Most music education methods for children begin with basic rhythmic and melodic elements. 70 years ago, Zoltan Kodaly based his system on what he heard children singing on the playground in his native Hungary. Other methods look to different developmental ideas. Most all agree that when you teach music to children, you should begin with the music of their own culture - using melodic and rhythmic ideas they are familiar with.
Here's the problem. Today I heard my kids in the back of the car singing this melodic pattern over and over:
It was a really cute ostinato...until I started to try to decipher the rhythm they were singing. First of all, it's syncopated. The starting note was off the beat and a little early. But intriguingly, they were also "swinging" the 8th notes (which I didn't notate, but instead used the common shorthand indicator above the notation).
This wasn't a cute little children's ostinato at all...it is incredibly complex, and would take a seasoned music educator weeks to explain all the components of this rhythm and get 7-year-olds to execute it correctly.
But here were my kids, just making it up! Not that my kids are special. In fact, most kids live their lives surrounded by incredibly complex music like this. The radio, TV, movie soundtracks...it's all much more complex than Kodaly's folk music, and our kids learn it by ear and can repeat it and begin to improvise on it.
No wonder they are bored with this:
We need to re-think the way we engage kids with music today. All kids love music. Too many of them don't like music class.
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