Developing the Singing Voice

This chapter discusses how young children can develop their singing voices as part of a community of singers and creative musicians. Teaching singing is approached both through direct instruction and through the compositions that children themselves create. Some of the techniques discussed involve pitch matching in a musical context, including solfège techniques and songs. The importance of voice regulation is also discussed, and several classroom activities involving chants and poetry are described, where children can both learn about voice regulation and create original work. The emphasis throughout is on singing with meaning and on the joys that can come with developing one’s individual voice in a community that sings.

Music and Story

This chapter describes the links between music and story, mirroring chapter 3, which investigated connections between music and movement. Daily classroom activities are presented and analyzed. A key focus is the ways in which a major performance can complement and extend classroom learning. In addition, this chapter explores the phenomenon of monotone singing, describing one child’s way of learning to sing, and brings into question the ways in which some musical elements are privileged over others. The crux of the story is that the child described in this chapter sang in a monotone voicing while, at the same time, reproducing the rhythmic patterns of songs perfectly. Over time, the pitches were shaped, by the child himself, into melody. Possible reasons for this emerging ability to sing pitches in a melodic way are discussed from a developmental perspective.

Improvisation—Play First, Write Later

This chapter describes a number of improvisational activities, including improvising using keyboards and Orff instruments, and explores pentatonic, whole-tone, and blues scales, among others. Through anecdote and example, the chapter discusses how movement and musical improvisation activities, based on visual patterns found in the classroom environment, can be used to create compositions. These visual patterns, found, for example, on the clothes that someone is wearing, can serve as notational systems and as a way of transitioning to invented and standardized notational systems. The chapter also considers the notions of the teacher as learner and of intentional listening as an important way of shaping musical improvisations.

Trust and Risk

This chapter explores the interconnectedness among teacher-student relationships by asking what it means to trust children as learners and to show oneself as vulnerable when teaching. It considers an integrated curriculum, in which music is explored alongside other subjects and linked to the music in children’s out-of-school lives. Further, it argues that the tone set by the teacher is critically important if we expect students to develop as creative musicians, because showing oneself as a creator requires students to be vulnerable, and that vulnerability must be supported in an atmosphere of critical acceptance. The importance of allowing enough time for relationships to blossom and activities to be meaningfully developed is also considered. The chapter closes with an example of students creating a composition that highlights both their cultural roots and their connection with their teacher.

On the Teaching of Music

The chapter opens with a broad introduction to the ways music is important throughout our lives and then addresses the crux of the issue: teachers often wish to approach music more creatively but feel that they lack the expertise to do so. This leads to a discussion of the limitations of traditional approaches to teaching music and a description of the overall tone of the book—namely, one that combines anecdote and example and does not shy away from describing the struggles that are an inevitable part of learning to teach in new ways. Children’s notations, produced when they create their own music, are introduced and then contextualized developmentally by juxtaposing music notations with other forms of symbol-system development (e.g., drawing the human figure). The chapter invites teachers to enjoy children’s musical offerings by viewing these works as the magical, funny, ingenious, and treasured gems that they are.

Overture

The opening section of the book describes the relationship between the first edition and the second, written more than thirty years apart, which document the author’s experiences as the elementary-school music teacher at an inner-city school in Boston, Massachusetts. The school partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in a professional development and research project. The author also describes her role as an academic at MIT and relates it to her present university position and to her lifelong work as a music educator. The conversational style of the opening section foreshadows the remaining chapters and the retrospective approach that is taken throughout, as the author explores why the pedagogy described in the first edition has endured so well over the years, not only in terms of her classroom-teaching experiences but also in her role as a preservice educator and music-education researcher.

Creating Music with Technology

This chapter advances several ideas for using digital technologies to enable children to improvise and compose, while also cautioning that the use of these technologies should not replace the primacy of learning music through the body. The chapter opens with a retrospective examination of the digital tools that were used in a particular school thirty years ago, with an emphasis on the elements that have endured over the ensuing decades. This allows for a broad discussion about the future of digital music tools in creative musicianship. The chapter closes with a discussion of “slow music”—music learning that is approached in a reflective, mindful way, combining old and local ideas with new technologies for recording, listening, performing, and creating.

Bridging Invented Notations to Standard Notation

This chapter suggests various ways in which children’s invented notations can be used as bridges to standardized forms. It begins by exploring how conventional symbols can be introduced through invented symbols, and it goes on to discuss the role of audience in shaping notational systems, especially when that audience is made up of peers who are also learning to use standard systems through their own invented notations. Several methods of moving to standard forms through direct instruction are also described, including instructional methods that involve movement, visual representations, and sound to embody the relationships among pitch, rhythm, and notational forms.

Music and Movement

This chapter explores how music and movement are intertwined and how movement can shape children’s understanding of music and help guide their creative expressions. Various structured movement activities are described, such as the Body Orchestra and the Names Game, both of which are based on Dalcroze techniques. Listening deeply is also examined, using sonic meditations as a way of both developing techniques for intense listening and pushing the boundaries of what counts as music. The chapter also considers the relationship between sound and silence and describes ways of consciously integrating movement and intense listening (with associated classroom activities). It concludes by developing the links between simple movement games and more sophisticated creations, leading to more complex choreographed works.

Coda

The epilogue to the book discusses the value of adapting one’s methods and approaches to educational contexts and situates the approach taken in this book with other successful approaches to music in the early years, such as Orff- and Kodály-based methods. A retrospective view is also taken in this chapter, describing some of the ways other teachers adapted activities outlined in the original version of the book into their own teaching practices. The ways children come to view music in a setting where they are encouraged and inspired to improvise and compose are revisited, and the nature and scope of learning that ensues are described. The value of learning by doing is the final piece described in this section.