The Ways Children Learn Music: An Introduction and Practical Guide to Music Learning Theory

By Eric Bluestine

How do children learn music? And how can music teachers help children to become independent and self-sufficient musical thinkers?With clear and compelling language, Eric Bluestine sheds light on the most vexing issues in music education — all the while drawing from the contributions of perhaps the most influential thinker in the field today, Edwin E. Gordon. In the process, Bluestine offers practical advice to music teachers interested in building a musical curriculum based on Music Learning Theory.If you teach music and are looking for a concise, dynamic introduction to Music Learning Theory, this book is for you. If you are a parent curious about what your child should be learning in music, this book is for you. And if you are concerned about the major issues in music education today (including sequential learning, aptitude, accountability and musical development of young children) this book is definitely for you!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Feb 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781622774432

Book preview

Thinking

Part One

Music Learning Theory

CHAPTER ONE:

Our Main Problem and a Possible Solution

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

—William Shakespeare

Julius Caesar

Ilove children. I love hearing them laugh and watching them run and play. I love watching the looks on their faces when I sing a song to them in a tonality they’ve never heard before.

Also, I love teaching. I was born to teach. Some people don’t know what they were born to do; I know. I feel very lucky that way. As it happens, I became a music teacher, but I think I’d be equally happy teaching something else.

I sing in a church choir. During the Sunday morning service, I’m sometimes asked to deliver the children’s sermon. My sermons are only about ten or twelve minutes long, but I still manage to cover a lot of ground. I’ve spoken about the Jewish people and their covenant with God; I’ve spoken about Passover, about the various commandments, the symbolism of the Jewish prayer shawl, the various meanings of the Hebrew name for God, the many things Jews and Christians can learn from each other. More often than not, I use posters and other visual aides. And I have a blast! The topics I choose excite me, but my main thrill is speaking to children. Naturally, adults are listening too, but I tailor my sermons for children; my impression is that they enjoy hearing them as much as I enjoy giving them. (Who knows? Maybe I passed up a promising career as a rabbi!) So yes, even though I became a music teacher, I could have chosen to teach another subject and still would have led a fulfilling life.

But not as fulfilling! You see, I love music and always dreamed of devoting my life to it. I listen to music every day the way other people eat food and breathe air. If music were to suddenly vanish from the earth, I would have no choice but to create it anew.

Many years ago, when I asked myself what I wanted to do with my life, I put my three loves together in one sentence, and a career seemed to choose itself: teach music to children.

Unfortunately—and I doubt this will surprise anyone—teaching elementary general music in Philadelphia is not an easy job. I see roughly seven hundred children every week and I never see any student (except those who sing in the choir) more than once a week. I’m in the middle of my eleventh year as a public school music teacher. And I still love music, teaching, and children! My ongoing frustration is that I cannot bring these three loves together.

I know many classroom music teachers who share my frustration. We desperately want to teach, but we’re blocked by one obstacle after another. Here are just some of the many problems we face in Philadelphia:

The dropout rate of music students in performance groups is alarmingly high.

We music teachers are taken for granted and are thought of as second-class citizens in our schools by parents, students, administrators, and other teachers.

There is no consistency or uniformity among music teachers from school to school. We teach whatever we please.

We are not encouraged to acquaint ourselves with current research in the psychology of music—research that could help us become better teachers.

We almost never meet with each other, and when we do, we rarely, if ever, share ideas about music pedagogy. We’re simply not encouraged to do so.

I believe these problems are interrelated. In fact, they stem from one basic problem:

We are not educating our students to become independent musicians and independent musical thinkers.

Here is a possible solution:

We music teachers should design a curriculum to help us teach better so that our students can grow musically and approach, maybe even surpass, our level of musical proficiency.

Certainly a new and improved music curriculum would not be a panacea, but imagine how far it would go in helping us solve those problems I listed a few paragraphs back.

Students who are developing a deep, meaningful, lasting understanding and appreciation of music will be less inclined to drop out of performance groups.

If we music teachers were to write a curriculum we were proud of, we would never again accept second-class status.

With a standardized curriculum, we could have both uniformity and accountability. Imagine what a thrill it would be to follow our students’ progress from month to month, year to year.

We would base our curriculum on existing research, and change it and keep it current in light of new research findings, thus motivating us to stay current in the field.

Music teachers would have a reason to meet with each other on a regular basis: curriculum development.

