[Harp-L] Learning Music

[Chris Hofstader]

Hi,

I thought the notion of a child learning music for the first time may be apropos to the discussion on modes, positions and music theory. As a child, my parents sent me to a piano teacher who used the Schwann (sp?) teaching system. In principle, it was intended to teach the student to both learn to read music and to play it on the piano at the same time. I did terribly with this method and my hypothesis is that it’s because it tries to teach one to read while it teaches one to play. If we look at how children acquire spoken language (my field is related to linguistics), we see that they learn to speak years before they learn to read. 

In my mind, teaching a child to read music before we teach them to “speak” music is akin to teaching someone to repair a carburetor before we teach them to drive the car. It’s my belief that we should teach music to children by showing them the sounds and sales (the alphabet of music) and then add a little theory at a time. When they’re ready, teaching them to read music will make sense to them as the symbols on the page will already correspond to sounds. A child can do a lot just knowing scales and playing around and figuring out what sounds good to them. Formalizing the mechanics of music before the student has an aural vocabulary causes confusion and expects to train two separate parts of the brain at once.

This is just my opinion but we’ve observed similar problems with teaching math to kids and we lose a lot of students due to backwards teaching methods.

Happy Hacking,
cdh