy emerges.  We must:

• Continue Acculturation & Imitation activities
• Encourage flow--curvy movements with the whole body (using lots of space)
• Foster beat competency--via flow that emphasizes shifting body weight (sway, bounce, etc.)
• Continue playful feedback as she begins to coordinate her breathing, singing & moving
• Encourage improvisation - via “musical conversations.”

Onward Towards Audiation (contextualized musical thinking)

• Initially her vocal range is about D to A (above middle C).  Sing in that range!
• Grow her Tonal (singing) Vocabulary via I-V7 patterns in Major & Minor
• Continue Acculturation, Imitation, Assimilation activities
• Grow her Rhythm (rapping) Vocabulary via M/m patterns in Duple & Triple
• Guide her to independently find resting tones (Keynotes/Tonic Pitches)
• Encourage her to improvise (via incomplete melodies and pattern conversations)

Audiation--she has exited Preparatory Audiation, and is now ready to develop her musicianship through Sequenced Learning when she can independently and accurately:

• Discover & sing resting tones (in unfamiliar major & minor tunes)
• Discover & move to Macro-beats, micro-beats, or (ideally) both simultaneously.
• Echo I-V7 tonal patterns in Major & Minor (and find her way back to the resting tone)
• Echo M/m rhythm patterns (while maintaining Macro-beat movements)

Once she is out of preparatory audiation, she's ready for Developing Musicianship via MLT.

Personal Note: Edwin E. Gordon’s Music Learning Theory provides the basis for just about everything in this blog. I urge all parents & teachers to discover the efficacy of MLT.  Start here:   www.giml.org.