But, you may be wondering, why talk about problems and solutions? And why must we write a new curriculum? After all, we now have the Music Educators National Conference (MENC) National Standards, and if we follow the Performance Standards for Music, Grades PreK-12 (1996), which are surely based on the most current and valid research in music education, we will almost certainly overcome the problems we face.

Let’s take this one step at a time. First of all, standards and benchmarks are, indeed, wonderful things to have. It’s a big help to me to know, for instance, that my students should read whole, half, dotted half, quarter, eighth notes and rests in 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 meter signatures (1996, p. 45) by the end of fourth grade. In general, the standards are quite ambitious: Children as young as age four are expected to sing a variety of simple songs in various keys, meters, genres, alone and with a group, becoming increasingly accurate in rhythm and pitch (p. 19). Children in grades K-4 will sing independently, on pitch and in rhythm, with appropriate timbre, diction, and posture, and maintain a steady tempo (p. 29).

As I read these standards carefully, I find myself asking many questions.

Let me begin with the first example I quoted: Children are to read rhythm patterns with various time values such as quarter notes and eighth notes. But what about rhythmic functions? They are to read rests and dotted rhythms. What about upbeat patterns? Syncopated patterns? Ties, divisions, elongations? Children are to read rhythm patterns in 2/4 and 3/4 time. (I assume this means duple and triple meters.) But what about unusual meters? Will children use a rhythm solfège system to help them read? To help them create and improvise? To help them generalize? If so, what type of solfège system should I teach them? And when should I introduce it? Will they learn to perform rhythm patterns before they read them? If so, how? As they learn to perform and read rhythm patterns, some children will doubtless be above or below average in ability; a few students will be very far above or below average. How should I adapt my teaching to meet the needs of these students? Suppose two students achieve the Proficient Level, which means they can read 75 percent of a set of rhythm flashcards correctly (p. 45). Now imagine that one student has low rhythm aptitude but has made enormous progress, while the other has high rhythm aptitude and has shown no progress at all. Is it fair to say that those children are at the same level of proficiency?

More questions: What informal guidance should I give my students to prepare them for formal instruction? What tonal solfège system should I use? Syllables, numbers, letters? I’m told to use any or all of them (p. 46). Are they equally effective? Students will sing music representing diverse genres and cultures (p. 63). But will they be exposed to the modes and meters of music from other cultures before they sing songs from other cultures? No mention is made of such a procedure.

Children are to sing independently, on pitch and in rhythm, with appropriate timbre, diction, and posture, and maintain a steady tempo. Sing what? Whole songs such as America? (The singing of America is one of the assessment strategies recommended in the Performance Standards for Music.) Or should my students sing parts of songs? Or melodic patterns? Or tonal patterns devoid of melodic rhythm? And which patterns should we teach? And how should we teach them? How much time during a class period should I devote to individual singing? To group singing? And again, how will I meet the individual needs of my students? How will I prevent the students with high tonal aptitude from becoming bored? And how will I prevent the students with low aptitude from becoming frustrated?

Do you find these questions discouraging? I hope not. I don’t want to leave you with the impression that we can do without the National Standards. On the contrary, the MENC Committee on Performance Standards has given music teachers invaluable, broad-ranging goals and a clear vision for our future. But with all that, we music teachers must still reckon with a basic truth of music curriculum development: we cannot meet long-range music education standards unless we back them up with readinesses. What stages of musical development must our students move through before we can expect them to sing in tune? What skills must they acquire before they learn to read and write music notation? Before is a crucial word in curriculum planning!

Perhaps the music curriculum in your school district is closely linked to National Standards (as is the case in Philadelphia), and you’d like to do something about it. Maybe you’d like to revise the music curriculum in your school district. But where do you begin? What form should a new music curriculum take? In what ways should it resemble your old one? My belief is that before teachers and administrators can write a music curriculum—or revise an old one—they must first educate themselves about child development as it relates to music. In other words, they must understand Music Learning Theory.

Music Learning Theory is a tough subject. Weeks, months of study must go into understanding it; and even when a music teacher feels comfortable enough to use it in her classroom, she will quickly discover that there is always more to learn. The reason is that Music Learning Theory, as its name suggests, is a theory of how children learn music, and as a theory, it is destined to stay open-ended and incomplete. One hundred years from now, researchers in music education will continue to revise Music Learning Theory. Is it any wonder that many music teachers respond to the phrase Gordon method with a mixture of hostility and fear?³

I, too, have felt these emotions about Gordon’s work. Understanding Music Learning Theory has been a slow process for me. When I started teaching music eleven years ago, I knew almost nothing about it. In fact, I’m embarrassed to recall that I thought of myself as a specialist. In general, I confused three things: Music Learning Theory, methods based on Music Learning Theory, and classroom activities. Let me briefly explain them.

Music Learning Theory is nothing more than a theory—or collection of theories—about how students learn musical skills and content most effectively. It’s child-centered; that is, it’s about how children learn and not about how teachers teach. Doesn’t it make sense that we should understand how children learn before we decide how we’re going to teach? (There’s that wonderful word before!) But once we understand how children learn, then we’re ready to create a learning method—a series of sequential and comprehensive objectives. Or you might look at it this way: Music Learning Theory is something you think about; a learning method is a step-by-step series of objectives that you actually write down and plan to accomplish; and teaching techniques, classroom materials, and musical examples help you to carry out and achieve your objectives.

Are you still with me? I’ve talked about three topics so far. Now imagine music education separated into four topics: 1) the musical and pedagogical principles that give rise to Music Learning Theory, 2) Music Learning Theory itself, 3) learning methods, and 4) classroom teaching (materials, teaching techniques, and musical examples).⁴

The relationships and differences between these four topics are mainly what this book is about.

In part 1, I explain the philosophical underpinnings of Music Learning Theory, often in personal, somewhat idiosyncratic terms.

In part 2, I try to answer these questions: What are the differences between informal guidance and formal instruction in music? What actually is supposed to happen during each level of Gordon’s skill-learning sequence? How does one design a curriculum based on Music Learning Theory? Finally, I take you on a tour of my tonal and rhythm exercises, and I also offer suggestions for teaching tonal and rhythm patterns.

Let me conclude this introduction by admitting, quite frankly, that my rhythm and tonal exercises are far from perfect. In order for me to improve them, I need the advice and wisdom of my colleagues. In turn, I hope the information I present here will give music teachers and music supervisors the foundation they need on which to build a new and workable music curriculum for their school system.

3 As I will explain in chapter 8, there is no Gordon Method. The term is improper and I, therefore, will not use it in this book. I will, however, occasionally use the term Gordon Learning Theory in place of Music Learning Theory. By so naming it, I do not mean to suggest that Gordon is the only researcher or practitioner in the field of Music Learning Theory. It’s a term of convenience, since Gordon is the most widely known and most influential researcher in this field.

4 In the first edition of this book, I called the fourth topic teaching techniques. This was a glaring oversight. What I had—and still have—in mind is that topic three, learning methods, is what a teacher plans to do; topic four, classroom teaching, is what a teacher actually does. I’ll explain these topics in greater detail in chapter 8.

CHAPTER TWO:

Audiation

Heard melodies are sweet,

but those unheard are sweeter.

—John Keats

Ode on a Grecian Urn

In a delightful book about music notation called Henscratches and Flyspecks (1973), the folksinger Pete Seeger wrote:

Music teachers sometimes overemphasize [emphasis in original] the importance of learning to read music early. Would you teach a baby to read before it could talk? Should a teenager study dance notation before learning to dance? Musicians need, in the beginning, to train their ears, their vocal cords, or their hands, and to develop the sense of music that tells them when to sing what [emphasis added] (p. 9).

In this paragraph, Seeger suggests two things to music teachers. First, children should learn musical skills in much the same order they learn language skills: they should hear and perform before they read and write. Second, children must develop two generic skills at the same time: 1) performance ability and 2) the sense of music that tells them when to sing what.

A convenient term Gordon has coined to refer to this sense of music is audiation. Perhaps you’ve heard the word before. But what exactly is audiation, and how does it relate to performance technique? I could say that you audiate when you inner hear music with comprehension, but such an oversimplified definition probably wouldn’t help you much. I could tell you that audiation is to music what thought is to speech (Gordon, 1997), but you’d probably tell me that Gordon’s analogy is too vague.

Perhaps an analogy with another art form might help. I discovered this explanation of the relationship between visualization and performance technique in—of all places—a book called I Am Not Spock, by Leonard Nimoy (1975). He writes:

I’ve played enough roles and have seen myself enough times that I can project my performance from the time I first read the